Shows from the Radia Network travel… from one artist’s ears to another’s. From one small community to another, far away. Within the shows journeys take place too, whether a walk through the shopping centre or a trip into space.
This collage, built from fragments of some of 2009’s contributions, celebrates these journeys large and small; what they have in common and what sets them apart.

Replacement show
This show is an abridged version of the one made for Kunstradio on ORF in Austria. If you’d like to hear the full version it’s here:
http://www.kunstradio.at/2010A/03_01_10.html

Small Journeys Long Distance features extracts from:
Out of Space, War of the Worlds from Orange 94.0
Our Domestic Radiation by Anna Friz for Free103point9
Snow Squabbles by Neil Griffith, Cathy Inouye Caroline Kunzle for Ckut
Incidental Parallels by Pôm Bouvier B. for Radio Grenouille
Radiodance Opus.01: Y Do B?, by F. Ribeiro, for Rádio Zero
Silence Radio: Ruisselle by Philippe Vandendriessche; Greetings from Italy by Damien Magnette; Nous, les Défunts by Yannick Dauby,from Radio Campus
Stiller Marktschrei by Stephan Roth from Orange 94.0
Closing Down, by GilbertandGrape from Soundart Radio
This Means War by Andrej Ancevski for Kanal 103, Skopje
Fragments of Stratford Shopping Centre by Martin Williams for Resonance 104.4fm
The Forester And Me by Maarten Lauwaert and Joris Van Damme for XL Air
Rug Radio by Maria Papadomanolaki for Free103point9
Flare: Real Energy World By Eva Ursprung for Klubradio/Herbstradio
Why Don’t You Go Home? by Cathryn Morgan Richards for Soundart Radio
Awaiting for the Waters to Rise by Frederic Alstadt for Radio Campus
Mayon Volcano by Andreas Loeschner Gornau for Radio Corax
Playground: Art Games by Miss Gunst for Radio X

“wien wie es klingt” by Gerhard Rühm

the radioplay “wien wie es klingt” places 24 significant listening spots of the austrian capital vienna into the framework of a daily routine – something like an acoustic equivalent to two sets of postcards. it begins in the early morning with the arrival at the railway station. the thematic middle of the piece is marked by the ringing of the bells of st. stephen’s cathedral in the center of the city at noon, and the piece ends in the late evening with the departure from the airport at schwechat. strewn in between is a tourist programme which could hardly be accomplished in one day. a compressed 47 minute sequence was distilled from the 12 hours of recording and arranged roughly chronologically with regard to normal visiting times in the morning, afternoon, and evening but precluding any kind of realistic plot by making geographical leaps all over the city. Produced in 1991/1992 for the series METROPOLIS at the WDR, Köln (Studio for Akustischer Kunst) in co-production with ORF Kunstradio, Wien.

http://www.kunstradio.at/1992A/18_6_92.html

In May 1990, ORF KUNSTRADIO, the radio-art program on the National Austrian Radio, and the WIENER FESTWOCHEN (the annual international festival of Vienna), collaborated to assist in the realisation of “LANDSCAPE SOUNDINGS / KLANGLANDSCHAFTEN”, a live sound and radio sculpture by Bill Fontana. For two weeks, 16 microphones that had been most carefully positioned by the artist captured the sound events taking place in the Stopfenreuther Au, a part of the Danube marshes near Hainburg on the Slovakian border.

By means of a collage of various transmission technologies these sound-events were delivered live to an improvised studio at the Museum of Art History and distributed to 70 speakers, again carefully placed and arranged, along the facades and in the cupolas of both the Museum of Art History and the Museum of Natural History and in the formal garden between them with its monument to the empress Maria Theresia. A stereo mix of the live signals was transmitted simultaneously and continuously to the ORF Funkhaus in Vienna where the producers were free to use the sounds at all times. Within a few days and with increasing frequency the live sounds could be heard on all of the radio channels of the Austrian National Radio. The success was so overwhelming that following a suggestion by Ernst Grissemann, the radio broadcasting director at the time, the last five minutes of the sculpture were eventually broadcast live on all ORF radio channels simultaneously: for 5 minutes the space of Austrian radio (at the time a monopoly) became the site of a live sound sculpture blotting out any other radio content.

During the 14 days of its realization LANDSCAPE SOUNDINGS developed into a project which paradigmatically touches upon some of the most important aspects of telematic/radio art: the phenomenon of simultaneity as well as the dissolution of the traditional concept of the (‘finished’) work of art; the co-authorship between artists and non-artists as well as the new definition of the role of the artist who, when preparing his work within the public, i.e. institutionalized domain, becomes an initiator, (project) manager, facilitator responsible for motivating other people involved to find, if necessary, highly unorthodox solutions.

LANDSCAPE SOUNDINGS not only highlighted the poetics of a fragile and endangered natural environment by and through the live transmissions but, by eavesdropping on nature, also adressed the surveillance character of new recording and transmission technologies which are infiltrating every aspect of the social space.

Two CDs were produced by Bill Fontana in connection with the project; LANDSCAPE SOUNDINGS, 1990 and VIRTUAL NATURE, 1994.

heidi grundmann

Bill Fontana – Landscape Soundings