Conflux festival, day 1

From Regine in We Make Money Not Art:

A few notes from Conflux Festival day one which runs until Sunday in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The HQ is at the gallery The Change You Want to See, a space for projects at the intersection between art, activism and academia.

Christina Ray introduced this edition of the annual festival for psychogeography by reminding that it started in 2003 when a bunch of friends decided to set up an event where they would invite other people to come and explore the city with them. Conflux gathers artists and also people who wouldn't call themselves artists such as architects, activists, researchers, etc. This year there are over 100 artists selected. I'm not going to blog everything, just a few projects i particularly liked.

Here's my pick of the day:

free103point9/31 Down Radio Theater (Ryan Holsopple, you might remember his pay phone murder mystery project, Canal Street Station) presented Supplied by the Public which is currently working as Conflux radio station. The content of the radio station is made of calls from participants of the festival.

The calls (from public phones, cell phones, home phones) are streamed in real time over the Internet. The stream is also broadcast on a low power FM transmitter to the local area of the event for people to listen to via a wireless radio. The calls are archived and will repeat when no active calls are being broadcast. The project is inspired by Max Neuhaus's telephone/radio work, Public Supply (1966).