Music & Machines VIII
February 2008
Broadcast
This international two-day conference presented different ways that artists and musicians have engaged with radio and broadcast technologies. This edition of Music and machines explored avant-garde composers’ appropriation of broadcast, the development of radio art as a genre of practice and the ways in which sound artists have utilised these concepts through radio, or more recently through network streaming. It featured a combination of lectures and interventions by key writers, artists and musicians in the field.
Speakers and performers
Andreas Broeckmann (Germany), art historian and curator
Heidi Grundmann (Austria), founder of ORF-Kunstradio
Honor Harger (UK/NZ), festival director, co-founder of Radioqualia
Joyce Hinterding (Australia), artist
Douglas Kahn (USA), Professor at the University of California, Davis
Tetsuo Kogawa (Japan), writer and activist, Professor at Tokyo Keizai University, founder of MiniFM movement in Japan
Laura Kuhn (USA), John Cage Trust
Brandon LaBelle (Denmark/ USA), artist and writer
Julie Martin (USA) Experiments in Art & Technology
Marko Peljhan (Slovenia), artist
Tao G. Vrhovec-Sambolec (Slovenia), artist
Sneha Solanki (UK), artist
Atau Tanaka (USA/JP), musician, Chair of Digital Media, Newcastle University
During the conference Culture Lab was transformed in a “Haunted House” by residents through a series of installations and small-scale public performance events exploring the uncanny and otherworldly associations of broadcast media and recording technologies. In particular, residents attempted to work with materials from Antonin Artaud’s final public work, the radiophonic piece Pour en finir avec le judgement de Dieu, it being the sixtieth anniversary, almost to the day, of Artaud’s death. In addition, Slovenian artist Tao Vrhovec-Sambolec presented his intervention Reality Soundtrack, in which a large group of conference participants moved through Newcastle city centre, following a predetermined route, all carry identical radios tuned to a local radio station broadcasting Tao’s unearthly, beautiful electronic soundtrack. This piece has formerly been presented in Vienna, Ljubljana, Mexico City, Amsterdam and many other interventions.
The conference was moderated by Paul Attinello, Bennett Hogg and Sally Jane Norman.
