ELECTRIC OP - Exhibition Catalogue - Buffalo AKG Art Museum
One of the most popular artistic styles of the twentieth century, Op art transformed European geometric abstraction into a global phenomenon in the mid-1960s, when its disorienting patterns and illusions, rendered with machine-like precision, became icons of the futuristic Space Age. Although it became a short-lived fad, many museums have reintroduced Op over the last fifteen years to audiences who enthusiastically embrace it as a reflection of contemporary life. Emerging at precisely the same time as mainstream video technologies and the modern digital computer, Op helped shape the aesthetics of electronic media, becoming the first artistic movement of the Information Age.
This bilingual catalogue (English and French), which accompanies an international traveling exhibition organized by the Buffalo AKG and the Musée d’arts de Nantes, features plates of 123 artworks by 88 international artists and collectives from the 1960s to the present (including Victor Vasarely, Vera Molnar, Lillian Schwartz, JODI, Ryoji Ikeda and Cory Arcangel) and offers a scholarly re-evaluation of the legacy of abstraction and the surprisingly intertwined histories of contemporary and digital art.
Abi Bliss wrote in The Wire:
"Radio Revolten captures the exhausting intensity of the world’s largest festival of radio art”
"Radio Revolten contains much to inspire."
Festival participants include: Gregory Whitehead, Anna Friz, Willem de Ridder, Chris Cutler, Dinahbird, Andrea-Jane Cornell, Aki Onda, Tom Roe, Mark Vernon, Kristen Roos, Steve Bates, Celine Bernard & Anna Raimondo, Resonance Radio Orchestra, Felix Kubin, Mary Stark, Caroline Kraabel, Udo Noll, Hartmut Geerken & Famoudou Don Moye and Julia Drouhin +More…
Radio Revolten: 30 Days Of Radio Art edited by Knut Aufermann, Helen Hahmann, Sarah Washington & Ralf Wendt
The GRIDS series consists of four mobile commissioned radio broadcasts at four different Chicago geographical locations. The transmissions occurred at either working or now defunct electrical production or distribution centers. Using a low-power FM transmitter - the Audio Relay Unit - that can be powered by solar panels, the broadcasts specifically addressed how energy is produced, distributed, and consumed in the event of radio broadcast. Radius has previously supported and broadcast audio work that makes inaudible energy fields audible. GRIDS continues to investigate the sonic qualities of electromagnetic energy and specific sites that produce this energy.
Artists:
Radius commissioned four artists to create audio works for broadcast that point to issues of energy propagation in the event of radio transmission.
Radius Grids
Half Letter Press (risograph)
Radio Territories
The legacy of radio and the arts has spawned forms of radical culture, from early Modernist notions of the “Wireless Imagination” and its subsequent vernacular tongues to Acoustic Ecology’s call for “Radical Radio” based on removing the DJ, transmission and broadcast media upsets and redistributes understandings of place, corporeality, social exchange, and the politics of information. Such instances of radicality find their current expression in radio networking and streaming, which seek to counter or supplement forms of public broadcasting through creating unique forms of collectivity. In response to these current initiatives, Radio Territories seeks to open the book on radio’s historical, medial, and aesthetical status.
Critical and creative essays by historians, media theorists, and radio producers, including Steve Goodman, Heidi Grundmann, Douglas Kahn, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, and Ellen Waterman, are coupled with artistic and activist projects, from such practitioners as Anna Friz, LIGNA, and additional contributions by Kabir Carter, Sophie Gosselin/apo33, Erik Granly Jensen, Brandon LaBelle, Sophea Lerner, elpueblodechina a.k.a. Alejandra Pérez Núnez, Kate Sieper, James Sey, neuroTransmitter, Marie Wennersten / SR c, and Achim Wollscheid. With audio works by apo33, Joe Banks, Steve Bradley, John Hudak & Joe Resinsel, elpueblodechina, Anna Friz, Jason Kahn, Kode9, Kristen Roos / Jackson 2Bears, SR c, Ellen Waterman, and James Sey / James Webb.
Islands of Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada
In the first book published on the subject, Islands of Resistance gives you a view from the crowsnest of the phenomenon of pirate radio in Canada. Here is a collection of seventeen activist manifestos, artistic treatises of intent, historical essays on the development of radio and its regulatory bodies, sociological examination of pirate radio's application in new social movements, and personal anecdotes.
Just as the new media ostenibly renders the old obsolete, Islands of Resistance unveils the existance of a thriving clandestine counterculture. An invaluable addition to an unscrutinized subject in Canadian media studies, Islands of Resistance appeals to the anarchist, anti–authoritarian impulses in all of us.