Radio activity

From Marisa Olson in Rhizome:

You may have read about free103point9 here, before. At Rhizome, we maintain a high esteem for this pioneering organization serving the field of "transmission arts," and we've fortunately been able to collaborate with them on projects in the past. In many ways, our missions overlap, as our organizations grew out of a desire to support emergent and often immaterial practices. Free103point9's founders situate their vision of the field in an evolutionary framework, looking at how broadcasting and transmission grew out of shared trajectories with net art, video art, mail art, and other creative forms of distributed communication. The organization frequently teams up with other institutions to take this message on the road and increase exposure for the work of transmission artists. Their newest collaborative project is both a show and a recording, co-presented by the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, in their Radio Web program (RWM). This curatorial initiative "is a radio-phonic project from the MACBA's website that explores the possibilities of the internet and radio as spaces of synthesis and exhibition." This self-reflexive approach to presentation is also inherent in the free103point9 show, entitled "Radio Action III," which takes up "radio" as both its theme and its delivery vehicle. Fifteen artists collaborate to present five-minute tracks inspired by this important device, and a bit of surfing of the artists' profiles on free103point9 will assure you of their diversity, ranging from site-specific sound manipulation to interventionist broadcasts. The recordings are the newest CD to be released in free103point9's Dispatch series and the album will premiere at an event at the New Museum of Contemporary Art on August 7th. Meanwhile, it will be streaming online at RWM from June 18 - August 30. Be sure to tune-in. (CD cover photo by David La Spina.)

Waves: material and medium of arts and communications

From Armin Medosch in The Next Layer:

The exhibition "Waves" is part of a long term research project which puts analogue and electromagnetic waves into the centre of its investigation. "Waves" uses the process of making an exhibition as a form of practice based research. The overall research aim is to develop a bottom-up, materialistic theory of media art. It is proposed that waves are a very important material of study for the development of a theory of media art, as they are a 'principle material' which every artist who works in the field of media art needs to consider and know about. Waves constitute a material layer without which media art is impossible and whose study therefore is also important for any theoretic effort.

Both sight and sound are based on waves, so that waves have shaped us humans evolutionary, our senses have developed in a process of adaption to that. Analogue and electromagnetic waves are the basic elements or materials for many artistic practices and social applications, ranging from sound (modulations of air waves which can be receieved by the ear drum), to light (electromagnetic waves in the TerraHertz range) and electromagnetic waves (which exist naturally and manmade).

Electromagnetism is one of the four basic fources in physics. Since roughly 100 years em waves have been used for signal transfers, radio, tv and remote actions such as alarm systems, radar, sensing, and many other things. em waves modulated band processed by analogue devices or computers form now one of the major components of our communications culture (from the mobiler phone to that thing parking attendants use to type in fines). Considering that, in this sequence, human culture has become increasingly electric, electromagnetic, and, based on that, digital, the 'waves' are getting very little attention 'in their own right' which is what this project is addressing.

Waves@Dortmund 2008 was realised in a collaboration and partnership between HMKV, RIXC and Ars Electronica as part of Szene-Österreich, an event in spring 2008 where Austrian artists were presented in the Ruhr Valley area.

Experts revive debate over cellphones and cancer

From Tara Parker-Pope in The New York Times:

Last week, three prominent neurosurgeons told the CNN interviewer Larry King that they did not hold cellphones next to their ears. “I think the safe practice,” said Dr. Keith Black, a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, “is to use an earpiece so you keep the microwave antenna away from your brain.” Dr. Vini Khurana, an associate professor of neurosurgery at the Australian National University who is an outspoken critic of cellphones, said: “I use it on the speaker-phone mode. I do not hold it to my ear.” And CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon at Emory University Hospital, said that like Dr. Black he used an earpiece.