Dianne Weller

On invitation of XL AIR, artist Jeroen Vandesande transformed his installation CIRCUIT02 (for pics, see website) in a proper radio broadcast for the Radia LX 2010 festival. Vandesande  (°1986, Turnhout, Belgium) completed his master studies at the Ghent School of Fine Arts Sint-Lucas and has been active as a (sound & visual) artist since 2004. Besides giving performances he also creates sound installations and regularly works together with musicians and performers. For this occasion he worked together with sound technician Martijn Veulemans and the XL Air radiophonic team. Vandesande has performed for audiences in several art centres and concert halls around the globe.

The installation.
CIRCUIT02 is the follow up of Vandesande’s acclaimed CIRCUIT01 where he tried to create an instant communication system for musicians through the use of a no-input mixing panel in which acoustic instruments were connected and modulated with the internal feedback circuits of the mixing board. Circuit 02 extends this prototype system to an infinite number of players. The result is best described as an autonomous society of communicating radio’s.  The idea behind Vandesande’s Circuit 02 is a kind of technical elaboration of the famous Bertolt Brecht idea of two way communicating radio’s:
But quite apart from the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him.                  (Bertolt Brecht – ‘The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication’ – 1932)
In what can be described as a technical perversion of the Brechtian prophecy, neglecting the social and political undertone of this quote, Vandesande build a network of mutual communicating radio’s by providing each transmitter with the possibility to receive and vice versa. He literally changed the apparatus from distribution to communication (or what is generally understood by the use of this word). The result is a crafty and powerful feed-back sphere inspired by 20 (old school) radios. The Brechtian utopic idea, when carried out with technical accuracy, creates a dense cloud of feedback loops, a vast network of pipes indeed. Walking through this cloud of analogue static fog, one can recognise the individual speakers and listen to the different voices of the different radios, finding a subtle beauty in this Babylonian noise. The big challenge for the RadiaLX festival was to translate Vandesande’s idea’s into a classic radio broadcast and to recreate the dynamic spatial qualities of the installation in a flat streaming signal. In order to do so, Vandesande decided to play with the different perspectives one can take in the spatial environment of the installation by recording the radios and feedback loops individually and from different angles with different recording techniques and different gear. Vandesande started out with the recording of two radios communicating with each other,  a broader network of radio’s was then recorded with the modulation of AM-broadcasting on FM-feedbackloops.  These sounds where recorded  through spatial microphone techniques combined with so called close-micing. One rather amusing outcome of these experiments was listening to AM Radio on FM band – could this be a world premiere? What you’ll hear is a 28 minute composition assembled out of the recordings we made during the experiments with the installation Circuit 02. If these experiments can teach us something, it must be that the aesthetic pleasure of the Brechtian utopian symmetric communication system is an ambiguous one. Any prophecy expecting perfection from communication systems or forecasting utopian dimensions in (new) media risks to become another dangerous joke for history. It’s in the nature of communication systems to fail, to be imperfect and to be replaced and complemented by new media. Too smooth or too much communication kills communication. In fact imperfections are exactly what makes communication work. The beauty off course derives from this imperfection and it’s this uncanny pleasure one can hear in the folds of Vandesande’s piece CIRCUIT02 BROADCAST.

INFO
http://www.jeroenvandesande.be/
http://radio.vub.ac.be/xlair/

This seasons XLAIR show is an impression of the Flemish ‘HAPPY NEW FESTIVAL VAN VLAANDEREN KORTRIJK’ and more precise an impression of the sound walk ‘Klinkende Stad / Sounding City’ (The Finest in Flemish sound art). The HNF festival is the successor of the renowned Happy New Ears festival that started in 1996 and came to an end last year. It has grown into one of the most prestigious sound art festivals around. In 2008 The Wire magazine called it: “one of Europe’s premier sound art festivals.” This year the festival took place from the 24th of April until the 9th of May. Klinkende Stad is best described as a sound walk and consists out of 12 different sound related works by Flemish artists, listed below. Since the works are very dependent on specific locations and are very difficult to record or grasp for radiophonic purposes, we tried to make a mix of information, description and sound suggestion. For those who want more information, listen to the 25 minutes interview with the HNF artistic director Joost Fonteyne following the radia show at 15:30.

http://www.happynewfestival.be/Klinkende_Stad.html.

WORKS & ARTISTS & time codes in the broadcast

“A40 Ruhr” Maria Blondeel (01’00” – 01’10”)

“De Egelantier in de Nachtegaal” Leo Copers (02’00” – 02’15”)

“Staalhemel” Christophe De Boeck (20’30” – 22’30”)

“Shadow Grounds” Pauwel De Buck

“Reflections” Boris Debackere & Steven Devleminck (09’40” – 12’25”)

“Permafrost” Aernoudt Jacobs (22’30” – 25’00”)

“Mahila” Annemie Maes & Bill Bultheel (25’00” – 28’00”)

“Not with a bang but a whimper” Stefaan Quix (12’30” – 15’30”)

“Circuit02” Jeroen Vandesande (15’30” – 20’00”)

“Shifting Grounds” Esther Venrooy & Hans Demeulenaere (07’00” – 09’40”)

“Into the Light of the Night” Els Viaene en Plan B Performance (03’00” – 07’00”)

“Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco” Visual Kitchen (09’40” – 10’30”)

Program themed ‘the unheard’ consisting out of 3 smaller parts.

Part 1: Retool Radio
Collage of ephemeral sounds recorded on the Retool Radio research night.

In December 2009 a number of artists were invited to investigate the space where radio can meet performance. Lilia Mestre is a choreographer who ended up in radiophonic spheres through her
antipathetic study of emotions in the performance arts. She’s looking
for ways to resist the dominant visual identification process and the
crystallization of meaning and narrative. As a choreographer she comes
from the theatre of movement and bodies to enter the theatre of sound
and nobodies. Nico Dockx is a visual artist, obsessed with data and archives. In one of his works he investigates the relation between sound and architecture. His film is suggesting that it’s not us, humans, who communicate, but communication itself, as Luhmann already pointed out. Who (or what) is sending? Who (or what) is receiving? Who (or what) is answering? Joris Van Damme is a former RITS student who won the Prix Europa for his fiction play ‘Ik zal het u vertellen’. Inspired by Ulysses, the piece was built up entirely of oral elements. Philosopher Samuel Ijsseling introduced the production. Dennis Tyfus, also a visual artist, ended the Retool Radio night with hidden guerrilla radio in quadraphonic setup.

The selected part contains a voice that was only broadcasted on the outside of the building and was unheard by the audience. Other sounds are mostly unintended, unheard or neglected bastard sounds from that evening, speech defaults, technical defaults etc. recycled, looped and edited. Some sounds are stolen from the talks or productions (for example the drumming).

Part 2: Servox
2 students (Elke Plancke & Eva Daeleman) looked to find the (unheard)
intonation of people deprived from their biological voice. People with
voice aids tend to have a very monotonous intonation. Through technical gimmicks they hoped to give them back some musicality. An extract of their search.

Part 3: Sample Minds
3 students (Joris Lenaerts, Vincent Van Reysseghem & Mathias Lewis)
are looking for the unheard in sample music. This fragment contains an
analysis of the samples used in ‘Voodoo People’ by The Prodigy

Maarten Lauwaert and Joris Van Damme both graduated last June from RITS Brussels, an audiovisual arts college, with distinction in the area of ‘radio’. For their Masterclass Audio, they went to Poland, to the last primeval forest in Europe, the Bialowieza Forest. In short, a forest where there was no human influence in the last 4000 years; the last place in Europe where you can see real prestine and untouched nature! They interviewed locals, forest preservation workers, scientists,… At first they made a radiodocumentary with the material they recorded, but they also made a more subjective and abstract audio piece with it. The piece is called ‘The Forester And Me’ with the subtitle ‘Burning Ice’…