ARCHIVE

Today tune in for radio art from The Beatles, and NeuroTransmitter. On The Beatles "I Am The Walrus," John Lennon instructs Ringo Starr to tune in an AM radio at the end of the song. Listen closely, and you will hear a BBC production of Shakespeares "The Tragedy of King Lear." The broadcast was at the point of Act IV, Scene VI, where the steward Oswald is killed. Then tune in two works from the duo NeuroTransmitter, Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere. First, hear their "Radio Film Studies Vol.1: made for Wave Farm's show "Tune(In))) Brooklyn." Then hear "12 Miles Out," realized in 2005 in conjunction with the exhibition "Airborne" at the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York co-organized by Wave Farm (then known as free103point9). The work was exhibited for many years as an installation rather than as a piece made solely for radio broadcast. "12 Miles Out" is an example of radio art that addresses radio as content, as material, and as a space; the piece is also a kind of archive of pirate radio, an archive within the archive. Here is neuroTransmitters description of the piece: '12 Miles Out' is a visual and sound installation that merges analog radio technology and line drawing. This work continues neuroTransmitters exploration of offshore pirate radio practice prevalent in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the US a decade later. Pirate radio is a tactic that undermines corporate media domination, and occupies the privatized space of radio bandwidth for noncommercial interests. '12 Miles Out' specifically references Radio Caroline, one of the most infamous offshore radio ships. Installed, the drawing represents a Radio Caroline ship circa 1964, setting the scene for the radio broadcast. The audio composition mixes live and ambient sound recordings of an ocean voyage neuroTransmitter took out into international waters; archival material from Radio Caroline broadcasts; and audio that references offshore pirate radio and the shifts in territorial boundaries that govern the sea. Multiple radios within the exhibition space are be tuned to the projects transmission frequency, or viewers can bring their own radios in order to listen to the work. Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2019/2020, Karen Werner.