Episode 4 - Anna Friz

Three works about transmission and emissions: historical broadcasts out to sea; a welter of drone surveillance and military signals; and a speculation of a human journey across space, traveling across magnetic fields.

Somewhere a voice is calling (Anna Friz and Absolute Value of Noise), 2014

On Christmas Day 1906, Reginald Aubrey Fessenden transmitted the first instance of music and voice on the radio out into the Atlantic Ocean. This piece considers themes of “invisible” sounds, hidden voices, and the early days of radio communication on the Atlantic. Drawing from tales of ghost ships and myths that claimed the seafaring dead could be contacted via shortwave, this performance conjured an ethereal world of distant voices, sea, and static. The pieces move from the dawn of radio through a journey across the sea, and into the future of a radio-sphere that is over-populated by the activities of humans and their devices. The artists play with frequencies from across the transmission spectrum, from shortwave radio and walkie talkies to VLF and ELF receivers.

Anna Friz is a radio, transmission and media artist. Since 1998 Anna has predominantly created self-reflexive radio for broadcast, installation or performance, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. Her compositions for theatre, dance, film, installation, and solo performance reflect upon public media culture, environment and infrastructure (human and extra-human, acoustic, and electro-magnetic), time perception, and speculative fiction.

http://nicelittlestatic.com

Absolute Value of Noise (Peter Courtemanche) is a contemporary sound and installation artist from Vancouver. He creates radio, installations, network projects, performances, curatorial projects, and handmade CD editions. He likes to work with 'gadgetry' - custom turntables, lamp filaments, wire coils, high voltage ionizers, magnetic transmitters and receivers. His art works often have a literary basis - inspired by narrative texts and the history of specific installation sites.

http://absolutevalueofnoise.ca

Curated by Afroditi Psarra, "Transmission Ecologies" explores the turbulent world of radio signals which propagate around us. Each show features a guest sound artist who broadcasts their radio experiments using EMFs, interference patterns from devices, HAM, RF field recordings, satellite signals, space astronomy research, etc. to formulate their interpretations, compositions, and translations of the invisible and unheard layer of telecommunication technologies.

"Transmission Ecologies" is commissioned by Stegi Radio / Onassis Culture.

Afroditi Psarra is a multidisciplinary artist and an Associate Professor of Digital Arts and Experimental Media at the University of Washington where she runs the DXARTS Softlab. Her research focuses on the interweaving of art and science through the creation of artifacts with a critical lens. In her projects she explores energetic phenomena like electromagnetic radiation, and technologies such as radio-frequency sensing, fractal antennas, and software-defined radio. She is particularly interested in the use of the body as an interface of control, and the revitalization of tradition as a methodology of hacking existing norms about technical objects. Her art practice builds on and extends the work of Cyber and Techno-Feminism(s) and the idea of bodies as archives of information, and manifests through e-textiles and wearables, performances, installations and sound art.

She has exhibited her work internationally in venues such as Onassis Stegi, Bozar, Laboral, EMST, Ars Electronica, Transmediale and CTM, Eyeo, Amber, Piksel, and WRO Biennale between others, and published at conferences like Siggraph, ISWC (International Symposium of Wearable Computers), DIS (Designing Interactive Systems), C&C (Creativity and Cognition), and EVA (Electronic Visualization and the Arts).