Radia Show 1087: Pins by Richard Foster (for Radioworm)

PINS is a game for all anonymous egos, everywhere, made through repositioning and reproducing old dreams and documents. PINS is a game that rejects the word “practice”, a ponderous barrage balloon of a word, one with a thin skin that can be undone with a pin prick, revealing an awful lot of hot air. Leave it for the doctors and lawyers. Or call it “praccy”. PINS favours the word “process”. Process can mean the slow deconstructing of making art. Process also means something that can be tracked. It means repeated and unglamourous toil, uncertainty, silence, private actions with no hope of public validation, multiple failures and misunderstandings, and – eventually – something or other. In the 1960s you could enact “death by Process”. There is rarely a plan, just an idea. Chance, whim, accident and other people play a role in the end result.
What does Richard think about PINS?
Richard often feels between worlds. He remembers the congealed boredom of the analogue industrial past. He is often wary of the earnest, yet fly-by-night present with its assumed importances and digital fevers. Like Syd Barrett, he is “much obliged” to contemporary life for regularly “making it clear that he’s not here”. Richard realises that being between these worlds is both his natural state and his opportunity to act. Between 1840 and 2023 he spent an incalculable amount of time looking out of bedroom windows, or sitting in pubs listening to builders, plumbers and middle managers telling him what real art is. Now he wants to bring those worlds he saw together, somehow. He feels he has a lot to do, even if his work may not make much sense.
Back in 2004, Richard painted out all the images he didn’t like in hundreds of 12” record covers. Only those that momentarily interested him stayed. The record covers are still more interesting than Richard’s actions. They are now under the spare bed. One day he may photocopy them. Now for the RULES, and ILLUSTRATIONS: both here and at the Museum of Photocopies.

Mix & Edit by Lukas Simonis
Text & voice by Richard Foster

Production by Ash Kilmartin
a RadioWORM/Dr Klangendum/Concertzender production

This is nr 4 of a series of pins, you want more pins? check; Concertzender.nl

Each week one member of the Radia Network produces 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: 22 partners in 14 countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Duuu (Paris, FR)
* ∏node (Mulhouse, Paris, FR)
* Diffusion (Sydney, AU)
* JET FM (Nantes, FR)
* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)
* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)
* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)
* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)
* 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)
* Usmaradio (San Marino, SM)
* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)
* Mobile Radio (Ürzig, DE)
* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)
* Radioart106 (Haifa, PS48)

Syndicated By

* Campus Paris (Paris, FR)
* Harrogate Community Radio (North Yorkshire, UK)
* KZradio (Tel Aviv, IL)
* Noise Radio (Zwolle, NL)
* Radio ARA (Luxembourg, LU)

More information at http://radia.fm