this post is in progress…
Title: FAIR 87.9 FM
Date: March 18, 2009.
Materials: Pirate radio station, FM transmitter, Internet, Computers, Microphones, Speakers, Automobile, Radio
Dimensions: Variable Dimensions
Location: Spectrum Project Space, Northbridge, WA, Australia
Keywords: Interactive audio installation/event, free radio, interact, collective art, transmission
Description:
An instant community pirate radio station was set-up in downtown Perth, Australia for the duration of four weeks in March 2009, during which beta broadcasts were assembled by the surrounding local community. Consisting of a dynamic plethora of incredible sound art, live and recorded music, interviews, rehearsals, spoken word, noise, and silence, all produced by the guests, viewers, and passers-by, a range of programming was created and streamed/broadcast through the station.
The impetus for the project was based on largely on ideas propagated by past initiative such as Radio Alice and Berkeley Radio. Looking for a way to develop the lines of communication using an art gallery as a hub to invite interested parties into a space through which the boundaries of radio broadcast and podcast could be explored. What happens when you create a functioning free-range radio station/recording studio and open it up to the audience, local and global?
The ‘free-range studio’ was open to the public from 10:00am- 8:00pm Wed. thru Sun. Subsequently, some regular programming developed, seeing what became coined as the Open Mic Free-Range Studio Sessions on Wed evenings. Also, the FAIR 87.9 FM hosted a series of workshops and live music events aimed at developing community involvement and providing a creative outlet for the locale.
Tuning in…
Working Analysis
The FAIR FM project was developed in response to current shifts in social paradigms brought into perspective through the recent explosion of ‘social media’ and Web 2.0 culture. Working from the conception of a ‘one-to-many’ communication and ‘user generated content’, FAIR 87.9 FM explores these relationships in an open, immediate context.
Within the more specific cultural context of the art institution the project seeks to explore fluid, alternating, and multiple roles of the artist as simultaneously a consumer and a producer of art contexts. In many ways this art work as a medium of the individual practice of the artist, is an extension of the artist as (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan (1964) suggested all media function in a capacity to “mediate our communication; their forms or structures affect how we perceive and understand the world around us”. Here, as an extension of the individual, the artwork exists as process and medium as message.
Communicative Inaction
This radio station, with out any content, broadcasts, djs, exists as a purely communicative space. Whereas the concept of broadcast, or one to many communication, is inherently teleological, by breaking the rules, so to speak, and pirating the form of radio, and subsequently leaving this space open and raw in a sense, the communicative action can exist in a purely communicative state of affair. This communicative inaction is broken by silence via the first program developed by myself, the first dj to make use of the station, in a radio broadcast program, Organized Silence ®.
Interaction within the artwork as an agency of socialization.
Grass-Roots direct action information dissemination.
How is the project responsive to the relationship between the individual practitioner and social media?
Is this art?
Relational aesthetics.
