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Audio Archives

Trans-X – 2013

[mp3] Keynote address: Radio In Its Place – Here There Nowhere Now
by Steve Bates
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In this talk, Steve Bates will discuss some of his recent projects that include site-specific recording, questions of threshold and border, residues of colonialism, silent broadcasts, sonic infiltrations and transmission. These projects include low-power productions in Dakar, and Ndar/Saint-Louis, Senegal and on Austria’s national state radio network. While different in their range and context, these investigations with site-specific sound geographies relate to a larger whole. The colonial history of longitude connects the project Radio 16º 16º to the site of Saint-Louis where site-specific recordings were collected as the raw material for low-power broadcasts. The title, borrowed from the abbreviated coordinates of the city, indicate an influence of military concept and jargon on the everyday. A Year of Radio Silence is a project with multiple iterations that uses the idea of a silent broadcast as its primary material, here one that causes a grand piano in Austria’s state radio studio to resonate across the former colonial power.

Steve Bates is an artist and musician living in Montréal. The sonic is always the starting point for his projects which are evocations of communication networks and systems, or expressions of spatial and temporal experience. Bates frequently uses sound material that is site-specific in an attempt to uncover place and how the sonic effects our experience of site. Time is measured, stretched, pulled at, ignored, and extended. His work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Europe and most recently, Senegal. Steve Bates works in the field, on the air and in museological/gallery contexts. These shifting territories reflect the content of his practice.

[mp3] Radius RANGE: Local, Distant, Fringe
by Jeff Kolar and Meredith Kooi
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Radius’ 2012 series RANGE: Local, Distant, Fringe explores the importance of place and proximity in the event of radio transmission and reception. Radius, the experimental radio broadcast platform based in Chicago, IL, USA, released a three-part, location-based commissioned series and booklet titled RANGE: Local, Distant, Fringe, which highlighted the economic, political, and technical dimensions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The artists involved in RANGE produced sound works for the three coverage areas of Local (Emilie Mouchous and Andrea-Jane Cornell “Rise & Shine”), Distant (Damon Loren Baker “Distant”), and Fringe (Rob Ray “Subject to Greater Uncertainties”) in order to challenge issues of signal accessibility and question radio’s role as a distribution tool. The three parts of the series are based on the proprietary mapping software that plots radio station coverage areas. The talk will present audio excerpts of the three episodes featured in the RANGE series, and Radius’ curatorial vision for executing location-based broadcasts.

Jeff Kolar is an audio artist working in Chicago, USA. His work, described as “speaker-shredding” (Half Letter Press) and “wonderfully strange” (John Corbett), includes cross-platform collaboration, low-powered radio, and live performance. Jeff is a free103point9 Transmission Artist, and also the director of Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform. His work has been released on Panospria (Canada), HAK LO-FI Record (France), free103point9 (USA), and has appeared in compilations by Furthernoise.org (Australia) and Sonic Circuits (USA). His video work was published in the DVD journal ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art. He presents at festivals, radio programs, exhibitions, and performance venues which recently include GLI.TC/H, KUNSTRADIO, and The Kitchen; and in Argentina, Mexico, and the Netherlands, among others internationally. http://www.jeffkolar.us/

Meredith Kooi is the editor for Radius. She is currently a PhD student in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University where she organizes the salon series SENSORIUM for the Visual Scholarship Initiative. She received her MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA in Environmental Studies from Denison University. Her visual and performance work has been shown in galleries and medical venues both nationally and internationally including the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Goat Farm Arts Center in Atlanta, Swedish Covenant Hospital in Chicago, and the Green Lantern Gallery in Chicago. Her critical writing has been published in Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline edited by James Elkins, Kristi McGuire, Maureen Burns, Alicia Chester, and Joel Kuennen (Routledge 2013), her arts commentary in the DVD journal ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art (2010), and her poetry in CTRL+P (2012). http://meredithkooi.us

[mp3] Frequencies: Dawson City
by Andrew O’Connor
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Part public sound installation, part narrative documentary Frequencies: Dawson City is project for a series of low watt FM transmitters laid out around Dawson City Yukon. It was commissioned by the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture as a part of their series The Natural & The Manufactured. The transmitters are all broadcasting on the same frequency and laid out in an array so that as you walk the installation with your radio tuned one transmitter starts to fall out of range as the next one is coming in. Each transmitter broadcasts a different collage of soundscapes and stories (played on a loop) that relate specifically where you are standing. The buildings, the landscapes, the stories and experiences attached to them, and how these memories resonate in a physical location. By employing random chance and juxtaposition, multiple narratives are combined in a way that creates a unique listener guided narrative experience.

Andrew O’Connor is a transmission artist based in Toronto. His work for the radio has been featured on numerous programs across CBC Radio 1 & 2 such as Inside the Music, The Signal, and Metro Morning as well as syndicated internationally on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Zero in Lisbon and WGXC in upstate New York. Andrew’s installation and sound design work has been presented by the Vancouver New Music Festival, the Third Coast Filmless Festival, Megapolis, and was recently featured in a multi-disciplinary theatre project called Boblo that premiered in December 2012 at the Theatre Center in Toronto.

[mp3] Still Here
by Alyssa Moxley and Ramona Stout
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Still Here is a soundscape of the island of Santorini, in the Cyclades, Greece, recorded and composed by the artists Ramona Stout and Alyssa Moxley.

We have selectively edited our recordings from Santorini to create a sound map. It is fundamentally inaccurate, yet it is all drawn from the aural environment as it is today, and likely will be for many years to come. It is a soundtrack that glosses the extremes of silence and noise that have come to dominate the island and recreates a bygone era in which there existed a host of functioning communities like Vothonas, of which there are now very few. It is the result of our recording the pulse of a place that now exists in suspended animation, a place that is alive but not quite living.

Alyssa Moxley is an artist, writer, and audio producer with interests in embodied knowledge, music, cosmology and acoustic ecology. She studied Ethnomusicology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Sound Design at the London College of Communication, production techniques at the Banff Centre, and is currently studying an MFA in Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. www.alyssamoxley.com/ www.soundcloud.com/dromomaniac

Ramona Stout studied ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. After graduating she dealt in vintage vinyl. She now lives on the island of Santorini, Greece, where she also learned to walk, talk, and swim. She is organising an annual music festival on the island, which will cater to its permanent community with a showcase of lesser known musicians from around the Balkans. She works as a freelance writer and sound artist/audio producer.

[mp3] Expanded Radio
by Robin Koek
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Expanded Radio (Robin Koek) – approaching the concept of ‘radio’ from the perspective of composition and the practice of sound art. The lecture deals with the possibilities radio allows for composers to work with non-lineair concepts of time, make instant global musical, connections through transmission and re-define concepts of the public space within their creations. It elaborates on how radiophonic concepts like interference, wavelength and tuning were translated to the domain of musicians within the work Tuned City

Robin Koek (Netherlands, 1987) is active as a composer, musician and designer of artistic systems. Koek studied Sound Design and Composition at the Utrecht School of the Arts.
Over the last years he established a repertoire of various multidisciplinary collaborations. With a main focus on sound art and interactive systems he was involved in projects that range from installation art to interactive dancepieces.
His works explore states wherein acoustic, digital and analog signals intertwine and form in to one body of sound. Currently his focus is on compositions and sculptures that explore the spatial potential of sound.

[mp3] Keynote address: From Radiation to Resonance
by Anna Friz
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Speculations and curiousities regarding the Radio of the Future, including the search for extraterrestrial life and cetacean radio. Maps are certainly lost, and mutiny may be declared.

Anna Friz got her start in campus/community radio at CiTR Vancouver in 1993. Since then she has created audio art and radiophonic works for extensive international broadcast, installation, or performance in more than fifteen countries. She is currently an FQRSC post-doctoral fellow in the Sound department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2011-2013), and holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from York University, Toronto. Anna is a free103point9 transmission artist. www.nicelittlestatic.com

[mp3] City Sondols – Toronto
by Matteo Marangoni and Angel Faraldo
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City Sondols is the title of an ongoing series of public interventions exploring architecture and public space that employ performative practices and mobile audio technologies to induce perceptual shifts within the built environment. Performers equipped with self-made mobile electronic musical instruments lead an audience on a walk through the city while probing the surrounding space with sound. In this talk we will present some questions that form the background of our project and summarize the trajectory that has conducted to its current state of development. We will further report on the two week residency organized for us by NAISA in Toronto during the Deep Wireless festival preceding the Trans-X Symposium, presenting documentation of our interventions in Toronto and Mississagua and relating the process of choosing locations, composing the soundwalks and interacting with both incidental listeners and with the audiences attending the Deep Wireless program.

Matteo Marangoni
(Florence, 1982) Focusing on the potential of listening to establish new connections between people, places and objects, his performances and installations employ field recordings, sound archives, computer programming and DIY electronics. His research investigates the relationship between sound, space and the body, looking for ways to address the body of the listener and to induce enhanced states of auditory awareness.

His work has been presented at Stroom Den Haag (The Hague), at the European Media Art Festival (Osnabruck), Patterns Pleasure (Amsterdam), Fabbrica Europa (Florence), Q-02 (Brussels), Signal Raum (Munich), the International Biennial of Contemporary Music (Koper) and Tadaex (Tehran). He is currently working on a commission from the Humboldt Lab Dahlem in Berlin.

Ángel Faraldo
(Spain, 1980) is a composer, sound artist, improviser and digital instrument designer currently based in The Netherlands. He is interested in processes that maximize minimal resources, as materialized in his ongoing cycle, The Feedback Study Series his digital synthesizer MISS or his interactive sonifications of Tanja Smit’s Textworks.

He has presented his work in festivals and venues throughout Europe and the United States; his music is released for free through various net-labels on the internet and his works involving computers are entirely based on free and open-source software.

He also teaches workshops on improvisation and electronic music with Pure Data, and collaborates as digital instrument designer or electronic music performer with projects and ensembles such as Modelo62 (NL), Fonos21 (ES), Medea Electronique (GR) and IOM (NL).

[mp3] The Dancer From the Dance: Mapping Motion With Sound Via Radio Transmission<
by Tricia Postle and Leif Bloomquist
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We present our work on the development of a device by which a dancer may wirelessly transmit bodily motion to a MIDI-capable device or computer in order to produce or alter sound, creating music that is immediately integrated with and inseparable from the dance.

To begin we briefly consider the history of movement mapping and dance notation. Moving into more recent history, we then present the technology employed (Arduino).

An accelerometer measures the motion. The x/y/z components are scaled and inserted into a MIDI message, which is then transmitted to a receiver and can be interpreted by any MIDI device. The motions can be mapped to parameters such as filters, pitch, etc., allowing the dancer to affect any sound that can be created electronically.

We then discuss some of the possible applications.

Several short vignettes will be used to demonstrate the device, followed by a three-minute piece showing the techniques working together as a whole.

Tricia Postle is the artistic director of Majlis Art Garden, a multidisciplinary seasonal art space in Queen West presenting poetry, music, dance and storytelling. This summer through Majlis she will be hosting a number of salon evenings on the intersection of music and technology, to be documented online, as well as other performances. For further information please visit majlisarts.com

Tricia is also a poet and a musician with a strong interest in medieval troubadour traditions, and has recently started composing. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Medieval Studies and Music from the University of Toronto.

Leif Bloomquist has been creating computerized sounds since the days of the Commodore 64. Classically trained in clarinet and percussion, he now composes using sequencing software and homebuilt hardware. His music can be heard in diverse environments such as gothic nightclubs and churches. He has released five albums to date through his various projects. For further information please visitwww.schemafactor.com .

When not creating experimental music, Leif is a senior engineer at MDA, an aerospace company best known for their work on the Canadarm. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo.

[mp3] Cellphonia: Toronto SONicGeo
by Steve Bull
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The Cellphonia.org project explores the social, technological, and creative possibilities of cell phones with bias to encourage new applications for cultural growth. With over a dozen examinations of this approach to using cellphones as social microphones, the Cellphonia: SONicGeo -Toronto was formulated around the concept of moving through time and the landscape of Toronto. The participants asked to “press” a number to answer one of the three questions:

Where have you been? – Where are you now? – Where are you going?

The server side script then puts their various responses into three sound storage locations: Then- Now –Future. The score changes slightly with each new call, so participants can continue to hear their contributions in the various sections juxtaposed in new ways with each new call and providing a new aleotoric narrative each time. The conceptual framework of cellphonia is direct and comprehensible, but capable of constant and varied levels of surprise.

Steve Bull
is a mixed-media technology artist and entrepreneur whose practice includes extensive software engineering experience. For the last ten years he has created location-specific narratives and games that explore the social, technological, and creative possibilities of cell phones. Bull received grant to create Cellphonia from NYSCA in 2005.

Scot Gresham-Lancaster
is a composer, performer and instrument builder. Currently teaching Sound Design at ATEC UT Dallas, his recent work at IMéRA is a 2nd order sonification of data sets. With HUB he is an early pioneer of “computer network music” and cellphone operas and “co-located” international Internet performances.

[mp3] ‘Be Here Now’ – Meaningful Strategies for Embodied Presence at Live Concerts in the Age of Techno-Mediation
by Alexandria Lepinski
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“Be Here Now”: Meaningful Strategies for Embodied Presence at Live Music Concerts in the Age of Techno-Mediation’ offers an in-depth analysis of the state of modern-day live music concerts in the age of techno mediation, where social media platforms, wireless communication and mobile technology play an integral part in our social identities and the ideologies that surround us. After briefly examining the dichotomous philosophy that informs many technological sceptics and musical purists, the paper offers an opportunistic argument for the inevitable convergence of new media and sensory-enhancing technology in the live music arena.

Crucial questions are posed: How can we innovate and maximise our state of presence as technologically driven individuals and through the familiarity of visual media? Where does this leave the unique physicality, temporality and ‘liveness’ of live music?

Be Here Now draws on a large breadth of scholarship and is organized into four sections – Antiquity, Erosion, Alternatively, and Recuperation – which, through the thoughtful consideration of varying performance case studies, serve to provide a mediated resolution.

Alexandria Lepinski received a BA in Popular Music and Women’s Studies from Western University, focusing on desktop production and the cultural significance of music. Upon graduating, Alexandria attended a live concert that prompted her to reconsider her understanding of music performance and the formalized divisions between art mediums and new media. She pursued a master’s degree in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths College in London, England, and in the fall of 2012, submitted her thesis entitled ‘“Be Here Now”: Meaningful Strategies for Embodied Presence at Live Music Concerts in the Age of Techno-Mediation’, along with a curated concert series proposal. She is now living in Toronto, eager to begin a dynamic career in live music curating that shatters conservative performance standards and explores daring, pluralistic multi-media platforms.

[mp3] The Sounds of Sea Swim
by Robert Mackay
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The Sounds of Sea Swim is a collection of compositions, sound collages, and installations developed as part of commissioned work for the Sea Swim project run in Scarborough, UK. Part swimming club and part art club, Sea Swim explores how swimming transforms the way we feel ourselves to be in our bodies and the liberating effects these changes have on the imagination.

Several aspects have been explored in this work, including phonography, sonic geography, acoustic ecology, field recording practice, and voice.

Set-up by co-artistic directors Lara Goodband and John Wedgewood Clarke, Sea Swim is part of imove: a Cultural Olympiad Programme in Yorkshire –www.imoveand.com/seaswim

imovehas been funded by Legacy Trust UK, creating a lasting impact from the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games by funding ideas and local talent to inspire creativity across the UK.

Rob Mackay is a composer, sound artist and performer. Currently he is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Music Technology at the University of Hull. He is the director of the ‘Sounds of Our Surroundings’ research group (http://icpcluster.org/page/sounds-of-our-surroundings).

Prizes and honours include: IMEB Bourges (1997 and 2001); EAR99 from Hungarian Radio (1999); Confluencias (2003); La Muse en Circuit (2004 and 2006). His work has been performed in 18 countries (including several performances on BBC Radio 3). He has held composer residencies at Slovak Radio (Bratislava), La Muse en Circuit (Paris), the Tyrone Guthrie Arts Centre (Ireland), and CMMAS (Mexico).

He has worked in a number of groups, including the Welsh Hip-Hop collective ‘Tystion’, collaborating alongside John Cale on ‘A Beautiful Mistake’, as well as two John Peel sessions on BBC Radio 1 and supporting PJ Harvey. More recently, he has collaborated with percussionist Evelyn Glennie on the Ruskin Rocks project (www.leeds.ac.uk/ruskinrocks).

John Wedgwood Clarke trained as an actor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and holds a D.Phil. in Modernist poetics from the University of York. He is currently Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the Centre for Environmental and Marine Sciences at the University of Hull, Scarborough.

Lara Goodband is an curator and artist. She studied art history and English literature at the University of York and holds an M.A. in art history from Manchester University. Since then she has worked continuously in art galleries, first as an in-house curator and now as a freelancer, specialising in temporary and touring exhibitions, in museums and galleries throughout Yorkshire.

[mp3] Grey Ecologies: Sonic Transfers and Monuments
by Abinadi Meza
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This paper/listening presentation focuses on interstitial urban space and clandestine soundscape interventions. The presentation starts with a contextualization of themes and references related to sonic territory, intervention, time, anonymity and the psycho-politics of cities, then shares original listening examples from transmission art projects in Los Angeles, California and Houston, Texas.

Each paper section is approximately 6 minutes in presentation length:

1. Charles Babbage and the permanent impression of sounds in our environment

2. JG Ballard and spatial/urban paranoia

3. Temporal monuments and ruins, citizens, habitants, wanderers

Listening examples are approximately 6 minutes in length (three 2-minute excerpts).

Abinadi Meza is a sound artist and writer based in Houston, Texas. He was educated at Drake University, University of Northern Iowa, University of Minnesota and Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Meza\’s performances, installations and transmissions have been presented in the United States, Spain, Ireland, Sweden, Portugal, and Brazil. He teaches in the Interdisciplinary Practices and Emerging Forms MFA program at the University of Houston.

[mp3] Distant Touch and a Faraway Feeling
by Samwell Freeman
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Distant Touch and a Faraway Feeling (DTFF) is a suite of wearable electronic apparrel equipped with radio transeivers, vibrating motors, and touch sensors. Participants wear haptic sensor gloves that use radio to control vibrating motors embedded in hats, gloves, wrists bands, underwear, and socks. Marshall McLuhan described the immense network of electronic connections that made possible the distant transmission of signals as a sort of externalized central nervous system for the human race. Distant Touch and a Faraway Feeling experiments with this externalization of our nervous system. The project allows people to feel another’s touch not through proximity, but by transduction of electronic sensors and transmission as radio. Using custom circuity, caresses can cross rooms and go through walls.

Samwell Freeman works with electricity, trying to find a starry synthesis of the mysterious speedy electron and the soft slow human. Studying obsolete technology Freeman explores our potential lives as elderly cyborgs. Many of his works are platforms for creativity that facilitate virtual drawing using sensors like gyroscopes and joysticks.

Freeman has exhibited at Maker’s Faire, Figment Detroit, Seton Hall University, New York University, Flux Factory, Burning Man, and Dorkbot NYC. Always interactive his work takes shape as devices, applications, videos, performances, drawings, and conversations. His website is: http://welike2draw.com/samwell/

Trans-X – 2012

[mp3] Radio Naked
by Christof Migone
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The presentation of an overview of projects involving radio and other means of transmission sincethe late 1980s to the present. Contexts aside from radio include dance, installation, performanc and publications. The works display a recurring attention to voice, language, translation, boredom, endurance, abjection, play, and humour. They also question the listener’s expectations, flirt with the unintelligible, and descend readily into noise. Once radio is stripped of its trappings, we are left with the sonic somatic ready to emit.

Christof Migone
is an artist, curator and writer. His work and research delves into language, voice, bodies, performance, intimacy, complicity, endurance. He co-edited the book and CD Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2001). He has released seven solo audio cds on various labels (Avatar, ND, Alien 8, Locust, Oral). He currently lives in Toronto and is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga
and the Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery.http://www.christofmigone.com

[mp3] Sound as transmission: towards and away from non-cochlear sound art
by David Cecchetto
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The “expanded” understanding of sound that resists the implicit claims to authenticity of both Schaeffer’s “sound itself” and Cage’s attentional injunction nonetheless includes both, and it is precisely through this ambivalence that we can fully embrace sound’s potential to refigure contemporary forms of communication (and particularly networks). Discussed will be Two projects—SRMP and Exurbia—that leverage the metaphorics of sound to trouble existing understandings of specific forms of network communication. The conceptual and material dimensions that constitute these projects stridulate in a hum of recursive transmission—in novel modes of “two-way communication rather than one-way distribution” (Joseph-Hunter)—that offer fresh vectors for considering the constitution and consequences of networked aural interaction in contemporary artistic practices.

Dr. David Cecchetto
is Assistant Professor of New Media (History and Criticism) at OCAD University. David has published numerous academic articles and book chapters, co-edited a collection titled Collision: Interarts Practice and Research (CSP, 2009), and has a monograph titled Humanesis: Sound, Discourse, and Technological Posthumanism forthcoming on the Posthumanities series of the University of Minnesota Press. As an artist working with sound, David’s work has been presented in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Russia. www.davidcecchetto.net

[mp3] Foundations of Transmission Art
by Galen Joseph-Hunter
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Informed by her recent publication Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves (PAJ Publications: 2011), Joseph-Hunter will discuss key inventors, activists, and organizations, including free103point9, who have helped pave the way for Transmission Arts. Citations of specific artists and works will spark dialogue towards defining the qualitative principles of the genre.

Galen Joseph-Hunter
is the Executive Director of free103point9, a New York State-based nonprofit arts organization whose mission is to define and cultivate Transmission Arts. Over the past fifteen years she has organized and curated dozens of exhibitions and events focused on artist’s experiments with broadcast media and the airwaves. free103point9.org, transmissionarts.org

[mp3] techNOMAD device art
by James Partaik
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This paper examines transmission tactics for the occupation and imbrications of urban infrastructures and interdisciplinary creations. TechNOMAD device art, or mutant technologies and art actions coalesce with the emerging discourses surrounding the issues of site specific art practices in the age of the networked landscape. techNOMAD art interventions actuate urban space and its infrastructures, revealing issues implicit to the site, the technologies themselves in a specific cultural context and the creative actions used to transform public space in a tangible way. The notion of wireless, meshed networks, hacking and real-time technologies extend the parameters of transmission art to the realm of the invisible forces of pure dynamics, creating a
complex, multilayered reality.

James Partaik
James Partaik’s truly hybrid creative practice embraces a range of non-mainstream contemporary art forms and media audio, video, electronic site specific installations, performance art and installActions. He is a founding member of AVATAR, at Meduse in Quebec City. Professor at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, he directs the Digital art sector. He has participated in international meetings and exhibitions in North America, South America, Europe, North Africa, the U.K. and Asia and has published notably in the Artextes’ anthology Sound in Contemporary Canadian Art.

[mp3] Telegraph: Transmission in a streetscape audio artwork
by Geoffrey Shea & Alan Boulton
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Telegraph is a multi-nodal sound installation, supported by a network of microcontrollers connected by radio transmitters. The design of the infrastructure requires a high degree of flexibility and mutability. The transmission of audio files could easily stress a wireless network. The broad range of sound manipulations requires us to think differently about the networks functionality, but also to take advantage of inherent weaknesses (using latency to create an echo effect, for example). Flexibility is also required because we expect to add further functionality in future iterations, including interfacing with the viewer’s mobile phone as a locating device and a sound input/output device.

Geoffrey Shea
is a Canadian media artist and researcher whose work highlights the intersections and opportunities between technological systems, belief systems and identity. His productions incorporate interactive programming, site-specific installation, mobile phones, a philosophical twist and a critical voice. Working primarily in video and installation, Shea’s artwork has been exhibited widely and was featured at two recent Nuits Blanches in Toronto and the exhibition “Talk to Me” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Shea was a founder, in the 1980s, of InterAccess Electronic Media Art Centre in Toronto and an editor of the video journal, Diderot. He has curated numerous exhibitions and film programs, and is currently the Co-Artistic Director of the Common Pulse Media Art Festival.

Alan Boulton
is a hacker and mathematical explorer who moves between the worlds of symmetry, experimental music and software design. He is passionate about the potential for technology to create magical and shared experiences, and to engage in play while inspiring change through authentic interactions. An Oxford graduate in mathematics, Alan has worked in software engineering for over 20 years, and is currently developing applications for mobile devices. This is Alan’s first foray into collaborative art installation and he hopes to contribute a fresh approach using his rigorous scientific background to encourage meaningful interactive play, while continuing to explore the limits and potentials of working within a framework of self-imposed technological constraints, adopting the Ouxpo philosophy.

[mp3] Panel: Locating the transmission & Transmitting the location
by Geoffrey Shea, Victoria Fenner and Kristen Roos (Moderator: David Cecchetto)
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A sonic portrait of a place, a site specific transmission art performance and locative media apps for mobile phones are each points of reference in this panel discussion. How does location inform artistic content? How does the way in which an artwork is transmitted determine the experience?

Kristen Roos
Whether Kristen Roos is working with DIY radio-based projects, massive arrays of low frequencies, or sampled and sequenced rhythmic construction, Roos demonstrates that there is more to sound than just audibility. His work appears in the Errant bodies publication Radio Territories, and The New Star Books publication Islands of Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada. kristenroos.com

Geoffrey Shea
is a Canadian media artist and researcher whose work highlights the intersections and opportunities between technological systems, belief systems and identity. His productions incorporate interactive programming, site-specific installation, mobile phones, a philosophical twist and a critical voice. Working primarily in video and installation, Shea’s artwork has been exhibited widely and was featured at two recent Nuits Blanches in Toronto and the exhibition “Talk to Me” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Shea was a founder, in the 1980s, of InterAccess Electronic Media Art Centre in Toronto and an editor of the video journal, Diderot. He has curated numerous exhibitions and film programs, and is currently the Co-Artistic Director of the Common Pulse Media Art Festival.

Victoria Fenner
is a writer, journalist and sound artist living in Hamilton Ontario. She takes a creative approach towards sound making, using her microphone to gather sounds and her computer to organize them in ways that reflect the way she hears the world. With a background in both journalism and art, one of her goals is to create, and help others create, works which portray reality in a creative and evocative way. She has worked in community and public radio in Canada and the United States, and is now an independent producer creating multimedia works for the internet. She has recently returned from Central America where she gathered material for the radio and podcast series The Green Planet Monitorwww.greenplanetmonitor.net. Her own website is www.magneticspirits.com

RWB – 2011

[mp3] Keynote Address
by Jonathan Goldstein
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Making use of clips from his own work and others, Jonathan will discuss unconventional story telling/making techniques.
[mp3] Keynote Address
by Colin Black
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This session aims to give an insight into the rich and varied radio art practices emanating out of Australia. Works that explore radio as a creative means of artistic expression dating back as far as the 1920s to the present will be discussed with audio extracts.
[mp3] Big Shed Square Dance
by Shea Shackelford
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Big Shed is bringing their unique aural hospitality to Radio Without Boundaries. Get ready for this choreographed, storytelling fandango. You bring your boots, they call the dance, and together you’ll document a landscape of sound and stories. By the time it’s over, they promise to bring you to an exhausted state of documentary bliss. Shea Shackelford will be your caller.
[mp3] Tangible plot elements versus conceptual abstraction
by Sarah Boothroyd and Shea Shackelford
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Voice as musical instrument versus voice as conveyer of information.
Journalistic concerns versus aesthetic concerns.
Sarah Boothroyd will guide a sonic safari of her attempts to balance these themes, drawing on her 2011 Luc Ferrari Broadcast Arts Commission, All In Time. She’ll also chronicle her experiments in time-lapse phonography, applying film sound techniques to radio, and layering together a diverse array of sources – from field recordings to creative commons samples and archival audio clips. Place + Memory Project by Shea Shackelford
We each have places in our pasts that were important to us, which remind us of who we were at those moments. They become touchstones for understanding how we became the people we are today. But what happens when those places disappear? The Place + Memory Project explores this question, mapping a remembered landscape in sound and stories. Shea Shackelford will share audio and insights from the project, along with other adventures from Big Shed, the audio and media production behind the project.

[mp3] The Art of Transmission
by Erin Gee, Peter Courtemanche and Darsha Hewitt with moderator Darren Copeland
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If you touch your radio receiver or radio transmitter you physically become part of the transmission – a human conductor of electromagnetic energy. Erin Gee, Peter Courtemanche and Darsha Hewitt with moderator Darren Copeland share their different approaches to connecting radio and wireless technology with the human body.
[mp3] Recycling Sonic Energy
by Victoria Fenner and Andrea Dancer
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Victoria Fenner and Andrea Dancer’s works are both grounded in radio documentary, soundwalking and poetry. Their process is a fusing of external with internal worlds and then letting the composition emerge from the experience of listening. In this session, participants will explore how to take an idea, infuse it with sonic energy, meditate on what those sounds means in terms of compostiion and narrative and how this is turned into a radio art work or documentary that engages the listener in much the same way the the artist / producer was engaged with the sounds in the first place. It’s about taking the documentary to the poetic level, and that requires not just thinking of the sounds as artifacts, but as springboards to launch us into our collective imaginations.
[mp3] Radio past, present and future
by Nora Young and Matt Smith
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Nora Young: Traditionally, radio is a medium shaped by time. It unfolds in linear fashion over time, the listener needs to be at her radio at the time a show airs. Now, podcasting allows for time-shifting, and the web allows us to add to the audio experience with non-linear content from multiple sources. Nora Young talks about some of the lessons of the Spark experience.

Matt Smith will talk about the history and future of radio as a technology and delivery format in the context of a paradigmatic shift in the way of how media are contextualized and received by the audience 15 years after the advent of a generally accessible many-to-many communication infrastructure, the internet.

[mp3] REMIX Radio
by Roman Mars
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PRX’s Public Radio Remix is an experimental radio stream hosted by Public Radio Exchange to showcase pieces from PRX.org and develop new approaches to public radio formats and sounds. It’s 24-hour semi-formatless remix of the best radio stories, radiophonic docs, amazing podcasts, cool ideas, fascinating interviews, found tape and intriguing sounds.

RWB – 2010

[mp3] Keynote Address
by Charles Stankievech
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“A border is not a connection but an interval of resonance, and such gaps abound in the Land of the DEW Line,” writes Marshall McLuhan providing the entry point for Charles Stankievechh’s lecture on the history of the electromagnetic in the Arctic. A complicated territory where boundaries constantly fluctuate, he will discuss and share original research collected while living and working in the “Zone” related to wireless telegraph eroding the boundary between inside/outside of the North, electromagnetic warfare playing with the boundaries between nation states, and the aurora borealis as the boundary between terrestrial/celestial. As a platform to investigate these issues, Stankievech has developed the practice of fieldwork, a production engaging with site (both geospatially and culturally) using interdisciplinary strategies. Focusing on his dual Arctic productions The DEW Project and Ghost Rockets: Purple Haze (Side-B) as examples of fieldwork, Stankievech revisits Ezra Pound’s claim that the “artist is an antenna.”
[mp3] The Neighborhood
by Scott Carrier
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Scott Carrier will discuss and play examples of radio stories he produced that are cultural histories of his home, Salt Lake City. Each story has a different form or structure, but all are similar in that they’re composed of interviews with “average” or “normal” citizens.
[mp3] Visual Radio panel discussion
with artists Anna Friz, Emmanuel Madan, Kathy Kennedy; moderated by Andreas Kahre
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Radio with a visual experience? Sure. Many visual artists like Paul DeMarinis have approached radio as a sculptural medium and many important radio artists were originally visual artists. In radio’s golden age many broadcasts took place in front of a live audience. This panel reflects on the integration of radio in live performance and the use of live performance as a vehicle for radio listening.
[mp3] Don’t tell my ears where to go
by Frank Kaspar
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New Hörspiel- and Documentary-approaches in the spirit of Glenn Gould’s “Contrapuntal Radio”
Glenn Gould’s “contrapuntal” CBC documentaries from the 1960s and 70s are outstanding examples for a polyphonic way of storytelling in radio, which offers listeners a great freedom to follow different voices and perspectives. With Gould’s pieces and his reflections on radio in mind, we are well prepared to explore the polyphonic sideways of Germany’s post-war radioart and to discover how this tradition is being revitalized by documentarists and radio-artists of a younger generation.
Lecture with sound-bites by, among others: Peter Leonhard Braun, Walter Filz, Michael Lissek, Rimini Protokoll, Christoph Schlingensief, Ernst Schnabel, Antje Vowinckel and Glenn Gould.
[mp3] Neighbourhood Transmissions
by Kathy Kennedy
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A 28 day festival permit was obtained to create a temporary community radio station in the Montreal district of Villeray, known for its cultural diversity. Kennedy will chronicle the strategies, challenges and outcomes of a unique cultural event, mixing experimental sound art with local activism.
The Neighbourhoods Story Project is a collection of audio-portraits of different neighbourhoods in the City of Toronto. All of the project participants are immigrant women. Home is a complex and layered narrative that includes not only traditional notions of comfort and identity, but also complex notions of loss and longing.
[mp3] Taking it Up (Interview workshop)
by Victoria Fenner
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If you were to collect all the books and articles in the world about how to do an interview, you’d need a very large room (at least). But the basic idea can be contained in a very small box. An interview is a conversation. What makes it different from a conversation over beer with your best friend is that it’s a conversation with specific objectives. Things like how long it should be, how structured it is and what emotional tone you want to establish varies, depending on how you are going to use your conversation in your finished piece. During this workshop we’ll explore those techniques, always mindful that a good interview engages and brings out the essence of the person you’re talking to and the knowledge you want them to share.
[mp3] Keynote address “Two Tin Cans & a String”
by Sook-Yin Lee
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The notion of community and communication has far reaching roots that began for Sook-Yin Lee long before her work on the CBC radio program DNTO. Sook-Yin will speak about how communication, storytelling and first person expression connect with her DIY practise that was born through music, film and TV and which she continues to explore in radio.

RWB – 2009

May 28, 2009

[mp3] Keynote Address
by Hank Bull
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The HP Dinner Show, “scientifically designed to help you prepare, eat and digest your dinner” aired weekly from 1976 to 1984 on Vancouver Co-op Radio. Hank Bull will make audio contact with co-founder Patrick Ready to invoke the magic of this legendary pioneering radio program.

May 29, 2009

[mp3] Keynote Address: “Instances of radiophonic panic, or towards a theory of transmission”
by Brandon LaBelle
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The mechanics of broadcast media, in extending the nervous system as McLuhan early on proposes, in turn makes highly sensitive the relation of transmission and reception. Connectivity becomes a volatile and ideological point measuring the climate of social exchange and community life. Following such thinking, I’ll explore instances of radiophonic panic, teasing out moments of breakdown so as to examine the nerve endings of radio. Through such a lens acts of transmission will be underscored as bending the limits of both terrestrial borders and emotional states.
[mp3] Listening to radio soundscapes
by Andra McCartney
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Participants will hear short excerpts from two examples of Outfront shows using soundscape recordings (Shut up and listen, and Eavesdropping on the Waterfront), and discuss different approaches to working with soundscape on radio. Participants are encouraged to bring short excerpts (up to two minutes long) of soundscape recordings that they would like to use in radio work, for discussion during the session.
[mp3] Radio that reflects community
Moderator: Anna Friz. Panelists: Victoria Fenner, Marian van der Zon and Kevin Matthews (NCRA)
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As the foundation of community radio in Canada supported by Universities is starting to show cracks in the foundation, what are the alternatives available? What are the community responsibilities of public radio broadcasters? What are some of the models around the world for community radio? What does the future hold for cultural diversity and community-oriented radio?
[mp3] Soundscapes of the imagination: the grey area between fact and fiction
Moderated with introductory remarks by Andra McCartney. Panelists: Gregory Whitehead, Hélène Prévost and Alessandro Bosetti
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This panel will speak on the authenticity of sounds used in radio art. If seeing is believing, how is the world rendered truthfully when there is nothing to see? What are the ethical obligations of the radio artist?

May 30, 2009

[mp3] Keynote Address: Night Birds and Skull Songs – deep wireless notes on the strange fate of voice, off
by Gregory Whitehead
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Split the voice away from the body, and anything can happen, and usually does. As an adolescent, I fell in love with the Night Bird, whose voice came to me from beneath my pillow, late at night. The Night Bird flew on by, but that sudden love for the solitary radio voice, sent from nowhere and everywhere, burrowed into my mind, body and soul.The radiophone is a most seductive nocturnal vibration, full of vivid promise and thus embracing, concurrently, more than a hint of danger. The lonely voice, in the middle of the night (time night, cultural night, personal night) is a voice that inspires and haunts me still, and in this presentation, using lots of cuts and castings, I will try to tell you why.
[mp3] “Oh, Shut Up! Who needs a narrator anyway?”
by Chris Brookes
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Should we — can we — kill the narrator, or will she keep coming back like the UnDead to spite us? And when she walks onstage, how do we write her into the cast of characters and convince her to act instead of just standing there explaining the drama to us as if we were schoolchildren? Some thoughts on narrators, narrative arc, and structural vortex.
[mp3] From Radio to Multichannel Performance
Moderated by Neil Sandell, with CBC Outfront artists Hélène Prévost, Paolo Pietropaolo, Andra McCartney and Iain Reid
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Every year the conference includes a panel from the artists commissioned by NAISA and CBC Outfront. This session is an opportunity to debate issues that emerged from the collaboration and for artists to provide background and additional insight on the approach they took to the work.
[mp3] How to Pitch
by Paul Ingles
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This session will cover how to successfully pitch your radio works to acquirers of independent work. The elements of a strong story pitch will be explained and other strategies will be offered for getting your work heard.
[mp3] Lifelines for the Radio Artist and Independent Producer
Moderated by Paolo Pietropaolo, with Paul Ingles, Tom Roe (free103point9), Chris Brookes and Mark Blevis
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What are the available outlets available for disseminating your independent radio production – whether it is a radio art piece or a radio documentary? Who are the new listeners? How have these new dissemination avenues influenced new directions in form and content?
[mp3] Radio Art in Situ
Moderated by Anna Friz; with Kristen Roos, Emmanual Madan and Hank Bull
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Radio does not have to exist in a blank void once the signal is beamed from the radio transmitter. This panel will explain and discuss a number of examples for radio art to be heard “in situ”. In this context a radio art work is as much about the sited experience as it is about the involvement of radio. Is radio merely a technical tool in these contexts or is there something that still makes the work radio art?

RWB – 2008

May 31, 2008

[mp3] Keynote Address: “Radio from Where I’m standing”
by Chris Brookes
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Chris Brookes talks about why he makes radio in Newfoundland. How a sense of place can be a creative platform for audio work, and how his radio features try to find the magic heart of his particular landscape. How perhaps the ultimate desire of all documentary work is to invoke the magic implicit in its subject.
[mp3] From Radio to Multichannel Performance
Moderated by Neil Sandell and Darren Copeland with CBC Outfront artists Marjorie Chan, Tristan Whiston, Eldad Tsabary & Richard Marsella.
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Every year the conference includes a panel from the artists commissioned by NAISA and CBC Outfront. This session is an opportunity to debate issues that emerged from the collaboration and for artists to provide background and additional insight on the approach they took to the work. Themes discussed elsewhere in the conference such as differences of language, artistic boundaries, and notions of what is radio will re-emerge in this discussion as well.
[mp3] Are there boundaries to the wireless imagination?
Moderated by Damiano Pietropolo with Jared Weissbrot, Chantal Dumas & Anna Friz
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What are the creative avenues available to the radio artist today in North America and Europe? What are the expectations and limitations in different cultural contexts?

June 1, 2008

[mp3] Keynote Address: “Re-examining radio art”
by Tetsuo Kogawa
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What is the difference between radio/transmission art, sound art and media art? For the audience, it is perhaps ambiguous. For the creator, however, radio/transmission art must use radiation and transmission. Then what is the difference between radiation/transmission and broadcasting? I would like to discuss the basic topics and future directions of radio art. These basic concepts will be radically re-examined.
[mp3] “hand-waving play with airwaves” performance
by Tetsuo Kogawa
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In accordance with my re-examination of the concept of transmission, I would like to demonstrate a short example to ‘parenthesize’ the “messages” of transmission and to let the airwaves emancipate themselves.
[mp3] Radio as Instrument
by Anna Friz
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Radiomaker Gregory Whitehead posits that artistic appropriations of radio “involve staging an intricate game of position, a game that unfolds among far-flung bodies, for the most part unknown to each other.” Mobile and micro-radio art practices bring these formerly far-flung bodies into contact and context and allow for something unexpected to happen. This presentation explores the relations of proximity, distance, interference, and feedback invoked when radio is no longer defined in terms of senders and receivers, but operates as an instrument. Here the concept of transception (the ability to both send and receive) is realized as a musical relationship in a circuit of devices and bodies, near and far. Beginning with the Theremin, an instrument with which sound is created through the interaction of two radio frequency oscillators and the human body, I will consider contemporary radio practices that employ low- and micro-watt transmitters, receivers, and bodies to create sonic installation and performance works characterized by dynamic radiophonic feedback.
[mp3] Art Radiophonique et autres débordements
by Chantal Dumas
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In the last few years, I have produced many works, very often as collaborations, which all related to sound and most of the time were bound also to another medium. There were those for radio – radio pieces; those using radio as part of an installation or performance; and radio waves as connectors. There were other works created for the web, as well as works based on urban soundscapes and finally, a project for the Montreal subway.

Ultimately a lot of sound.

That I will present to you.

[mp3] Insight to Radio on Site
Moderater: Andrew O’Connor; panelists TradeMark G (Burning Man Festival radio), Peter Courtemanche and Gabe Sawhney (murmur)
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How does context influence the radio content made on site? What are the unique challenges of taking broadcasting outside of the conventional studio? What are the social responsibilities of radio produced in situ?