FREQUENCitY

Radio, at its best, projects the life of a city. It communicates the passions and concerns of its inhabitants. Radio is fully switched on when it is a social tool. When it builds culture. It does this by engaging the community in a dynamic collaborative where the listener is active participant.

There must be a distinction made between commercial radio and public or community radio. While the latter is vital as a vehicle for public discourse, commercial radio, exists primarily for the trade of goods. Public access radio has the potential to be an organic tool of a community and it is here where my interest lies.

Integral to radio and something that often separates it from other art-making practices, is its multiplicity of voices. This capability and the fact that radio exists alongside our daily activities gives it unique potential as a tool for development, dynamic art production and dissemination. People listen to radio at work, while preparing meals, lying in bed, working in the garden, driving in cars.

This project asks artists to consider the notion that radio be a conduit that transmits the movement of a city, its ebb and flow, its noise and its melody, its church bells, speeches, transmissions, barking dogs, parades. In this series, artists will use city sounds to create and perform works that reflect a social reality.

Cage and Schaefer have asked us to think of these sounds as part of an ongoing composition. With this in mind, I move through the city differently, ears open wide, not always searching, but always discovering. The ringing bell of a shovel scraping concrete, the haunting sound of a siren in the distance.

How do these sounds feel projected back to us through the radio? What does this information tell us of ourselves?

Contemporary online radio projects are creating new spaces for collaboration and network building and for the first time in radio's history - visual content. For FREQUENCitY, artists will develop their work within this new model of online broadcasting where content continues to expand and new systems of interaction and production are developed.

FREQUENCitY will archive these works created for broadcast and will feature an ongoing stream of archived files that listeners can contribute to.