Wave Farm Radio and WGXC 90.7-FM are please to present a special broadcast of Radio As Art - Concepts, Spaces, Practices: Radio Art between Media Reality and Art Reception. This conference is taking place in Bremen, Germany June 5-7, 2014. A live stream will be available on Wave Farm Radio throughout the conference, with highlights broadcast on WGXC on Saturday June 7 during the station's Transmission Arts and Experimental Sound program schedule.

Conference stream: http://mobile-radio.net/

About the conference:

Radio As Art addresses the aesthetic and activist potential of radiophonic concepts in the age of Twitter and online communication. It opens multiple perspectives on radio’s role of engaging performatively in social and political constellations, beyond its reception as a popular broadcasting medium. Acoustic signals, voice and language, sound collages, and experimental music have expanded the realm of radiophonic transmission to the status of multifaceted platforms for artistic strategies and networking. Beyond radio’s apparatus-based structure to serve as a tool for global interconnection and collaborative processes, artists have employed it as a means of disseminating creative content, often implying tactical impulses for self-empowerment or resistive subtexts.

In spite of radio’s acknowledged status of experimental art from Futurism through Fluxus to the digital present— and although a broad spectrum of radio art materialized in archival documentation or exhibition displays, as well as in aesthetic and sociocultural processes—radiophonic art has long occupied a peripheral position in the spectrum of ephemeral forms of expression within the art-historical perspective. Yet acoustic and radiophonic contributions have eluded the—primarily visually based—knowledge parameters of art-historical methods that have been shaped for the most part by the study of pictures.

The symposium will provide an opportunity to situate radio art within the discourses of contemporary aesthetic orders and intermedial and transcultural art practices. In view of its historical emergence, the fluctuating nature of radiophonic art concepts will be explored within its institutional framework, between public broadcasting and today’s exhibition culture, between archival documentation and ephemeral processes, between eco-nomic constraints and societal effects, between cultural and geopolitical transformations.

Presented by: Centre for Artists’ Publications at Weserburg | Museum of Modern Art, Bremen; Universität Bremen, Bremen; Universität zu Köln, Cologne. Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.