[spectre] CFP: Radio as art (Bremen, 5-7 Jun 14)

[Andreas Broeckmann]

From: Sarah Rothe <kontakt.studienzentrum at weserburg.de>
Date: Jan 6, 2014
Subject: CFP: Radio as art (Bremen, 5-7 Jun 14)

Bremen, June 5 - 07, 2014
Deadline: Feb 14, 2014

Call for Papers

International Conference
“RADIO AS ART – Concepts, Spaces, Practices: Radio Art between Media 
Reality and Art Reception”
  In the age of Twitter and online communication, the perspective on 
radio’s role as a popular broadcasting medium – and a medium that has 
also served since the 1960s as a platform for artistic concepts – is 
changing. Acoustic signals, voice, sound, articulation, music and 
spatial networking are dispositifs of radiophonic transmission which – 
since Futurism and by way of Fluxus and Concrete (auditory) Poetry – 
have brought forth a great number of artistic practices. Up to and into 
the digital present in the visual arts, radio has been and is employed 
and explored as an apparatus-based structure as well as an (alternative) 
model for performance and perception. Whereas on the one hand 
aesthetical experiments with broadcasting technology triggered 
collective processes of exchange and cooperation internationally, on the 
other hand artists discovered radio as a means of disseminating artistic 
concepts, often also with subversive means and resistive subtexts.

At the same time, from the art-historical perspective, radiophonic art 
long occupied a peripheral position in the spectrum of ephemeral forms 
of expression. True, there was a wide diversity of radio art 
materializations in the form of interaction and installation contexts as 
well as the integration of the latter in performative processes and 
social discourses in which the recipients were given the opportunity to 
participate actively, for example in the Ligna artist group’s 
Radioballet of 2002. Yet the acoustic and radiophonic contributions 
eluded the – primarily visually based – knowledge parameters of 
art-historical methods which had been shaped for the most part by the 
study of pictures.

To what extent can the terms coined by post-structuralism and in the 
fields of media, theatre and curatorial studies contribute to 
deciphering the complexity of radiophonic art concepts and their 
response aesthetics? In what way does integration in exhibition contexts 
serve to restructure primarily dissemination-oriented radio art 
practices, and how do the constitutive components of radiophonic 
artworks change through these forms of documentary “arrest”? What 
geopolitical contexts animate artists – and animated them in the past – 
to work with radiophonic media? Do radio art projects participate in the 
formation of new forms of community (in the sense of a “Mit-Sein” 
[“being-with”] as defined by Jean-Luc Nancy)? And how is the abuse of 
radio art for propagandistic purposes and the impact of the same on a 
displaced radio public reflected artistically? What role does radio art 
play for the on-going transformation of aesthetic orders within the 
framework of a trans-media-oriented and (trans-) cultural global art 
development? For in the convergence of broadcast, reception, 
interaction, installation and exhibition, radio art points beyond the 
media definition of radio, which is always determined in part by 
politics and society. Within this context, radiophonically disseminated 
art forms bear a relationship to the interconnections between 
technology, voice, body and cultural and geopolitical formation likewise 
discussed in cultural and gender studies. Radio art concepts undermine 
the spatially regulated dispositifs of art reception and the related 
locations of the museum and the private reception context. Through the 
blurring of spatial boundaries with the public sphere, new horizons open 
and widen, horizons that address the collective, historically anticipate 
the concept of the network, and to an extent reconnect them with the 
local circumstances, as in the works of Marko Peljhan.

The sections of the conference will be devoted to various aspects of 
this spatial-media-based as well as socio-cultural and 
response-aesthetic framework. The first section will raise the question 
as to radio art’s various production, presentation and perception 
spaces. The second section will concentrate on theoretical concepts of 
an art-theoretical and cultural-studies-based approach to radio art. 
Network structures and cooperation models in artistic working processes 
will form the focus of the third section. In the fourth section, the 
political and societal foundations and influences of radio art will be 
discussed.

Throughout its sections, the international conference “RADIO AS ART – 
Spaces, Concepts, Practices: Radio Art between Media Reality and Art 
Reception” will link conceptual, recipient-response-related, 
conservatorial and sociocultural issues to matters of relevance to radio 
art’s mediation. Within a broadly defined reference framework, the 
results of the research project Radio Art: On the Development of a 
Medium between Aesthetics and Socio-Cultural Reception History will be 
put forth for discussion in a circle of international experts. 
Submissions from art historians, media scholars, art educators, 
curators, cultural studies specialists, ethnologists and artists are 
welcome.

Your short biography and abstract for a 20-minute lecture in English 
should not exceed 350 words.

Conference language: English
Deadline for abstracts: 14 Februrary 2014
Notification by: 1 March 2014

Contact: Jee-Hae Kim / Franziska Rauh / Sarah Rothe 
kontakt.studienzentrum at weserburg.de

Conference location: Bremen, University Guest House, Auf dem Teerhof 58

Presented by: Centre for Artists’ Publications, Bremen / Universität 
Bremen / Universität zu Köln
Sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation

Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: Radio as art (Bremen, 5-7 Jun 14). In: H-ArtHist, Jan 6, 2014. 
<http://arthist.net/archive/6672>.

____________________________________________________________________

H-ARTHIST
Humanities-Net Discussion List for Art History
E-Mail-Liste für Kunstgeschichte im H-Net

Editorial Board Contact Address / Fragen an die Redaktion:
hah-redaktion at h-net.msu.edu

Submit contributions to / Beiträge bitte an:
http://arthist.net/mailing-list/mode=contribute

Homepage: http://arthist.net

  --