Posted by: Justin Grotelueschen on June 1, 2008 01:04 PM | Comments (0)

I'm a little freaky about conference panels based on theoretical discussions (in this case, the creative avenues available to the radio artist today in North America and Europe and the expectations and limitations in different cultural contexts), mainly because it can be a bit too obtuse to get any real meaning out it and when recapping I don't want to muck up the intended meaning of the panelists. But Saturday afternoon it worked for me, I think -- in part because a small group of us were still building transmitters, and as we worked away the discussion served as our private radio broadcast where we could look up and actually see the hosts! Magical, just like radio.

Radio has always been a performance medium, but its value as its ability to connect people, cultures, as a form of communication and conversation has given it staying power. And the Internet came along and eclipsed radio in both regards. So naturally a radio art conference can't be without a little gloom and doom about radio as a viable medium for the transmission of art. If people aren't listening to radio anymore because conversations have moved to the Internet, does that mean the role of the radio artist has diminished -- does the disembodied voice, the voice from nowhere, go nowhere?

In the context of this conference, though, that's a liberating concept; radio conceptually can be separated as a form of communication from radio as an art form, and radio artists can concentrate on art, not making material suitable for all audiences. But I don't feel that separation is not entirely necessary, as maybe it's time to revisit radio for its other positive aspects: both to create art, and to think of 'community' and 'public' radio as community-builders for those who assemble to create it. Artists and creators flock to community radio because of the tangible aspects of their own community, a fine byproduct of making art.

But WILL THE KIDS LISTEN TO IT? An age-old question for the business end of radio, the argument of how to reach younger audiences that has been around since CBC and NPR and the public broadcasting networks have been around -- do they want hipper programming, do they want shorter and more digestible content? But even when disregarding art and thinking about the radio industry as a whole and it's need to tell stories and inform through 'the news', we're ignoring that people are inherently inquisitive individuals and will use the Internet and word of mouth and all possible channels to find content that is good. And just maybe young people will 'graduate' from iPods to radio at some point. If young people are still creating and seeking out sound art, they will find it, eventually.

Like Anna Friz said at the end of the discussion, "an unstable medium is almost the most interesting one", and radio artists can enjoy focusing on the experimentation and not the statistics. The audience has always been considered, although now it can be as it was originally considered, as seekers of the disembodied voice.

More from Deep Wireless 2008 :
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