Background:

Artists of the early 20th Century avant garde, in their poetic manifestoes and utopian texts, sought to understand radio, with all its potentials and distortions, as a free and universal space of wireless communication. Radio, as the most accessible of modern media, has continued to hold a fascination for artists, writers and composers, especially those concerned with the social and cultural impact of new communication technologies. In an era of intensive corporate globalization, an alternative kind of globalization must be considered: that of communities and artists communicating across borders with the intent not to dominate or extract profit, but to share information, reaffirm community, question the status quo, present alternative views, and continually experiment with the medium. The project:

On the occasion of the ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 2002 and its on site-on line project OPEN AIR - A RADIOTOPIA, KUNSTRADIO offered to organise a networked on air-on line radio-art-part for the RADIOTOPIA -project.

Around a 6 hour live LONG NIGHT OF RADIO ART produced by Kunstradio on Sept 10th/11th, a network of international nodes produce their own live events while others (artistsgroups, radiostations and individual artists) deliver prerecorded projects and contributions into the network.

RADIOTOPIA - on air - on line has called for a strong vocal component, as well as soundscapes urban, rural, political, and personal, in order to transmit a sense of the particular among the many diverse cultural contexts that will be included.

The project's use of communications media follows the exchange-based traditions of mail art, telephone music, earlier collaborative on air-on line-radio-art projects as well as the strategies of contemporary "acoustonauts" who link old media such as Shortwave, Mediumwave, VHF, Mini FM etc. with the Internet.

The website:

This website, aside from being the archive of the submissions to the radio-art project RADIOTOPIA, is the site of live streams from several network nodes, including the stream and webcam from Kunstradio's Long Nigth of RADIO ART NIGHT on Sept 10th/11th 2002.

It is the site of the documentation of the RADIOTOPIA radio-art project as a whole.

Project-Website:
Sandra Wintner FirstFloor,
Matthias Strohmaier www.avenir.at

Project director:
Elisabeth Zimmermann, Ö1 Kunstradio