a telematic radio network project

With HORIZONTAL RADIO a 24 hour period had been given as the framework in which radiostations transmitted and received by whatever lines they could technically and financially muster. The 24 hours were also the framework for live performances and installations with or without live audiences in a physical space and they were the framework for Internet activities.
In the meantime it has become apparent, though, that the project did not stop at noon on the 23rd of June. The performances and installations are gone, true, but radiostations keep on broadcasting bits and pieces from HORIZONTAL RADIO and though some of the servers active during the project seem to be inactive now, others go on (REAL AUDIO Server) and some of the online projects have been revived.

HORIZONTAL RADIO just as its - much less complex - predecessors was and is a collage of different spaces, locations, materials, technologies and systems. The project operated in the "found" (existing) tranmission and broadcasting spaces of international public and independent radios, of the telefone, of Internet. In telecommunications art we can recognize artistic strategies and intentions, which have been crucial to the development of art in our century. These strategies and intentions however are transferred into a context which profoundly challenges both the role and definition of art and artists in our society.

The importance of sounds (and text) in HORIZONTAL RADIO points to the fact, that it is still more promising - also artistically - to get a hold of virtuality, virtual reality, by means of sound - and therefore the absence of images - than by computer images rooted in a naive realism. Just as minimal art has tought us to reconstruct the wealth of the concept of sculpture out of the absence of its many possibilities and aspects, sounds permit the reconstruction of an incredible wealth of virtual images out of our individual memories.

A project like HORIZONTAL RADIO amassed so many data that an image of our changed relationship to data/information developed. It became clear that metaphors like speed - let alone infobahn etc. - belong to the past, do not apply. Instead one got the image of a geometry in which each place is of equal distance and in which data is not located at any specific place but floating. It is either there or not there, the users/listeners are either in it/with it or out of it. On or Off. Nothing in between. The passage from being without to being within the domaine of information is abrupt, sudden, complete. Once you are in, you are.... everywhere.

As soon as the floating data become visible/audible to a specific user they turn into information: they are endowed with meaning by the user not the artist, whose information has turned into floating data once it is released into the net/web. The pre-structuring by artists/organisers/technicians/institutions in HORIZONTAL RADIO provided points of possible entry - in different media, on different locations, in different bandwidths.....The rest was out of control.