The increasing desire of visually impaired people to fully participate in cultural life and the implementation of disability rights legislation has focused the minds of galleries and arts professionals. This has led to a discourse that has gone beyond the bounds of access and is contributing to a wider examination of long accepted norms embedded within the art world. Progressive thinking in the context of art and visual impairment has led to a wider questioning of the dominance of vision in the hierarchy of the senses.

Pressure for equal access, both as audiences and practitioners, demands the abandonment of old stereotypical responses on the part of the arts establishment and an acknowledgement of and engagement with new perspectives.

Inspired by the book ‘Sight Unseen’ a discourse in the form of a correspondence carried out between two philosophers Martin Milligan who was blind from birth and Brian Magee who is sighted. This programme will draw upon its contributors diverse experience to attempt to create a piece of radio art which explores new perspectives in representing ‘visual’ arts in a non visual context tackling some of the philosophical and practical implications involved in this.

With contributions from Tony Brennan, Mark Lawson, Paul Margrave, Bonny Mitchell, Sarah Owen, Arti Prashar, John Schauerman, Marie Schauerman and Julie Takata. And special thanks to Velda.

The program plays out in many different ways. Konst2, the artists turned curators, invites International Festival, the curators and teachers making art, to become executors for a radio piece about Konst2, the artists. A word to mouth, buzz-marketing, undercover story about questioning the underlying motifs of the questioning of institutional frames. A doubling up on interdisciplinary stuff, short-circuiting connections by reconnecting, ending up in double standards, double meaning and double radio pleasure. Its 2 and its 2 again. Hell, it’s two as in nothing to lose and nothing to win; it’s 2 as in the end of proprietary exclamations, but shame on binary enterprises. International Festival Konst 2 / Konst 2 International Festival is a baroque folding, complexifying its existence by adding on the surface. A program on doubling and on 2 that ironically is broadcasted on the 11 September.

It is also International Festival’s relation to broadcasting, to the tone of voice and the opportunity for turbulence in highly public media. The program is a salutation to radio, to the theatricality implied in radio, which offers an inherent critique rather than an individual listeners experience of Pod casting. The radio as a background turned foreground and up in the face turned shadows for daily activity and work. Radio as a medium of radical distance, what is that machine in the kitchen babbling to us out of reach and easily turned of with a flip with your index finger. But radio is at the same time an extensively intimate set up allowing another, or many other’s voices to enter you private domain, voices that you can not look away from, voices of politics, intimacy and antagonism that you have lunch with and with which you produce relations.

Its two shows for the price of one. Its music in your mouth and just do it for your ears.

Click here to hear the show

The show RADIO TRANSMITTED TIME CAPSULE FOR 7006 gathers a selection of practitioners contributing to a real time capsule to be sealed after its presentation on resonance FM and hidden in 2 different locations for the benefit of future civilization. This aims to present future audience with relevant fragments of contemporary culture in the specific domain of visual art. We asked seven contributors to provide us with a 5 to 10 minutes long clip. These will form part of the time capsule material to send into the future.

Contributors are:

- Spencer Anthony
- Falke Pisano
- Aurelien Froment
- Juneau Projects
- Christodoulos Panayiotou
- Sandra Terdjman, “A capsule of sound to imagine the invisible captured by Orphee, Tom Mc Carthy, Loris Greaud, Mario Garcia Torres and Jordan Wolfson”
- Martin Vincent

Narrated by Louise Hayward.

For her contribution to Radio Gallery, Susan Philipsz will revisit The Dead, a work she produced in 2000. Based on James Joyce’s eponymous 1914 story, reinterpreted by way of John Houston’s posthumously released 1987 film, Philipsz’s work touched upon themes of loss, retrieval and memory.

In Radio Gallery No. 9, widely relying on the talkshow format as one of the most pervasive forms of the radio broadcast, Philipsz has recorded a programme in which she tells the story of the ideas, circumstances and personal motivations behind the creation of The Dead. The programme draws on a variety of sources, including excerpts from the original recording, elements of Philipsz’s research archive, a reading from Joyce’s story, the sound of a film projector, and an especially performed version of the song from the ‘Sirens’ section of Ulysses set to the tune of ‘Salve Regina’.

“GUY DEBORD IS SO COOL!”.
MATTHIEU LAURETTE interviewed by JEROME SANS.
Interview remake # 1.
2006.
In this remake, Matthieu Laurette’s voice is interpreted by an electronic voice named “Zarvox”, Jerome Sans’ voice, is interpreted by an electronic voice named “Pipe Organ” and Anna Colin’s voice is interpreted by an electronic voice named “vicky”
This interview was originally published in Uovo Magazine, issue number 11, in 2006.

A Stellar Key to the Summerland is a documentary about The Modern Spiritualist Movement, a religion that originated in New York State, USA, in 1848 with the notorious Hydesville Rappings. Despite being based on speaking to the dead, Spiritualists saw themselves as part of a rational religion in dialogue with scientific developments; parallels were made between the messages received via a medium and new communication technologies such as the telegraph and later the telephone and the radio. However this programme particularly examines how Spiritualists used the religion to visualise an alternative to industrial society, overlapping with non-conformist political causes such as the Co-operative movement and the campaign for women’s suffrage. The programme is read by Rufus Wright and is structured as a lecture, a broadcast format that now seems old fashioned. It includes seance recordings and interviews with ‘scientists’ involved with studying spiritualism.

It is available as a podcast at podcasts.resonancefm.com and is currently being broadcast on Resonance 104.4FM at 6:00pm on Sundays.

www.marvinsuicide.org

subscribe to the podcast

PROPAGANDA

This exhibition explores the uses of the radio as a tool for propaganda during times of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ war. It begins in World War II with a compilation of German and Italian propaganda aimed at British and American troops and civilians (featuring, for example, Lord Haw-Haw (hanged for treason in 1946) and Ezra Pound). After this historical, archival introduction, the programme becomes live, eavesdropping on what’s being said on clandestine radio stations around the world while the exhibition is on air. To do this we will gather speakers of several languages (Farsi, Arabic, Mandarin, Korean and Spanish) in the Resonance FM studio to deliver simultaneous translations of broadcasts coming from states at war with (or regarded as a threat of to) America, Britain and their allies, e.g. Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, China and Cuba. Resonance FM, for the hour of the ‘exhibition’, will devour the content of other radio stations across continents, producing radio from intercontinental radio.

‘CROSSFADING’ refers to the encounter of two sources of sound, that is two different frequency waves sent to each ear. The effect is one called ‘Lucid Dreaming’ that leads to a modified state of awareness, a moment of clarity during a situation of sleep, within which thoughts control and analytical thinking are emphasized. The listening conditions need to be optimal to experience this phenomenon, which otherwise manifests as a feeling of lethargy and a confusion of noise sources, amongst other noticed effects.

Loris Gréaud’s performance ‘CROSSFADING’, involving the diffusion of such distinct frequencies to an audience for 41 minutes and 24 seconds, was first realized in Maine, US on 20th August 2004. It was subsequently realized in Vietnam, Japan and the UK. Never previously broadcast for want of permission, this is Crossfading’s first appearance on the radio.

For Resonance FM’s version of ‘CROSSFADING’ there is a voiceover by artist Karl Holmqvist that gives the background to ‘CROSSFADING’ and a description of its own coming about. Karl Holmqvist is well known for his artistic practice that has already included various forms of voice experimentation and its potential for altering reality and dream, which finds a logical continuation in this unique collaboration with Loris Gréaud.

LAPDOGS OF THE BOURGEOISIE PRESENTS:

THE STOP SHOW by Dirk Fleischmann
Conceived by Nav Haq and Tirdad Zolghadr

This broadcasting event is to serve as the launch of the long-term research and exhibition project Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie. The project investigates the latent issue of class underlying the field of contemporary visual art. What role does class structure play in production, presentation and reception? These are issues that have been overlooked in the current era, where artists, even when coaxed into anthropological or self-reflexive approaches, leave the socioeconomic hierarchies of the artworld unexplored. What was it that made gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality eclipse the class issue with such ease?

As part of the project, the artist Dirk Fleischmann, known for his astute engagements with issues of service work, profit and socio-symbolic hierarchy will present a new version of his ongoing project The Stop Show, specifically for a radio format. Fleischmann’s project, in which competitors must accurately determine ten-second time spans, does not illustrate or ‘map’ the exhibition theme in the usual manner of a group show. His Stop Show, a degree zero playing field of fundamentally equal opportunity, offers no more and no less than a simple competition with the most rudimentary of rules, allowing audiences to participate via phone and internet.

“I don’t play music, I present my listening practice” Darius Miksys

In Radio Dinner that functions as a DIY variety-show of parallel worlds, Rai listens to people talking, singing and reading in multiple times and places. One of them, a renowned psychotherapist Eugenijus Laurinaitis, is asked to hypnotise the host of the program wanting to become a radio-receiver for one hour with an intention to record the whole program for Resonance FM under hypnosis. A number of other guests, including Vilnius’ artists Juozas Laivys, Vale Kale and Darius Miksys come to a dinner to talk about their practices of listening and to make a contact with an obscure radio conversation from 2003 dedicated to a screw, yet they end up meeting Anne, Ieva and Vesta, their own female avatars on air.

In 1959, the Swedish painter, archeologist, opera singer and polyglot Friedrich Jürgenson (1903-1987) discovered that he was able – in using a microphone, a tape recorder and an out of tune radio – to record voices from dead people…

That method became quickly known worldwide as Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) and Jürgenson found many followers and friends that built on his research. It is a scientific attempt to deal with the possibility of a life after death and, because it is scientific (the radio and tape recorders were high technology in the 50′s-60′s and the users presented themselves as researchers), it tries to be an indisputable – yet still highly interpretable – proof. But, in the use of radio, radio waves and noise, EVP questions the radio medium itself, how it is made and how it could be misused.

There are two directions in EVP that the exhibition tries to investigate. On the one hand, the aesthetic of ground noise, white noise and lost radiowaves. On the other hand, the poetic beauty of the researchers’ methods, where technical objects are used to produce things they are not supposed to. The artists have been chosen for their ability to deal with one of those two aspects, bringing the show not a presentation of ‘beliefs’ but the strange beauty of ‘investigations’.

‘SEE THE SONG’ is an hour-long music program during which a velvet-voiced disc-Jockey describes record sleeves from the very famous to the most underground labels. Once a rather big (12 inch square) element, it has shrunk today to a tiny jpg on iPods – a perhaps dysfunctional yet natural evolution of the imagery associated with music. Our show celebrates the visual in its ultimate status: sound.

This show was recorded in a London pub, providing material for a blind pub quiz. It was recorded on Monday 3rd July at 8pm.