Free103point9 and Transmission Arts

“the guts of radio are not sounds, but rather the gaps between sending and receiving, between transmission and audition, or however you want to name this space.”

Soundclash, airwaves’ tapestries, aural networks. Transmission art is an artistic movement interested in exploring transmission “as a medium for creative expression”. Transmission artists navigate the unnamed space “between transmission and audition”, the ephemeral territory where the medium becomes the message. Transmission art attempts to make airtime available to those whose vision of the medium does not fit commercial venues, to those who imagine airwaves as raw material for something more than ads.

If John Cage, Jean Tinguely and Nam June Paik’s work can be regarded as “landmarks” of transmission art, a more recent chapter of this history cannot ignore free103point9‘s transmission art projects and online radio.

Performing transmission

Since it emerged as a microcasting artist collective in 1997, free103point9 has consistently pursued the legitimization and promotion of transmission arts. Today, the clandestine collective is a non-profit arts organization whose many ventures are: Project space -a gallery in Brooklyn, New York-, Wavefarm -a research centre currently under construction-, a radio lab, an on-line radio and a distribution label. Aware of the need of defining transmission arts, free103point9 has painstakingly theorized and documented the history and forms of transmission art: radio and video art, performance, installation, light sculptures. Textbooks and a growing on-line archive of transmission artworks are two ways in which free103point9 consolidates the notion of transmission arts.

The term “transmission” has often been associated with linearity and passive reception. In Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s cybernetic communication model, transmission is the transference of information from sender to receiver. Despite its obvious debt to the cybernetic model, transmission art subverts this linearity by focusing on reception conditions. This is the goal of free103point’s transmission projects (Tune (In)), Radio 4X4 and Microradio Sound Walk), in which artists “re-examine conventional ideas about sound performance and the audience experience”. These “conventional ideas” are basically the assumption that performance is “immediate” and that audiences are “passive”.

In Tune(In))), for example, both assumptions are challenged by proposing listeners to experience audio performances broadcasted live in individual radio headsets. These “mediated” performances compete with other signals in the FM dial, and their transmission is not complete until the listener agrees to break with the silence and puts the headsets on. The silence of the room contributes with the audience’s self-awareness of its “role” in the performance.

A variation of this theme is found in Radio 4X4, a collaborative radio transmission performance that proposes a “walking tour of local airwaves”. The project, presented at the Center for Contemporary Art Laznia in Gdansk in May 2005, consists in four simultaneous audio performances transmitted separately throughout the room. The viewer/listener collaborates in the performance by moving within the room, mixing the signals with each step.

Premiered in 2004 at free103point9 gallery, Microradio Sound Walk is a walking tour and sonic piece that invites viewers to move among station transmitters situated along a path. Signals shift with each participant’s move, resulting in a soundscape that reveals the complexity of local airwaves. As in the case of Tune (In))) and Radio 4X4, the participant becomes extension and medium of the sonic experience.

Creating community

If performing transmission is the first step towards new uses of airwaves and sound, free103poin9 on-line radio is crucial to bridge the gap between artists and public. The possibility of transmitting on-line extends the goal of artistic experimentation by opening up a space to communicate creativity beyond the monopoly of commercial stations. The creation of the on-line radio is a symptom of free103point’s shift from civil disobedience to alternative action under the umbrella of “high profile nonprofit media arts organization.”

The most promising aspect of free103point9 is precisely this determination that prompts the organization to engage larger audiences in the debate and imagination of richer and more interesting forms of radio, to encourage artists to explore the unnamed territory between “transmission and audiences”, and, finally, to dare to make art out of the “guts of radio”.

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Gregory Whitehead, as cited in Allie Alvarado, “An Interview with Gregory Whitehead.”
free103point9 is now Wavefarm.