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?
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Friday, October 30, 2009
Friday, October 9, 2009
Dr Andy Birtwistle Paper Abstract
TITLE: DISORGANISING ORGANISED SOUND: THE SILENT MODERNITY OF WALTER RUTTMAN’S 'WEEKEND'
“It is not a question of a new style or anything like that, but rather of producing a variety of possibilities of expression for all the known arts...” Walter Ruttmann, 1919.
“Since the appearance of the wireless, everyone has predicted... the rise of a truly radiophonic literature and dramatic art.” Paul Deharme, Proposition for a Radiophonic Art, 1928
In 1930, the filmmaker Walter Ruttmann produced a 12 minute sound composition documenting a weekend in the lives of his fellow Berliners. Broadcast by Berlin radio, and created using Triergon optical film sound technology, 'Weekend' has been described both as radiophonic art, and as 'cinema for the ears'. Ruttmann’s first and only piece for radio is celebrated as one of the first electroacoustic compositions, its ‘musical’ organisation of wordly sounds prefiguring the work of Edgard Varese and John Cage. However, what connects these artists together, beyond the electroacoustic dynamic of their praxis, was a shared interest in the potential of film sound technology to create a new art of organised sound.
This paper examines the ways in which Ruttmann’s deployment of filmic techniques within a radiophonic context radically challenges the differentiation of art forms and mediums that has been seen to define modernism - and which continues to inform the work of contemporary artists working in radio art, such as Gregory Whitehead. By situating 'Weekend' within the context of Ruttmann’s work in film, the paper aims to explore the composition’s radical intermediality, examining how the relationship it forges between cinema and radio might be understood within in a history of radical modernism.
Andy Birtwistle is an art historian, sound artist and filmmaker, and is currently Principal Lecturer in the Department of Media at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. He originally trained as a filmmaker, but in recent years his research interest in film sound has resulted in the production of audio compositions that have been broadcast and exhibited internationally. His production work in this area draws on contemporary critical theory to explore art historical issues of modernism through creative production in sound and moving image. Recent work in this area includes sound installations, live performance and radio broadcasts. His video work has been screened in galleries and on television in the UK, and at international and domestic film festivals.
“It is not a question of a new style or anything like that, but rather of producing a variety of possibilities of expression for all the known arts...” Walter Ruttmann, 1919.
“Since the appearance of the wireless, everyone has predicted... the rise of a truly radiophonic literature and dramatic art.” Paul Deharme, Proposition for a Radiophonic Art, 1928
In 1930, the filmmaker Walter Ruttmann produced a 12 minute sound composition documenting a weekend in the lives of his fellow Berliners. Broadcast by Berlin radio, and created using Triergon optical film sound technology, 'Weekend' has been described both as radiophonic art, and as 'cinema for the ears'. Ruttmann’s first and only piece for radio is celebrated as one of the first electroacoustic compositions, its ‘musical’ organisation of wordly sounds prefiguring the work of Edgard Varese and John Cage. However, what connects these artists together, beyond the electroacoustic dynamic of their praxis, was a shared interest in the potential of film sound technology to create a new art of organised sound.
This paper examines the ways in which Ruttmann’s deployment of filmic techniques within a radiophonic context radically challenges the differentiation of art forms and mediums that has been seen to define modernism - and which continues to inform the work of contemporary artists working in radio art, such as Gregory Whitehead. By situating 'Weekend' within the context of Ruttmann’s work in film, the paper aims to explore the composition’s radical intermediality, examining how the relationship it forges between cinema and radio might be understood within in a history of radical modernism.
Andy Birtwistle is an art historian, sound artist and filmmaker, and is currently Principal Lecturer in the Department of Media at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. He originally trained as a filmmaker, but in recent years his research interest in film sound has resulted in the production of audio compositions that have been broadcast and exhibited internationally. His production work in this area draws on contemporary critical theory to explore art historical issues of modernism through creative production in sound and moving image. Recent work in this area includes sound installations, live performance and radio broadcasts. His video work has been screened in galleries and on television in the UK, and at international and domestic film festivals.
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