free103point9 Newsroom has moved to http://free103point9.wordpress.com/

free103point9 Newsroom has moved to http://free103point9.wordpress.com/as of March 18, 2010 A blog for radio artists with transmission art news, open calls, microradio news, and discussion of issues about radio art, creative use of radio, and radio technologies. free103point9 announcements are also included here.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

RadiaLx


The Radia network, Radio Zero and Sirr will host the 2nd edition of the bianual Radio Art Festival RadiaLx in Lisboa, Portugal, from the 20th to the 28th September. RadiaLx 2008 is a biannual radio art festival gathering an international set of groundbreaking artists, instigators and producers, delivering public interventions, performances, workshops, live radio broadcasts, discussions, and conferences.

Initiated from the need to discuss and expand the ideas around radio as an active social enhancer and as an alternative against the retinian paradigms that sorround us, it Intersects multiple approaches and genders to achieve participative and social awareness,

Under the motto "new and forgotten ways of making radio", RadiaLx2008 brings together new and old, allowing different forms of participation to emerge, melt and overlap in virtual and traditional broadcast interaction, redefining radio's own identity and interaction range. The festival includes the following artists Gilles Aubry, Knut Aufermann, Ed Baxter, Xentos Fray Bentos, Mike Cooper, Michael Fischer, Anna Friz, André Gonçalves, Tetsuo Kogawa, Diana McCarty, Patrick Mcginley, Noid, Jay Needham, Paulo Raposo, Ricardo Reis, Pit Schultz, Alexandra Varela, and Sarah Washington.

Labels: , , , ,

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Voices of America


free103point9 is pleased to host, Voices of America, a participatory Internet radio project that reflects on the media spectacle of the 2008 US Presidential Election through the lens of the Voice of America Radio Network, a US government broadcasting service intended for an international audience. The new site and custom application will be up Aug. 25, 2008 through Nov. 5, 2008. Here's how it will work:

* RECORD up to one minute samples of election coverage on an over-the-air Voice of America station
* UPLOAD and TAG your recordings
* DOWNLOAD from the searchable pool of available recordings
* REMIX the broadcasts and UPLOAD them back to the website
* LISTEN to the recordings and remixes online anytime or to the radio broadcast at the Audacity of Desperation exhibition at the Sea and Space Gallery in Los Angeles on Election Day

http://www.voanews.com
http://desperationexhibition.blogspot.com/
http://www.seaandspace.org/
Voices of America (VoA) is created by Lee Azzarello and Sarah Kanouse. VoA is happy to be a participant in The UnConvention, a project of Art Through Technical Alternatives, Carleton College, Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, University of Minnesota Institute for New Media Studies, and the Walker Art Center.

Labels: , ,

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Evidence CD release


Evidence (Stephan Moore and Scott Smallwood) celebrate the release of their new CD "Receiver" (free103point9 Audio Dispatch 035), created through a residency at Wave Farm, with a re-imagined performance of the original installation. Bring a radio with batteries! A limited number will be provided. Evidence will be joined by the modern dance company The Extra-Sensory Pedestrians, performing a new work, "Boxed Dances."

Description of original project Evidence will attempt to recreate: "Spheres of Influence (working title)" is a performance/installation of both live-performed and pre-recorded sounds being broadcast through a number of radio transmitters all tuned to identical (or nearly-identical) frequencies. The audience is equipped with radio receivers, and then encouraged to explore the points of “indecision” that exist between the various transmitters. In this way, each audience member participates in the composition/editing of the final piece by performing the interplay between our broadcasted material and the indeterminate artifacts of the transmission/reception process inherent in the installation.

Sound artists Stephan Moore and Scott Smallwood began performing as the duo Evidence in 2001. Focusing on the universe of real-world sound, Evidence pours field recordings like water into their compositional and improvisational process, resulting in music that balances between tight organization and unregulated flow. Using recording equipment, laptops, and other electronic devices, Evidence creates music that deals with gradual change, improvised over time, sometimes atmospheric, sometimes pulsating, always texturally striking and unique. Resisting classification into a single genre, Evidence is equally at home performing in experimental venues, clubs, galleries, planetariums, and rooftops.

Aug. 14, 2008: 8 p.m. – 10 p.m.
at Issue Project Room at the (oa) can factory, 232 Third St., Brooklyn, NY
http://www.issueprojectroom.org
Admission: $10

For more information see:
http://www.free103point9.org/events/1957/

Labels: , , ,

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Police Call publisher Gene Hughes dead at 80


From Kevin Poulsen in Wired:
The southern California man who published the radio scanning bible Police Call has passed away. Under the pen name Gene Hughes, Gene Costin became a household word among geeks in the 1970s when he started cataloging the radio frequencies used by various police and fire departments and other agencies, giving hobbyists something to do with the first generation of programmable scanners then hitting the market. I had the privilege of interviewing him for a profile in 2005, when he made the decision to close down Police Call after 41 years.
It was the best day amid the worst years of Gene Hughes' life. He was 13 years old and seeking escape from the loneliness of a Los Angeles foster home by playing with an AM radio his uncle had mailed him. Tuning around the dial, he picked up something different from the dance hall music and campy radio dramas that normally spilled from the tinny speaker -- something unexpectedly genuine. "I suddenly heard strange voices, women broadcasting addresses and numeric codes," he recalls.

He quickly figured out that he'd somehow tuned into Los Angeles Police Department dispatchers crisply directing the city's black-and-white police cars to real robberies, domestic disturbances and traffic accidents throughout the City of Angels.

That was 1940, nearly a half-century before shows like Cops would turn live police action into mass entertainment. And what might have sounded to someone else's ears like unwanted interference from a city transmitter, was to Hughes the pulsing music of an invisible world. He bought a map and started marking out the police calls with a pencil. As he moved into adulthood, his interest only increased, and he invested in specialized radio receivers. "If they had the word, I guess you'd have called me a nerd," says Hughes.

But that nerdiness paid off. In 1964, in a bet with his wife, Hughes took all the information he'd accumulated -- call signs, frequencies and codes for police, fire, paramedics and other agencies -- and rolled it up into a 16-page manual titled Police Call.

It was the start of something big. Under Hughes' direction, Police Call would eventually expand into nine regional volumes covering the entire continental United States, with a peak circulation of a half-million copies. Updated annually, it would sell countless thousands of radio scanners and play a crucial role in incubating and growing the hobby of radio monitoring, which traces a line from the cop watchers of the 1970s to the railfans of the '90s and the NASCAR dads of today.

Along the way, Police Call would help spawn local and national clubs and organizations, spark brushfire controversies over information disclosure, and turn Gene Hughes -- a pen name -- into a household word among scanner buffs and anyone who spent too much time at Radio Shack when they were kids.

Scanner buffs are posting memories to Costin's online tribute page.

Labels: , , ,

Saturday, August 02, 2008

Radio Action III CD release at New Museum


Performances from: Damian Catera, Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson, The Dust Dive & Latitude Longitude, Joshua Fried & Todd Merrell, Tianna Kennedy, LoVid with Howard Huang, Tom Roe, and others at 7:30 p.m. Thu. Aug. 7 at the New Museum in Manhattan. Attendees will receive a complimentary copy of Radio Action III with admission. Join free103point9, in collaboration with Radio Web MACBA, Barbara Held and Pilar Subirá, for a live performance celebrating Radio Action III, an online radio program produced for RWM and the next free103point9 Audio Dispatch CD Release. Radio Action III features 12 five-minute soundworks conceptually tied to the idea of "radio" as an instrument or theme, composed by free103point9 transmission artists working in collaborative teams. RWM is a radio-phonic project on the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) website that explores the possibilities of the internet and radio as spaces of synthesis and exhibition. 7:30-9:30 p.m. Live web stream at www.free103point9.org. CD cover photo by David LaSpina.

Radio Action III track listing:
01 The Dust Dive & Latitude/Longitude, "PARTY COVE"
02 radio_ruido and ben owen, "Dandelions (c/clocked)"
03 LoVid & Michelle Rosenberg, in collaboration with Howard Huang, "Ring in the New"
04 Tom Roe & Scanner, "Airscape"
05 Damian Catera, "deComposition USA"
06 Joshua Fried & Todd Merrell, "Pistol Shrimp"
07 neuroTransmitter, "Chronicle"
08 Anna Friz & Tianna Kennedy, "When radios sleep what dreams may come"
09 Michelle Nagai, in collaboration with Kenta Nagai, "Sleep Radio"
10 Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson, "You Love Me Truly"
11 31 Down & Matt Bua, "Wireless Electric Chair"
12 Alexis Bhagat & Sophea Lerner, ".00011574 Hz"

Labels: , , ,