From June 5th to June 7th, in Bremen the symposium Radio As Art - Concepts, Spaces, Practices. Radio Art between media reality and art reception will address the aesthetic and activist potential of radiophonic concepts in the age of Twitter and online communication. It will open multiple perspectives on radio’s performative engaging role in social and political constellations, beyond its reception as a popular broadcasting medium. Acoustic signals, voice and language, sound collages, and experimental music have expanded the realm of radiophonic transmission to the status of multifaceted platforms for artistic strategies and networking.
Beyond radio’s apparatus-based structure to serve as a tool for global interconnection and collaborative processes, artists have employed it as a means of disseminating creative content, often implying tactical impulses for self-empowerment or resistive subtexts.
In spite of radio’s acknowledged status of experimental art from Futurism through Fluxus to the digital present—and although a broad spectrum of radio art materialized in archival documentation or exhibition displays, as well as in aesthetic and sociocultural processes—radiophonic art has long occupied a peripheral position in the spectrum of ephemeral forms of expression within the art-historical perspective. Yet acoustic and radiophonic contributions have eluded the—primarily visually based—knowledge parameters of art-historical methods that have been shaped for the most part by the study of pictures.
The symposium will provide an opportunity to situate radio art within the discourses of contemporary aesthetic orders and transcultural art practices. In view of its historical emergence, the fluctuating nature of radiophonic art concepts will be explored within its institutional framework, between public broadcasting and today’s exhibition culture, between archival documentation and ephemeral processes, between economic constraints and societal effects, between cultural and geopolitical transformations.
Radio Papesse will be streaming some of the lectures. Here it is our calendar:
Thursday 5th @ 17.00
Keynote Lecture by Hank Bull (Vancouver) | The Reception of Electricity
Friday 6th @10.00
Sarah Rothe (Bremen) | The Museum as an Agent of Radio Art
Anna Friz (Montreal/Berlin) | The Wireless Experience of Distance
Colin Black (Sydney) | The Media Environment as an Exhibition Space for Creative Sound Based Works
Ralf Homann (Berlin) | Radio Picnic (Bremen Version) – A Sonic Sculpture
Friday 6th @14.00
Philip Glahn (Philadelphia) | The Radio and/as Digital Productivism
Claudia Wegener / Continental Drift (Cologne) | Everyone a Listener – Everyone a Producer!: A Collective Journey towards Another Sound of “Radio”
Franziska Rauh (Bremen) | Radio Art as Strategy “in Our Everyday Hand-to-Hand Struggle with Apparatuses?”
Carolyn Birdsall (Amsterdam) | Radio Art, Technology, and the Sound Archive
Saturday 7th @12.00
Jee-Hae Kim (Cologne) | To Link, To Greet, To Dance, … To Radioart
Biroul de Cercetari Melodramatice // The Bureau of Melodramatic Research (Irina Gheorghe and Alina Popa, Bucharest) | Radio Prolife and the Invisibility of Dissimulation
#radioasart