curated by ...

a series of on air-on line exhibitions of international radio-art.

Radio Roadmovie Radio Roadmovie Matt
Smith

Social Music: Brandon LaBelle

Social Music
Brandon LaBelle

The future of all radio is silence: Resonance FM

The future of all radio is silence
Resonance FM

Soundcard: Aleksandar Vasiljevic

Soundcard
Aleksandar Vasiljevic

ISOL: radioqualia

ISOL
r a d i o q u a l i a

Literatur als Radiokunst
Christiane Zintzen

FREQUENCitY

FREQUENCitY
Steve Bates

Reception Is Interception

Reception Is Interception
Anna Friz

Acoustic Space Set

Acoustic Space Set
Rasa Smite and
Raitis Smits

The Frequency Post

The Frequency Post
Andrew Garton
ran.
Johannes Auer
HOMO SONORUS
Dimitri Bulatov
Garrett Phelan
Garrett Phelan
Silence Radio

urban sound stories
Gruenrekorder
“Personal Radio: A Los Angeles perspective on radio art”
GX Jupitter-Larsen


RADIA



"A short guide to becoming-bat"
Stefano Perna



"The Transmuted Signal"
by Colin Black


IBERWAVE

by José Iges
too be continued ...

[deutsch]

In May 2001 Kunstradio has started to declare four to six of its weekly on air-on line broadcasts as spaces for exhibitions of international radio-art. Radio-artists with differing artistic and theoretical backgrounds are commissioned to develop the concept and design of each of these exhibitions. In their projects, each of the curators, together with the artists chosen by her, attempts to highlight aspects of contemporary radio-art, which they deem important and interesting.

Kunstradio thus delegates its own curatorial functions - with the calculated risk of definitions of radio-art entering which may be foreign to the producer/editors as well as to some of the artists, who have been over lengthy periods of time instrumental in defining some of Kunstradio's own definitions of radio-art. After the - yet undetermined - end of the project, all the exhibitions should be part of Kunstradio on line's archive, each of them containing the original works and a small catalogue.

With this project, Kunstradio hopes to contribute to an on-going debate on the role the institutions of public radio and those of the art-system have played and still play in the definition of radio-art.

- The discussion on the definition and legitimatization of a radio-specific art and on the role the institution of public radio plays in its definition, promotion and production has gained renewed actuality because radio-art projects and series of broadcasting radio-art are increasingly among those under scrutiny when it comes to streamlining the budget and output of public cultural radio-channels according to criteria of audience-figures.

- Simultaneously the monopoly for the definition of a radio-specific art which public radios have claimed for decades - unchallenged especially in Europe - is being rapidly undermined by the growing number of radioshows on the Internet, which may not be explicitely called art, but are obviously informed by artistic concepts.

- Against this background, questions about what radio-specific art might be or even, whether there is anything like a radio-specific art, have gained a renewed urgency. How, e.g. does radio-specifc art differ from a blooming sound-art taking advantage of ever more accessible sound-technologies? How does it differ from what is called "Klangkunst" in Germany and seems to be flourishing independent from radio? Is radio-art just fading into a sound art which is itself awaiting definition or blending without a trace into Klangkunst, which is defined by Helga de La Motte and her collaborators as a new genre between music and visual arts? Is radio-art a relic from modernist self-reflective times or part of an ever expanding media-art (itself a term to be defined) which is differentiating rapidly in respect to its contexts and strategies?

- While a sound-art still wrapped up in its sometimes conservative and defensive controversies of definition and legitimisation and a 'Klangkunst' encompassing everything which sounds, are still at the margins of the traditional object-oriented art-system, there is no doubt that this system and its institutions are attempting to apply their strategies of curating, interpreting, classifying, presenting and ultimately historisising to an art in the immaterial contexts of converging communication media, occasionally even to radio-art. Although many of the artists and theoreticians involved in communications-art view these attempts with suspicion, there is no doubt, that (hi)stories on an art in the communication-media are in the making.



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