FAIRFM is on the move once again, and this time the revolution will be streamed live! Bringing you Fidelity a la Insurgency Radio 88.8 FM; compiled from stolen sounds and captured compositions, the humdrum of today’s “lo-fidelity” society gets mixed down into five minutes of performative piracy. Transmitting across two frequencies this bootlegged broadcast masks itself, just as the pirate is a revolutionary liberator masked as a marauding low life. From lo-fi to no-fi to wi-fi to hi-fi. This is the new hi-fi.  Tune in to FAIR 88.8 FM !

Included in Low Lives 3, an international festival of live networked performances streamed worldwide, you can catch the performance in real-time, screening at a number of art spaces worldwide, including Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (USA), Utah Museum of Fine Art (USA), Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Oaxaca, (MEX), Attakalari Centre for Movement Arts (IND) and 30 other art spaces, galleries, and museums in Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Tanzania, Trinidad & Tobago, Germany, Japan and the USA.

Check it out online by tuning into our live, lo-fidelity ‘bootlegged’ broadcast aired exclusively on April 30th 2011 at 10:30am (WST-Australia) or at 10:30pm April 29th 2011 (EST-USA) at  http://www.ustream.tv/channel/low-lives-3

Viva lo-fi !

UPDATE: May 01 2011

Here is the performance as seen on http://www.ustream.tv/channel/fidelity-a-la-insurgency-radio

I know I’ve done some less-than-ethical things in my youth, but I’ve struck a new all time low…  I’ve recently been selected, alongside 49+ other artists across the globe, to get low in Low Lives 3.  Check out the release:

Low Lives is pleased to present Low Lives 3, the third installment in a series of annual international art events. Low Lives 3 will feature more than fifty live performance-based works over two days, each transmitted over the web and projected in real time at venues across the globe, with a special spotlight on contemporary choreography. The exhibition will begin on Friday, April 29 from 8-12 pm (EST) and continue on Saturday, April 30 from 3-6 pm (EST).

Founded in 2009 by artist and independent curator Jorge Rojas, Low Lives highlights works that critically investigate, challenge, and extend the potential of performative practices. The project celebrates the transmission of ideas beyond geographical and cultural borders, offering global audiences the opportunity to consider live performance in both physical and virtual space.

By featuring performances at numerous venues and broadcasting those works via multiple online networks, Low Lives provides a new model for efficiently presenting, viewing, and archiving live performance-based art. The annual exhibition embraces low-tech aesthetics, such as low pixel images and muddled sound quality, to emphasize the raw quality of the broadcast and reception of the works.

Now in its third year, Low Lives has expanded its reach to over twenty presenting partners in the United States, Mexico, Spain, Germany, India, Tanzania, Japan, and others. Presenting partners for Low Lives 3 include: Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, New Jersey; Attakalari Centre for Movement Arts, Bangalore, India; Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn, New York; Chez Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York; Co-lab, Austin, Texas; QMAD, Queens Media Art Development in partnership with Crossing Art Gallery, Queens, New York; Diaspora Vibe Gallery in partnership with AE District, Miami, Florida; DiverseWorks in partnership with Box 13, Houston, Texas; Elon University Department of Art & Art History, Elon, North Carolina; Fusebox Festival, Austin, Texas; Konic Thtr, Barcelona, Spain; La Periferia, Mérida, Yucatán, México; La Perrera in partneship with MACO, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Oaxaca, México; Living Arts, Tulsa,Oklahoma; Mascher Space Co-op, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Mindpirates, Berlin, Germany; Obsidian Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota; On the Boards, Seattle, Washington; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon; Real Art Ways, Hartford, Connecticut; Simba Theatre Art International in partnership with Village Museum, Dar es Salaam City, Tanzania; SOMArts, San Francisco, California; the temporary space, Japan; and Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, Utah.

More to come on this one…..

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

Website: http://fairfm.info

Description:

FAIR FM was a nomadic community pirate radio station, initially created and exhibited during a month-long artist-residency at Spectrum Project Space, Northbridge, Western Australia in March, 2009. An operational broadcast booth was built into the gallery, which housed broadcasting equipment including a mixing console, transmitter, computer, and a large antenna.  In the adjacent gallery space, a series of portable radios, including a small automobile, aired the station live to viewers. An array of advertising materials including promotional posters, T-shirts, and other media adorned the walls. Broadcasting on 87.9FM through the use of a low-power FM transmitter, FAIR FM had a broadcast radius of approximately 1km in Northbridge[1], which technically classified it as a micro station. The station went live on air at 2:00pm on Wednesday 09 March, 2009 and broadcast daily from 2:00 pm to 9:00 pm Wednesday through Sunday until 05 April 2009. During these broadcasts, the viewers in the gallery and the public at large were invited to create, perform, and broadcast their own audio programming over the station, which resulted in an eclectic mix of pirated music, live spoken word, musical performances, and sound art. Throughout the duration of the four week residency approximately 15 individuals became involved in the station, including a street busker from Athens, Greece, a professional nightclub DJ from Sydney, the local Perth punk band - Red Triangle, and an array of other interested audiophiles, musicians, and sound artists.

The concept and motivation for creating this project was in response to my situation as an artist within the field of practice, which aestheticised an idea of social relationships, as in relational artistic practices. At the time, researching a theory of relational aesthetic in order to understand the relationship between artist and viewer as an inter-subjective relationship, I became focused on creating an environment in which the viewer could immediately transcend, or change their role as receiver in the often one-way communicative directive often experienced in a gallery setting. I was interested in challenging the boundaries of the inter-subjective experience facilitated by the work of art. This inspired the name FAIR FM, an acronym for Found Air Instant Radio, or Free and Interactive Radio, or any other acronym the users could create. Modelled after initiatives such as Radio Alice, a free broadcast radio station in Bologna, Italy in the late 1970s in which Felix Guattari was involved, I sought to create an open line of communication between the subjective spaces encountered in the gallery and the spaces that existed beyond.[2]

Specifically, I was interested in creating an artwork that moved beyond the subjective boundaries that I create when I make art as a form of self-expression. In other words, I had the urge to explore art making for others, in a way that I feel I had not previously explored in past projects. This meant pushing the boundaries of my practice into new, unseen, unknown realms.  Radio broadcast inspired me as an opportune medium to work through as it represented an invisible link through which one can communicate and connect beyond the boundaries of time and space. I have had experiences in my past working as a disc lockey at a small community radio station, WMEB 91.9 FM, in Orono, Maine, USA, inspiring another reason to use radio as my chosen medium of expression.

Through the use of radio broadcast as an expressive, artistic medium, in this project I desired to manipulate an everyday channel of media through which I could subvert the system of communication and exchange. Through subverting a communication system such as radio, I enabled an altered position in which I could experience my role as artist, or maker, in new terms, in this case in a reversal of roles, whereby the viewer or listener became the maker, or broadcaster and I as maker became the listener. In a system of radio the majority of its users are consumers, the countless throngs of listeners that complete the system as a form of mass media are at the end of the communication. Traditionally radio operates as a one-way medium of communication. Foreseen by 19^th century socialist Edward Bellamy, radio was pre-empted as the “collective telephone” in which the masses would be mobilised by the propaganda of nationalist corporations of industrial power (Mattelart & Mattelart, 1998, p. 17). It is not difficult to see radio operating in the form that Bellamy foreshadowed.  While it may be argued that radio functions as a medium of expression[3], fostering and communicating the musical expression of individuals and communities, the current state of radio is a far cry from free with the majority of publicly broadcast channels produced by national, and multi-national media corporations. I was interested in facilitating others in an attempt to challenge these boundaries, which to me represent the power relationships that exist within the field, in the creation and reception of art, or in a way of subjectivity in general.

The creation of FAIR FM enacted my response to these observations. The development of pirate radio and free radio supports an idea of opening up radio as form of mass communication, operating beyond the boundaries of control and governance of communication often encountered in modern society; FAIR FM challenges this means of control. In short, FAIR FM questioned, to what degree are my own communications controlled by the formal constructs of contemporary society and my social role as an artist?  To what degree are my own forms of communication, my own productions, or programming, formulated through a similar type of conditioning?

Beyond my desire to confront these boundaries through this project, FAIRFM allowed me to explore my practice as an open, and evolving process of creative social interactions. Somewhere between performed and lived action, by creating a public pirate radio station I could create possibilities and opportunities to move between roles, to aestheticise exchange on a communal level.

When viewers entered the gallery, I often greeted them over air, which was broadcast through the radios stationed throughout the space. Inviting these viewers to enter the booth and become active users, I had a number of individuals, prompted by their own musical and audio interests to get involved in various ways (see Figures 22, 25).  However, these experiences were very limited.  In many ways it was the lack of interaction, the limitedness of the station as my channel of communication to the public. In most instances the station acted as a platform for individuals to perform.

Modelling FAIR FM within a theory of relational aesthetics, I was examining my own “inter-human” exchanges facilitated through the pirate radio station as the “aesthetic object” that Bourriaud discusses as “producing sociability” (1998/2002, p. 33). These exchanges occurred through the communicative aspects of radio broadcast. FAIR FM functioned as a means of enabling an extension of myself in a way that challenged my boundaries of communication. Through this challenge I pushed myself to experience my role as maker of my subjective self, as artist, in an extended form, through more temporal, distanciated processes.

Because radio broadcast, as a communicative means of interaction and exchange often functions in a one-to-many context, it can be an incredibly introspective process, and in turn self-reflexive.  FAIR FM extended this representation of one-to-one communication, however the majority of the time I felt is if my communications were “one-to-none”.  Becoming lost in the self-centredness of the radio station was another instance.  Sitting, often alone in the stations broadcast booth, I became very aware of myself, listening to and monitoring myself.

Knowing that the communications I created through the process of broadcast were being transmitted beyond the space of my own perception, I was sending out signals. These signals represented attempts to define my position. One program entitled, Organised Silence, a broadcast in which I transmitted only the white noise that was created in the process of producing the broadcast itself. This gap, its space, created a divisional space, a void through which I could find another form of distance between my place and myself.

The temporality of the various transmissions I created through FAIR FM became relevant as a means of producing observable instances of myself, occasionally interrupted by the presence of another, in which, I would offer the station to that individual allowing them to gain control of the transmission.  This immediate transfer, in ways allowed me to disrupt my subjective processes, and the communication, transmission of this subjectivity.  In ways this was the first instance of exchange that occurs in the collaborative effort involved in communication. The possibility of taking over a pirate radio station, in my opinion, affords the possibility of extending ones subjectivity into inter-subjective space, yet a space that is transient and ephemeral as the radio broadcast itself. However, this transfer between viewer and user, or in this case listener and DJ, never transpired to anything more than an exchange of control.  In hopes of further extending this process of exchange into a more sustained form, FAIR FM was revised into a second installation, which was included in the exhibition, what is displace?.

[2] Guattari’s interest in free radio was in its “form and mode of social organization” (Multitudes 21, 2005, n.p.).

[3] See article Wrightson, K (2003). An Introduction to Acoustic Ecology. As Wrightson explains, “In the developed world, sound has less significance and the opportunity to experience “natural” sounds decreases with each generation due to the destruction of natural habitats. Sound becomes something that the individual tries to block, rather than to hear; the lo-fi, low information soundscape has nothing to offer. As a result, many individuals try to shut it out through the use of double glazing or with acoustic perfume–music. Music–the virtual soundscape–is, in this context, used as a means to control the sonic environment rather than as a natural expression of it. Broadcast speech and music provide the same opportunity for control, turning the sonic environment into a commodity. Networks, transmitters and satellites extend the acoustic community across the entire planet, a fact that has been utilised for fair deeds and foul. Schafer refers to the latter use of sound as “sound imperialism” (1977a, 77)” (2003, p. 3).

so you think you can make art?

nathan stevens: splendid arts lab 2009

AS THE SAYING GOES, “TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE”, SO 10 HEADS MUST BE SPLENDID. FROM A UNIQUE INITIATIVE BETWEEN LISMORE REGIONAL GALLERY AND THE MUSIC FESTIVAL SPLENDOUR IN THE GRASS, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL, NORTHERN RIVERS PERFORMING ARTS (NORPA) AND ARTS NORTHERN RIVERS, COMES SPLENDID, A NEW EXPERIMENTAL ARTS PROGRAM AIMED AT PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN ART AND AUDIENCE, PUTTING THEORY TO THE TEST………..

Click here to read the rest of the article at realtimearts.net

CHAPTER 1.

In this chapter Kwon develops the concept of site and its transformative response to the conditions induced by phenomenological, institutional, then discursive frameworks. Identifying how site-specific practice worked through the physio-spatial conditions through to their particular cultural frameworks

According to Kwon (2002), site-specificity initially established a physical relationship between a work of art and its site of installation. Referring to the works of Smithson, Barry, and Sera, these practices are identified as grounding the concept of a materiality of physical space as a characteristic of initial site-specific art. Attributing the initial development of contextual reference in site-specific work to Minimalist practice, the understanding of the site was experiential.

Site-specificity responded to a number of conditions that developed out of “idealist space of dominant modernisms”. (Kwon 2002, p. 11). Aiming to bound the work within a spatial site, only completed by the physicality of a viewing subject, site-specific art, according to Kwon, affirmed “The aesthetic aspiration to exceed the limitations of traditional media…and institutional setting; relocate meaning from within the art object to the contingencies of its context; restructure the subject to a lived bodily experience; and resist the market economies desire to circulate art as a transportable and exchangeable commodity” (2002, p.12).

It is here from this original grounding in the physicality of the environment, that the site encompasses not only these conditions, but also the social, economic, and political pressures that are intrinsic and circumstantial to these sites. As Daniel Buren asserts, “Art, whatever else it may be, is exclusively political.” (cited by Kwon 2002, p.14). In other words, these pressures, amongst the other cultural factors defined in part by the institutions of art, transformed the meaning and modeling of a site into an a thing not only spatial or physical, yet also cultural.

In many ways, for artists working through these developments such as Robert Smithson and Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, and Michael Asher were critiquing the site and situations of art, the museum, physical spaces of art, and the “cultural confinement within which artists function” precipitated through this; the cultural condition and institutional frame of the artist (Kwon, p.18).

The site of art was beginning to dematerialise, no longer subordinate to its absolute physicality, but rather becoming fluid and impermanent. Kwon describes a concurrent shift in aestheticisation, or rather a deaestheticisation and withdrawal of the visual, where practices adopted “informational, textual, didactic, or immaterial [strategies] altogether…”. In essence, the work of art was becoming more process-based, replacing the object-based, phenomenological practices proceeding this evolution.

From here the boundaries between art and non-art become further obscured as art moved beyond the physical and institutional boundaries of the traditional/conventional sites of art towards a social phenomena, art and non-art oriented.

(Has art, to some degree, been concerned with the social?)

Kwon describes art as having become reflexive and self-conscious through the development of site-specificity. When the general practice of art focuses on its situation what does this mean? Art as a reflection of human development? Reflexivity, individualism, self-consciousness (Narcissism is a quality Giddens (1994) describes as necessary in today’s cultural conditions.) have precipitated through Modernity. We find our identity through locating other identities. In this way we are discursively inter-subjective.

Identifying how the site is generated by the work as its content and Kwon suggests that it is then subsequently “verified by its convergence with an existing discursive formation” (p.26). Examples of sites within this emergence might include cultural debates, theoretical concepts, social issues, political problems, institutional frameworks (non-art), seasonal event, or historical condition” (p. 28-29).

Evolving from an actual location to a “discursive vector” the definition of site has undergone ontological transformation. However, this transformation is not succinctly staged in a linear trajectory, but rather offers an overlap of competing definitions and formations. Kwon notes “The phenomenon (move away from literal interpretation of site) is embraced by many artists, curators, and critics as offering more effective avenues to resist revised insitutional and market forces that now commodify “critical” art practices. In addition, current forms of site-oriented art, which routinely engage the collaborative praticipation of audience groups for the conceptualization and production of the work, are seen as a means to strengthen art’s capacity to penetrate the sociopolitical organization of contemporary life with greater impact and meaning” (p. 30).

Kwon goes onto state that “art is becoming more and more unhinged from the actuality of the site once again” (p.30). However, we must address this unhinging with new questions, concerning “traditional aesthetic values such as authenticity, originality, and uniqueness… which always begin with the particular, local, unrepeatable preconditions of a site”? Also, how are the viewer/reader and artist roles and relations defined ? “What is the commodity status of anticommodities?” Does this unhinging support or resist the ideological establishment of art and capitalist expansion?