The BBC is reporting that Debrecen airport in Hungary is about to test attaching radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to every passenger.

This sounds like one of those fabrications that zoom about the internet. But the BBC reports that Dr Paul Brennan, an electrical engineer from University College London, is leading the tagging project, known as Optag. "The basic idea is that airports could be fitted with a network of combined panoramic cameras and RFID (radio frequency ID) tag readers, which would monitor the movements of people around the various terminal buildings," they quote Brennan.

At check-in, each passenger would somehow be tagged. "In our system, the location can be detected to an accuracy of 1m, and video and tag data could be merged to give a powerful surveillance capability," he says.

Maybe the right-wing thugs have overthrown the Hungarian government. Or perhaps civil liberties are quaint 20th Century ideas.

From St Helena Herald via Media Network Weblog:

The first construction works began a couple of weeks ago at Radio St Helena in Pounceys, St Helena, with the pouring of the concrete slab, which holds the base to the shortwave transmission antenna. This antenna will be erected later this month when the man behind the revival of the Radio St Helena Day (Sat. Nov. 4), Robert Kipp, arrives from Germany.

This project was made possible entirely by generous donations. The antenna was funded by overseas shortwave enthusiasts and the concrete slab holding the base was sponsored by local building contractors and friends.

After this year’s revival, Radio St Helena plans to continue this annual worldwide transmission, which is very popular with shortwave radio enthusiasts and local listeners - who can hear peoples’ greetings from all parts of the world. Next year will be an extra special shortwave transmission, which will coincide with Radio St Helena’s 40th anniversary. More information of the Revival of Radio St Helena Day, including the schedule, can be found at www.sthelena.se/radioproject.

Andy Sennitt comments: This is one of these rare occasions when the local people are getting as excited as the shortwave hobbyists. St Helena has traditionally been one of the most isolated places on earth. With a population of around 4000, this tiny island in the South Atlantic has no airport (though that’s about to change), and access has been via the Royal Mail Ship St Helena, which takes 5 days from Cape Town and about half that time from Ascension Island.

From New Scientist:

Solar flares can drown out GPS signals with potentially serious consequences for airlines, emergency services, and anyone relying on satellite navigation.

It turns out these bursts of charged particles, which produce auroras and geomagnetic storms, also generate radio waves in the 1.2 and 1.6-gigahertz bands used by GPS.

How was such a clash missed? Because GPS receivers only became common during a period of low solar activity. By 2011 solar flares will reach the peak of their cycle and receivers will likely fail. Or so Alessandro Cerruti of Cornell University, New York, told a meeting of the Institute of Navigation in Fort Worth, Texas, last week. The only solution would be to redesign GPS receivers or satellites, which may not be practical, says Cerruti.

Vox Novus invites composers to submit audio works 60 seconds or less in length to included in a special theme concert of the 60x60 project to be held June 2007 in Munich, Germany. The theme for audio works will be on the topic of oppression and/or totalitarianism. Sixty compositions will be selected to be performed continuously in a one-hour concert, in conjunction with multimedia elements and an analog clock marking the passage of time.

During the concert each of the 60 pieces selected will begin precisely at the beginning of the minute, this will mark the end of one piece and the beginning of another. There will be no pause between the pieces. Works may be less than 60 seconds in length, but may not exceed 60 seconds. Works selected that are less than 60 seconds long will be “padded” with silence either before, after, or surrounding the composition. Please note that the total duration of the work including silence may NOT exceed sixty seconds.

The 60x60 project’s definition of a record work is as follows: any work created as a musical composition which is captured on recorded media, which does not require live performers for its production in broadcast at concert halls, radio, multi-media, etc. Its creation can include but not limited to acoustic instruments, voice, environmental sources, and computer (Sampling, MIDI, C Sound, ProTools, etc.)

All submissions must be postmarked by December 1, 2006. Selected works will be announced on March 1, 2007. Submission of the work(s) on compact disc must be accompanied by the submission form and sent to:
60x60
c/o Robert Voisey
Radio City Station P.O. Box 1607
New York, NY 10101 USA
Read more about guidelines here.

Every so often excellent freeish-form New Jersey-based WFMU shakes up their radio schedule a bit. The current version starts today and goes through June 11, 2007. It includes regular favorites such as program director Brian Turner, Dan Bodah, and Bethany Ryker, as well Tony Rettman and Black Ops, who have DJ'd at several free103point9 events.

Next year will mark free103point9’s tenth anniversary. As we approach this monumental milestone we'd like to invite you to participate in an exciting schedule of special anniversary events and the planning ahead for free103point9’s long-term future.

We are writing to ask you to consider making a tax-deductible contribution to free103point9. We hope you believe free103point9 programs and activities –- online radio, special exhibitions, unique experimental transmission shows, and artist residencies and resources –- to be valuable and can assist in making their continuation possible.

Since our founding in 1997 as a mobile microcasting collective, free103point9 has fostered artists and audiences interested in experimentation on the airwaves. With encouragement and assistance from the free103point9 community at large, and generous grants from the New York State Council for the Arts, and Experimental Television Center, free103point9 shifted from artist collective to nonprofit organization in 2002, employing the term "Transmission Arts" as an umbrella for our interactions with airwaves.

“Transmission Arts” unite a community of artists and audiences interested in experimental radio ideas and tools. Transmission practices harness, occupy and/or respond to the airwaves that surround us. We are excited that the term is becoming part of the educational canon.

Proudly, over the last ten years, we have presented the work of hundreds of artists to international audiences in a wide scope of contexts. Our programs have been presented in partnership with exciting and influential institutions such as Anthology Film Archives, NY; Art in General, NY; Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Electronic Arts Intermix, NY; Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Hallwalls, Buffalo; Hogar Collection, Brooklyn; The Kitchen, NY; LMCC, NY; The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; The New Museum for Contemporary Art, NY; NAMAC; The Santa Fe Art Institute, New Mexico; The Ontological Theatre, NY; PERFORMA, NY; Rhizome, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and White Box, NY among numerous others.

From 2000 to 2004 the free103point9 Gallery in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn provided a special place for artists working in experimental sound genres such as avant folk, noise, computer-based music, free jazz and spoken word. Renamed the free103point9 Project Space in 2005, it continues as place for artists to meet, conduct workshops, present works in progress, and serves as a key studio for live content streamed on free103point9 Online Radio. This year, we’ve started hosting public events again and have many special events planned for this fall. With financial support, we will expand these programs further.

Both our Online Radio and Dispatch Series programs continue our commitment to the experimental sound and transmission community, and distribute live and recorded works to audiences in over sixty countries. We are now working closely with over 20 "transmission artists," exhibiting their work in many contexts including online radio, galleries, museums, and public spaces.

The free103point9 Wave Farm, which opened last year in upstate New York, is situated on 30 acres of pastoral meadows, with ponds, forest paths, and mountain views. Wave Farm is home to a summer performance series, artist residencies, skill shares, special Online Radio performances, and a forthcoming Transmission Sculpture Garden. As many of you have witnessed first hand, the Wave Farm environment is uniquely inspiring. Your extraordinary feedback about the grounds and atmosphere fuels our vision for Wave Farm as a public destination for decades to come.

On June 16, 2006, we broke ground on the Wave Farm Study Center, which will house reading, listening, and viewing libraries; a performance/gallery space; a recording studio; and future artists-in-residence. This major undertaking is well on its way. Designed by Caireen O’Hagan and Manche Mitchell, the Study Center is a 4,000 square-foot facility. We are working with some terrific who are supportive of free103point9’s activities and we will do much of the interior work in-house. Yet, we need to raise an additional 20,000 dollars to complete the building, and are turning to our community for the first time appealing for individual contributions to help close this gap.

We'd like to thank you for your help in building free103point9 from a tiny group to a well-respected non-profit organization that now works with some of the best transmission artists in the world. We are planning several special events in conjunction with our anniversary next spring and we look forward to celebrating together.

Your support will facilitate future programs and ensure the longevity and growth of free103point9. Donations of any amount are welcome. More information by clicking donate above.

Simon Elvins work, April, 2006:

This map plots the location of FM commercial and pirate radio stations within London. The poster works in its own right as a piece of information design, but when connected to the modified radio it becomes part of the interface. Each map is made site specific by connecting only the stations that can be received in that location. This is done by drawing power lines in pencil on the back of the map, which conducts electricity from the radio to the front of the poster. Placing a metal contact onto each point enables us to listen to the sound broadcast live from that location.

Soundlab added a ten-question interview with Canadian free103point9 Transmission Artist Anna Friz yesterday. Read it here.

On Oct. 1 the Chicago Sinfonietta premiered Indiana University professor David N. Baker's "Concertino for Cellular Phones and Symphony Orchestra" at Dominican University.

"A device similar to a traffic light signaled the audience members to activate their rings — red for the balcony, green for the orchestra seats — at various points in the piece. An assistant conductor, Terrance Gray, followed the score and activated the lights," Daniel J. Wakin wrote in The New York Times. "Four amplified mobile phones were onstage. One, operated by a teaching assistant at Indiana, Aaron Vandermeer, was programmed with Mr. Baker’s main tune and well-known classical themes like the 'William Tell' gallop and a motif from the last movement of Brahms’s Symphony No. 4. The other three cellphonists onstage played random rings, sometimes timed to destroy a pastoral melody here or there."

From Media Network weblog via Reuters

The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) agreed yesterday to convene a conference late next year to complete negotiations on a new international broadcasting treaty, ending eight years of wrangling. The WIPO general assembly, the United Nations agency’s top decision-making body, called the so-called diplomatic conference for November 19-December 7, the agency said in a statement.

The conference will aim to update the 1961 Rome Convention on the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations, which predates much of modern television technology. Further preparatory sessions will be held in Geneva in January and June 2007.

The need to update the existing treaty has been made more acute by a growing signal-piracy problem in many parts of the world, WIPO officials said. But some activist organisations question whether the broadcasters need any further protection than that already given to them by international copyright and other existing intellectual property provisions.

The scope of a future treaty, as well as the duration of any protection granted, are amongst issues to be decided at the 2007 conference.

Has anyone seen this show, up through Oct. 21 at the Swiss Institute, 495 Broadway in Manhattan, third floor, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.? If so, please post a comment below.

By Gabrielle Giattino

With Illusion is a Revolutionary Weapon Loris Gréaud sets in motion a complex system of unattainable experiences. A multi-track exhibition with no center. A vast network of projects spanning continents and collapsing time. Illusion is a Revolutionary Weapon will manifest itself in the binding between projects rather than the discrete events geographically defined by London, Los Angeles, Milan, New York, Tokyo and Vilnius. On city streets, building sites and playing fields, in public parks and gallery spaces, the works will take their start: from there extending and thwarting perception. Spreading through phone lines, radio waves, television emissions and eventually through rumors and hearsay, units of information relating to the project will cross over, run together and cancel each other - obscuring experience.

Rooted in the deceptive potential of the transmission of information, the project – and its title – stems from the 1970 William Burroughs essay, "The Electronic Revolution", in which the conspiratory capabilities of mass communication and mass confusion are elaborated. Cut-up techniques and the playback of multi-layers of recorded information stand to threaten the comfort of knowledge.

Illusion is a Revolutionary Weapon projects are linked – entangled in a quantum mechanical sense – so that though spatially or physically distant from each other, the discrete forms that exist separately refer to one another: they influence each other and exist in an associated system. Gréaud enables this network as much as the viewers activate it. The impossibility of actually viewing all these projects renders many dark holes in the experience of the Illusion project, but it is the unobtainable complete experience itself which defines the project. One could consider that the project exists in its pure form when not viewed at all, a classic conceptual work - for once illuminated, a project’s potential is diminished.

In Tokyo, with Item Idem and Assistant, Gréaud becomes a director for a building’s destruction. In the style of Gordon Matta-Clark’s first cuttings, a demolition company will be brought in to raze a structure. In opposition the Matta-Clark’s methods, however, instead of keeping the event private – only to be documented by a film crew – the Gréaud project will be attended by seated viewers. Bags will be checked at the entrance and all cameras and recording devices will be off-limits. The only record of this theatrical event will be the anecdotes and experiences of those present, and, perhaps, a mountain of pirate images.

Layers of sound – a voice track that becomes incomprehensible, and then engenders new meaning as if in foreign tongue – is the point of departure for Gréaud’s project in Milan. Transforming the sound of an early Steve Reich tape piece, “It’s Gonna Rain”, into overlapping radio signals, Gréaud will control the light entering and leaving the space through the ten windows of the gallery. Moving electric blinds will mimic the stops, starts and lags of the Reich work. Lapses of sound and meaning are transferring into chaotic emissions, controlling a code of light and dark.

New York will host a kind of switchboard for the Illusion project. A gallery’s answering service will be occupied by Gréaud, working with Karl Holmqvist, for diffusing information in the form of sound projects. Multi-layer recordings on this extended ext-17 project will be available anywhere and be recorded continuously and remotely, from undisclosed locations during the two months of the Illusion project. The non-lieu of the extension project mimics the format of the global Illusion project: with no center, the recordings exist entangled in an undefined space. Following Burroughs, the layers created by the multiple voice tracks will only proliferate the possibility for playback to incite confusion. Information, reports, theories, riddles, noises, lies - swarming around Illusion is a Revolutionary Weapon.

My role is the hardest – to describe a project that on principle defies description. Your challenge is clear – listen to the rumors, spread your own, make your theories, build a binding, but bear in mind that limits approach an infinity as values are pinned on position, time and speed. The more light you shed on a moving target, the quicker it escapes you.

Federal Communications Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps will attend a "Town Hall/Public Hearing on the Future of Diversity in the Nation’s Media" at 6 p.m. Oct. 19 at Hunter College.

We're sure the audience at the Hunter College Kaye Playhouse (at East 68th Street between Park and Lexington Avenue) will be asking about low-power FM, shredded studies that prove the harms of a consolidated media, and more. If you are planning to attend and record the hearing, please get in touch, as we'd love to air it on free103point9 Online Radio.

This meeting is sponsored by the National Hispanic Media Coalition/National Latino Media Council, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the National Institute for Latino Policy and in partnership with Free Press, a national public policy group.

Usually, when the U.S. invades a country the first thing it does is set up a pirate radio station. But this is the Bush administration, so they are just now getting around to launching Voice of America's Deewa (Light) Radio in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

In the coming months VOA will expand the propaganda to six hours of daily news programming from its current one hour.

Simultaneita: Ars HyperMedia Almanac

Call for Papers and Artworks

Ars HyperMedia, Call for papers and artworks, the submission deadline is November 20, 2006. Simultaneita new media arts magazine is pleased to announce this call for submissions for a special project. Yearly full-color printed "Ars HyperMedia Almanac" on digital culture / media arts. The publication will feature various sections, to be formed through articles, texts, interviews and images. Keywords: -- net / web art -- digital art -- hacker art / hacktivism / artivism -- architecture / design -- dance / theatre -- sound / sonic art / electronic music -- electronic literature -- festivals / art centers / galleries -- curating and preserving new media art -- cross-media -- cinema / animation / comics. Articles may be 2,000 words in length. What kind of artworks are we looking for? Digital art, graphic works, illustrations, digital photos, sketches, drawings, video, CD or DVD, graphic novels are accepted. File format: photoshop tiff, jpg 300 dpi.

A few Friday radio items:

* Watch a video presentation by Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware, a book about the potential of a world dominated by RFIDs (radio frequency IDs) and other tracing technology here.

* Check out this flicker set of photos of vintage BBC radio equipment here.

* From DIYmedia: "The FCC is soliciting comment on rules to govern an upcoming auction of 124 full-power FM station construction permits around the country. These channels are on the commercial portion of the FM dial; the action is set to commence on March 7."

* Radio propagandist Iva Ikuko Toguri (aka Tokyo Rose) died the other day. WFMU's blog has an excellent obituary here.

* In Florida, the sheriff busts the "pirates," not the Feds.

* The Radio Transmission Orchestra (RTO) invites you to bring tuneable FM radios at 6 p.m. Sunday to join in at Cold Storage, 1168 E 5th St, in Los Angeles.

Designed by Caireen O'Hagan and Manche Mitchell, and being constructed in multiple phases, the free103point9 Wave Farm Study Center will feature reading, viewing, and listening libraries specific to transmission art. Eventually, the structure will also house accommodations for two artists-in-residents, a performance and gallery space, and the free103point9 archives.

By next summer, we will have a large shed with a roof and a place for performances without minding so much if a little rain falls. The rest of the building will be completed as funds allow.

In the background you can see the Catskill Mountains. On the left side of the building, the performance area will be set up, underneath a large roof that extends past the concrete foundation.

free103point9 works with a core group of artists exploring transmission as a medium for creative expression. This genre includes experimental practices in radio art, video art, light sculpture, and installation and performance utilizing the electromagnetic spectrum. Please click on the links below for work samples, exhibition histories, and biographical information specific to each of these artists who incorporate transmission practices in their performance, sound, video, and sculptural work.

free103point9 is excited to announce the following new
Transmission Artists:

Latitude/Longitude

Sophea Lerner

Todd Merrell

More information:

Latitude/Longitude
Brooklyn-based artists Michael Garofalo and Patrick McCarthy began performing as Latitude/Longitude in 2004. Teasing melodies out of prepared and alternately tuned guitars while electronics murmur in a nest of instrument cables at their feet, the duo weave electro-acoustic dream songs from cross-circuit chaos. In 2005 Latitude/Longitude released their self-titled debut album on their own imprint, Early Thieves. Eschewing traditional arrangements, they favor a looser, more spontaneous approach to composition. Live improvisations are played back and manipulated until they take new forms. The results range from surreal folk and delicate instrumentals to noise-drenched drones. Latitude/Longitude continue to work with diverse sonic materials: test oscillators, homemade cassette tape and field recordings, radio transmissions (FM/AM/SW/CB), and toy electronics (broken and functional), as well as more traditional instruments, such as pedal steel guitar, banjo, mbira, and voice. www.minutesandseconds.com

Sophea Lerner
Sophea Lerner is an australian sonic media artist and broadcaster currently working between Australia, Finland, and India. Her work brings together experience in group devised physical performance with 15 years of experimental radio and new media art into a collaborative art practice which explores mediated temporal experience. Lerner's radiomaking encompasses intricately composed radiophonic projects as well as engineering and production and collectively devised, rapidly executed semi-improvised live broadcasts. Community and creative networks are integral to collaborative aspects of her practice. She currently runs media and sonic arts courses at the Centre for Music & Technology in Helsinki where she has directed experimental open content fm/hybrid broadcast project ääniradio in Helsinki since 2004 and particle/wave festival of hybrid radio in 2005. In 2006 she was artist in residence at Sarai, New Delhi. She is an active member of the foodradio_network which broadcasts monthly on free103point9.

Todd Merrell
Since 1978 Todd Merrell has been fascinated with the imperceptible environment of electromagnetic radiation that shortwave radio and processing can capture, and transform into an immersive, musical environment. In 1991 he began exploring the musical possibilities of this world in a collaboration with Patrick Jordan. The result was SWR, a two movement work that was performed several times in Chicago, and on WBEZ National Public Radio. Composer Lou Mallozzi, of the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, wrote in P-Form Magazine: "It soon becomes clear that the focus of the work is not on acheiving any particular musical moment, but on the ephemerality of sonic transformation itself. Unlike compositions that utilize radio in part for its referential or signifying qualities, SWR is more in the minimalist tradition of relying on the primacy of the material itself. The work is a celebration of the radio as material and of the belief that minutiae and limited systems can yield rich results. But it is also a celebration of the rich, ragged, unstable thickness of analog sound in a world anesthetized by the crisp and clean precision of digital audio." He has since developed these techniques and incorporated them into a larger, more visually and sonically evocative world, with an emphasis on live performance, and the thrilling contingency and danger that such site- and time- specifically dependent work produces. Along with several current solo projects, he continues to work with like-minded musicians and sound artists, and recently completed a new project with Aidan Baker, who joined him in 2004 on a mini-tour of the Northeastern United States. Todd Merrell studied music composition and voice at Berklee College of Music, and with composer James Sellars of the Hartt School. His works have been performed by The New York Festival Of Song, Chicago A Capella, and double bassist Robert Black of Bang On A Can Allstars. Merrell has performed in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Hartford, and at such venues as Knitting Factory, Issue Project Room, Galapagos Art Space, Cake Shop, Hot House, WBEZ Chicago Public Radio, Berklee Performance Center, 119 Gallery, Real Art Ways, and Free 103point9’s Wave Farm. He has collaborated with BT, Aidan Baker, Duane Pitre, Casey Block, Lou Rossi, Patrick Jordan, Gary Higgins, Bunny Brains, Blaise Siwula, and Jake Bell, and appeared with Francisco Lopez, Joan La Barbara, Robert Dick, Ricardo Arias, Barbara Ess, Peggy Ahwesh, and Sybarite. Todd Merrell’s recent solo album ‘Neptune’ was released in February, 2006 on Dreamland Recordings, and he has recorded for Whirlybird and Transient Frequency. www.toddmerrell.com

For more information see:
http://www.free103point9.org/artists.php

RadioREVOLTEN opened a few days ago (Sept. 20) and continues gathering radio artists (including free103point9 Transmission Artist Anna Friz) and projects in Germany through Oct. 21.

The conference, "showcases installations, performances, and on-air projects as models of experimental radio cultures within a social context. The artistic works concern themselves primarily with the future of the medium of radio," says the web site. "The goal of RadioREVOLTEN is to develop models of a new artistic appropriation of the medium of radio, to present these within in the framework of the exhibition, and to test them within the programming of Radio Corax. The Relating Radio conference also offers a forum for theoretical and aesthetic contributions. Together, the exhibition and conference seek to provide the impulse to seriously rethink the medium of radio."

Friz's "You Are Far From Us: solo for 4 transmitters and 50+ receivers" takes place Oct. 3. Friz writes, "The radio of the present is filled with reports of the dead. Rather than dream again of the radio transmitting messages from those who have passed away, what communication might we be missing from those living around us? What nearly inaudible signals, transmitted in moments of intensity, crisis, or near death, might we hear if the radio was tuned to hear? What do people seek to transmit, in a moment between the intake of breath and the breath held, waiting, in tension? You Are Far From Us reflects the mortal dreams of radio, where union with others may be impossible, but where the radio could nonetheless have a potential for conscience and consciousness. This is a search for a poetics of radio, made of intimate sounds revealed, performed by a chorus of receivers." Her presentation is co-produced by free103point9. Friz gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

The Swiss group Blablabor (Reto Friedmann and Annette Schmucki) sound out the different qualities of radio receivers with the radio play "ungefähre" (approximate). "Each radio reproduces the aired information due to its own specific sound quality, thus the "ungefähre“ never sounds the same, but is always also a result of being rendered by differently sounding radios. Blablabor layout their live radio show like conducting an orchestra, in a way, announcing the next radio receiver to be highlighted, and thus introducing the issues (and philosophical notions) of accuracy, approximation, or relativity as well as tranformation and volatility to the compositional process." They are performing this tonight at the Museum for Applied Arts in Vienna.

SilenceRadio.org is a Brussels-based project which offersseasonal issues of ten new audio pieces which intend to question the contemporary mediascape through the field of creative radio. From rough footage to electro-acoustic composition, from field-recording to archive, from noise to silence, from documentary to drama, from politics to poetry, SilenceRadio.org stands as an eclectic and colourful audio bazaar with an accent of manifesto for something we would call the 'art of listening'.

For their next issue, they are launching an open call for remixes of SilenceRadio.org. If you're interested in making a remix out of the existing pieces, feel free to contact them at courrier @ silenceradio.org. We'll publish the best remixes in the next issue. Deadline: 1 December.