RADIO AS ART

International Symposium 

June 5–7, 2014 

University Guest House 
Auf dem Teerhof 58 
28199 Bremen 

Presented by: Centre for Artists’ Publications at Weserburg | Museum of Modern Art, Bremen Universität Bremen, Bremen Universität zu Köln, Cologne 
Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation 

Radio As Art addresses the aesthetic and activist potential of radiophonic concepts in the age of Twitter and online communication. It opens multiple perspectives on radio’s role of engaging performatively in social and political constellations, beyond its reception as a popular broadcasting medium. Acoustic signals, voice and language, sound collages, and experimental music have expanded the realm of radiophonic transmission to the status of multifaceted platforms for artistic strategies and networking. Beyond radio’s apparatus-based structure to serve as a tool for global interconnection and collaborative processes, artists have employed it as a means of disseminating creative content, often implying tactical impulses for self-empowerment or resistive subtexts. 

In spite of radio’s acknowledged status of experimental art from Futurism through Fluxus to the digital present—and although a broad spectrum of radio art materialized in archival documentation or exhibition displays, as well as in aesthetic and sociocultural processes—radiophonic art has long occupied a peripheral position in the spectrum of ephemeral forms of expression within the art-historical perspective. Yet acoustic and radiophonic contributions have eluded the—primarily visually based—knowledge parameters of art-historical methods that have been shaped for the most part by the study of pictures. 

The symposium will provide an opportunity to situate radio art within the discourses of contemporary aesthetic orders and intermedial and transcultural art practices. In view of its historical emergence, the fluctuating nature of radiophonic art concepts will be explored within its institutional framework, between public broadcasting and today’s exhibition culture, between archival documentation and ephemeral processes, between economic constraints and societal effects, between cultural and geopolitical transformations. 

For the schedule click here.

The abstracts of the contributions can be found here.

more information on radioasart.net/RADIO_AS_ART.html