Magz Hall Introduction to Reinventing The Dial Sympoium

This symposium aims to take a leap into the huge but reflective pool of current experimental and radio arts practice and the theoretical, technological and aesthetic currents that inform it.
Todays event brings together radio academics, practioners and artists whose own distinctive approaches to experimental radio demonstrate the manifold ways in which the convergence of new media technologies are simultaneously defining and problematising the notion of 'Radio Art'.

Richard Thorn raised the pertinent question back in 1996 “Why should it be necessary to raise the issue of 'experimental radio', for any other reason than that experiment is singly absent from listeners' experience ?”

I would like you to consider today if the task of the radio artist is to liberate the technologies of communication from the stultifying codes of conventions that dominate the radio medium and render the very idea of experimentation anathema.

Has the ever growing prevailance of new media, mobile technologies and increased spectrum availability, via micro radio and community, radio opened a new terrain for the kinds of experimental practice long suppressed by mainstream broadcasting channels, or will this dispersed internet radio landscape be once more recolonised by "the professionals” as the internet becomes increasingly commercialized and policed.

The speakers gathered here have devised their own strategies towards this task and I hope this will prove an informative exchange of ideas between all attending. It’s great that so many of you have made it from some distance today. As well as students and staff who have attended form the arts, media and music departments.

“Radio Art” has grown as an international practice, each cluster of radio art activity developing its own distinctive practice according to the diversity of economic, social and artistic circumstances from which they've emerged. I hope that todays interchange will allow us to engage with Radio Art as an active set of aesthetic strategies enmeshing the local and global.

So this seems the perfect moment to hand over to our keynote speaker Dr Kersten Glandien who will be raising a central question and one I also ask you to consider now - So this seems the perfect moment to hand over to our keynote speaker Dr Kersten Glandien who will be raising a central question and one I also ask you to consider now - has the gap between sound related disciplines closed?