Galen-Joseph Hunter & Tom Roe of free103point9

free103point9 is a nonprofit media arts organization focused on establishing and cultivating the genre Transmission Arts by promoting artists who explore ideas around transmission as a medium for creative expression. These investigations include practices in AM and FM radio, Citizen's Band, walkie-talkie, generative sound, and other broad and microcasting technologies utilizing the transmission spectrum. free103point9 programs include a performance/exhibition/transmission series; an online radio station; a distribution label; an education initiative; and, most recently, an artist-in-residency program and a forthcoming study center and archive at free103point9 Wave Farm, located on 30 idyllic acres in Acra, NY, 120 miles north of New York City.

Founded in 1997 in Brooklyn as a microcasting artist’s collective, free103point9's goals during its formative years were focused on the microradio movement’s fight for public access to the airwaves. free103point9's mobile operations made airtime available to community voices, local bands, and, most significantly, to a group of under-served artists shaping conceptual works specifically for radio transmission. Galen Joseph-Hunter is free103point9’s Executive Director and Tom Roe is the organization’s Program Director.

RANTS

Hurricane radio:
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, communication policy in the United States was again exposed as woefully inadequate. Civil servants in the city struggled with ineffective communication systems, just like the firefighters in the World Trade Center four years earlier. And since the local AM and FM airwaves were deregulated to absentee corporate owners long ago, there wasn’t much information being shared on the best medium available for disaster communication. “Pirates” quickly set up “Radio Algiers,” and other stations in the flooded city to help recovery efforts. Impressively, the folks at Prometheus Radio Project and Austin Airwaves actually got the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to grant them a temporary license to set up a low-power radio station in the Houston Astrodome, so the hurricane evacuees could communicate, share stories, and disperse information. The local officials and Federal Emergency Management Agency representatives at the Astrodome were not very interested in providing the evacuees with communication services, though. First, officials demanded they get 10,000 radios with headphones, so the people who didn't want to hear the radio station wouldn’t have to. Radio activists successfully got 10,000 radios donated. Then officials said, “No, we can't spare the electricity.” So the radio folks got batteries to run the transmitter. Eventually, officials admitted they were concerned evacuees might listen to “gangster rap” on the radios. So the radio activists applied for another permit from the FCC, this time to set up a station outside the Astrodome, but with a strong enough signal to penetrate the stadium. The six-watt Katrina Aftermath Media Project (KAMP 95.3-FM) was only on the air for a few days, since red tape delayed the project for so long.
www.prometheusradio.org/

Damian Catera, Tom Roe, Radio Ruido, & Tianna Kennedy Photo of a free103point9 4x4 collaborative radio transmission performance (2005) at Center for Contemporary Art Laznia Gdansk, Poland

US government pirate radio stations:
The first thing the US government does when it invades a country is set up pirate radio stations. While the FCC claims that individuals setting up transmitters in this country might bring down airplanes or disrupt capitalism, the US has no such worries in Iraq or Afghanistan. Or even in countries it hasn’t invaded lately, such as Cuba, which continues to complain about the illegal US propaganda broadcasts targeting the island.

Jack FM:
The latest format to sweep the corporate radio world eliminates on-air personalities and is supposed to sound like your iPod on shuffle. Radio should be local and reflective of its community, not programmed from afar with some short universal playlist. But that’s what Bill Clinton’s 1996 Telecommunications Act has wrought. In New York City, the new Jack format knocked the oldies station from every hardware store in town, and the ratings plummeted almost by half. Hopefully, actual DJs will be able to play “Hit the Road Jack” again soon.

RAVES

Essays on Radio: Can I have 2 minutes of your time?
This CD and DVD compilation released by Crónica assembles two-minute works utilizing or commenting on the culture of radio. The focus emerges from a fascination with the first broadcast medium and the recognition that sound experimentation was able to forge beyond the restrictive scope of music through radio. Sadly, the contents on the CD aren’t the sort of experimentation you hear much on the airwaves today. Highlights include dial-turning adventures such as Gilles Aubry’s “Ridiot;” political speech turned on itself from Tilia and Duran Vazquez; and Akos Garai’s closing Scanner-like soundscape; as well as minimalist works from John Hudak, o.blaat, Christine Fowler, and Stephen Mathieu. The DVD also includes an international cast, with videos from Isabel Abreu & Rita Barbosa, Paulo Raposo, Sumugan Sivanesan, Marius Watz, and many others.
www.cronicaelectronica.org

Negativeland The Booper (2005) Mixed media Courtesy the artists and Gigantic Art Space, New York

Negativeland’s Negativlandland at Gigantic Art Space:
For 25 years, members of Negativland have produced works sharply critical of corporate culture, copyright restrictions, and mass media proliferation. Their recent exhibition at Gigantic Art Space in New York showed examples of their “culture jamming” processes: video, audio, and photographic and sculptural artifacts. A personal favorite, The Booper, is an interactive installation featuring one of Negativland’s homemade electronic noise devices. The Weatherman, its creator, is seen on a small LCD monitor; he explains how to operate The Booper via a rotary phone used by the viewer/listener.

Joe Milutis talk on airspace at Location One:
On October 19, 2005 at the nonprofit gallery Location One in New York, Joe Milutis gave a scholarly and entertaining talk called “Airspace” on the occasion of his forthcoming book Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything (University of Minnesota Press, February 2006). In Ether, Milutis maps a historical connection between “the origins of electrical science with alchemical lore, 19th-century industrialism with yogic science,” and “links the ether to phenomena such as radio noise, space travel, avant-garde film, and the rise of the Internet.” As a means to demonstrate radio wave radiance, audience members and online listeners were treated to an interlude of “radiophonic chamber music,” a performance using microradio transmitters and radio receivers.

free103point9 will present a project entitled On the Air at White Box in New York from November 2-5 as part of WHITE NOISE for the first PERFORMA05 Biennal.

For more information on free103point9, visit:
www.free103point9.org
http://05.performa-arts.org/artists/free103point9
http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=18796&page=1#35924