Posted by: Barry Rueger on May 27, 2007 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

It is now Sunday Morning, and Kunstradio's Heidi Grundmann is beginning a talk entitled Radio Art in a Period of Change. In thinking back over Saturday's activities - both within the conference, and beyond - I am struck by the sense that this is the central question of the week.

In the morning yesterday Robin Ravlich showcased works being presented on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. That discussion necessarily referenced the loss of The Listening Room at ABC, and the overall sense that broadcasters are devoting less time and resources to what Heidi just referred to as "Art media."

In the afternoon a panel looking at Soundscape again seemed to be looking back as much as forward. As noted by Hillary the references were to "the usual suspects: R. Murray Schaeffer, Hildegard Westerkamp, Barry Truax and the World Soundscape Project."

And again this morning Heidi's talk is offering a history of Kunstradio, with the requisite references to Canadians like Dan Lander, Hank Bull and others who led the radio art movement. Once again we're reminded of ground breaking events like Radio Rethink: Art, Sound and Transmission, which took place in Banff in 1992.

I have been working in radio, more specifically community radio, for nearly three decades. What has always excited me has been the sense of possibility that radio can present, the relative ease with which producers and artists could try new ideas, create new worlds and experiences, and the explore the world around them.

In those earliest days, back at Vancouver Co-op Radio in the eighties, there seemed to be no boundaries to form or content, and it was apparent that the work being done by Patrick Ready, Hank Bull, Howard Broomfield, Victoria Fenner, GX Jupitter-Larssen and others was just the beginning.

More important though was the influence that their work had beyond the rarified Art Media community.

You cannot measure the ways that Radio Art changes all broadcasting, nor can you really guess what happens when unsuspecting members of the public listen to these works.

Radio is the most democratic and accessible of electronic media. It is inexpensive to produce and distribute, and virtually every home, office, and automobile has a receiver. The possibility is that Radio Art can reach and influence people who would never visit a gallery.

In an age when electronic media is all pervasive, and more importantly where commercialized media envelops us from every direction, Radio Art can challenge the accepted forms and conventions in a way that no other medium can do. It can make people listen more closely, and can challenge the media forms and conventions which surround us.

It is though a time of change. Two decades of globalization have left public broadcasters with less budget and with a redefined mandate which measures success in terms of listener numbers rather than excellence. When Public Broadcasting tries to operate in the same way as commercial media it is the artistic work and the experimental work that suffers.

Even though non-commercial community radio still affords a home for Radio Art, it is the Public broadcasters who have offered the resources, budgets, and technical expertise to create much of the work that now can been seen as influential and iconic.

(Heidi just began talking about newsounds gallery, and the the work done by Victoria Fenner, and later GX Juppiter Larssen. That's the time when I was just young and enthusiastic volunteer, and was having my eyes and ears opened in ways that I never imagined. I am astonished to think of those days at Co-op Radio as being of such historical interest.... to me, at the time, the work that Hank and Patrick, and Hildi, and GX were doing was just the way that radio was supposed to be)

"Co-op Radio was for us an empty vessel that we could fill with life"

(Heidi is now discussing the influence of General Idea on the work of Hank Bull, and again places Radio Art within that larger context of the art of the time.)

But if Public Broadcasters are no longer willing or able to enthusiastically embrace Radio Art, and if community broadcasters continue to suffer from an ongoing lack of resources, where is the Radio Art?

There has never been a problem with embracing new technology, and galleries like the Western front were using faxes and modems and videotext and satellites long before such things became commonplace.

Although these technologies can allow artists in diverse locations to connect and collaborate, they lack one thing that radio has to offer - universality.

Radio Art has to a degree moved from being accessible by all, something which could be discovered by any person with a radio, to a largely gallery based medium seen and experienced by the few. (I include much of the web based presentation under that umbrella. Although in theory web based audio is accessible to all, in practice an radio art web site is one of millions upon millions of other sites. A radio station playing Radio Art is one of perhaps thirty or forty choices in any city and consequently has a much great chance of reaching a large audience.)

In thinking about this time, and spurred by Heidi's talk, it strikes me that the Golden Age of Radio Art was that time which immediately preceded the rise of video and cable television, and certainly the Internet.

The value of Radio as an artistic form was its relative accessibility and low cost. When you could begin to produce and distribute video without needing large budgets and expensive technical facilities it seemed that Radio Art was no longer the newest and exciting form. Video meant that the tyranny of the picture was able to overtake audio.

Now of course we have the Internet, but it is once again a visual media, and once again audio takes a back seat to pictures. The question on my mind, and I think on the minds of most people here this weekend, is where Radio Art can find a home as we move forward into an interactive, Web 2.0, 500 channels of cable television Universe.

How can we create an environment in which Radio Art can be encouraged, supported, funded and distributed, in which this medium can thrive, and not just survive.

More from Deep Wireless 2007 :
« Radio Hears the Soundscape: A New Usual Suspect, Bill Fontana | Everything I know about transmitters I learned from pirates . . . »