Radia Show 977: CONTINUUM (Usmaradio)

CONTINUUM a collaborative radio performance conceived by Roberto Paci Dalò for TACTUS Radio Festival on the 2nd of December 2023 between 19:00 and 20:00 CET, it was broadcast on Usmaradio together with a global network of radio stations.

The challenge was to work on radical improvisation without any conduction and prior rules, giving a maximum of freedom to the participants. Most of the artists, performing from different locations, didn’t know each other and actually never talked to each other before the performance. Obviously the key of the project was an extreme attention during the performance from any single artist: “the art of listening” with 18 people performing together on-site in the Republic of San Marino and remotely from the USA, Germany, and Austria.

The result was surprising: a subtle texture of sounds with an amazing quantity of moments of silence despite the massive use of live electronics. The performance somehow proved that the planned lack of conduction can be balanced by the level of attention and involvement from the performers. It was a mesmerizing immersion in an acoustical world where electronics graciously merged with acoustical instruments and voices; a nocturnal winterreise across galaxies.

CONTINUUM intended to develop the praxis of the “telematic performance” which developed in the beginning of the 1990s. Especially around activators such as the programme ORF Kunstradio in Austria, the Ars Electronica Festival and L’Arte dell’Ascolto radio festival, seminal projects such as Cheap Radio, Horizontal Radio, Rivers&Bridges, and Realtime , designed an innovative use of telecommunication technologies including the nascent Internet in conjunction with the broadcast and telephone networks. The artist Robert Adrian was one of the major inspirations for many artists in the field.

The arrival of the Internet obviously greatly expanded the possibilities for global interaction between artists who could now participate from their personal spaces and with minimal need for financial support. But at the same time this provoked national broadcasting corporations to step back and reduce their involvement in such experimental projects. Let’s think of the infrastructure, technologies and the great professionals working in radio stations. The role of the engineers and their inspiring relationship with the artists has always been crucially important in such projects.

CONTINUUM wanted to link these practices from the past by bringing together both independent and broadcasting corporations in order to act in our present and investigate the possibilities of today’s technologies. À suivre…

Each week one member of the Radia Network produce a show for all the others. The Radia Network emerged from a series of meetings, clandestine events, late-night club discussions and a lot of email exchanges between cultural radio producers across Europe. The topics vary and the reasons for forming a network are many, but Radia has become a concrete manifestation of the desire to use radio as an art form. The approaches differ, as do the local contexts; from commissioned radio art works to struggles for frequencies to copyright concerns, all the radios share the goal of an audio space where something different can happen. That different is also a form in the making – radio sounds different in each city, on each frequency. Taking radio as an art form, claiming that space for creative production in the mediascape and cracking apart the notion of radio is what Radia does.

It is producing radio stuff that is hard to describe. Some of it can be labeled radio art, or experimental radio, or creative radio. Sometimes it talks, sometimes it doesn’t. It can be noisy, or a kind of soundscape, or a documentary, a document, a talk, a performance. Each and every week, one of the partners will provide the network program, commissioned and produced especially for this purpose: being broadcast by all the partners and made available online.

Some things have to be said about all those partners. They are radio stations, of the independent, non-commercial, community, cultural species. They all speak different languages, and this should create interesting problems. Although initially they were all European radio stations this has changed over time and Radia has become not only larger but also more diverse: 17 partners in nine countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Campus Paris (Paris, FR)
* CFRC 101.9 FM (Kingston, CA)
* CKUT (Montréal, CA)
* JET FM (Nantes, FR)
* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)
* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)
* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Corax (Halle, DE)
* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)
* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)
* Radio Nova (Oslo, NO)
* Radio One 91 FM (Dunedin, NZ)
* Radio Panik (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Papesse (Firenze, IT)
* Radio Student (Ljubljana, SI)
* radio x (Frankfurt/Main, DE)
* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)
* RadioWORM (Rotterdam, NL)
* Reboot.fm (Berlin, DE)
* Resonance FM (London, UK)
* Soundart Radio (Dartington, UK)
* TEA FM (Zaragoza, ES)
* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)
* XL Air (Brussels, BE)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)

More information at http://radia.fm