Radia: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

Oct 01, 2011: 10am- 10:30 am
WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears

90.7-FM in NY's Upper Hudson Valley and wgxc.org/listen everywhere
http://www.wgxc.org/

"All That Is Solid Melts Into Air" (Radia Version) is a transmission work produced for the Radia Network by Brett Ian Balogh, and is an extension of the work done for Maximilian Goldfarb's Deep Cycle (2010). The piece is composed of a series of maps that trace a path through all Radia Network stations in Europe. The maps are then encoded to sound through a protocol for transmission of images over radio known as slow-scan television, or SSTV (in this case, Robot 72s Color). The piece re-interprets the solid as air through the processes of encoding, transmitting, receiving and decoding the map. Through this process, the physical and imagined boundaries depicted on the map become distorted through their interaction with the actual space they intend to represent.

Balogh is a Chicago-based artist working at the intersection of objects, sounds and spaces. He received his Masters of Fine Arts in Studio from the Department of Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his Bachelor in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently an instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology, teaching courses in architecture, computer-aided design and manufacturing, do-it-yourself broadcasting and acoustics. Brett is also a free103point9 transmission artist and a 2009-2010 free103point9 Airtime fellow.

The Radia Network includes WGXC (via free103point9) and 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: 20 partners in 13 countries and growing all the time. "Radia" airs on WGXC every Saturday at 10 a.m.