a further development of a recent site-specific transmission performance, transfiguration for winter light and folded time (ground wave, sky wave) was aired on Sunday, 24 July, 16:00 – 17:00pm Portugese time, within the programming of Radio Real, an experimental radio project exploring various themes and strategies around the concept of "Neighbourhood radio", located in Rua do Poço dos Negros in Lisbon, and broadcasting from the 15th to the 24th July, 2011.
This hour long mix of the original live piece transfiguration for winter light and folded time set the initial phonographic recorded audio of my walk through the city of Dunedin on one side of a stereo mix, and the transmitted audio recorded in the gallery Rice & Beans, with radiophonic noise and responsive improvisational input from other musicians, on the other. The two durational streams of these parallel recordings meet at the end in a crossed over moment, to flip - and potentially loop - back, creating something akin to a 'radio moebius strip'.
With relevance to Radio Real's stated curatorial aims - "Neighbourhood radio explores notions of distance, involvement, community" - radio cegeste's use of mini FM in the context of the initial transmission creates "neighbourhood radio" inside an artist-run, not-for-profit gallery space, in which all the listeners to the transmission were also participants in the musical soundscape around it, re-defining the notion of the transmitter-receiver relationship and indeed the active "neighbourliness" of the white-cube space in the process.
The title transfiguration for winter light and folded time (ground wave, sky wave) refers to the project's ongoing evolution through various forms of transmission, both locally bounded (based in a particular social, topographical and electromagnetic "neighbourhood") and internationally streamed (albeit from another localised sphere of transmission and community). It was a fascinating opportunity to speculate on the various paths which the transmission of radio waves can take from a transmitting aerial to a receiving aerial, in particular the line-of-sight ground wave (or tropospheric wave) which occurs with the direct propagation of radio waves between antennas that are visible to each other, and sky waves (or ionospheric waves) which are reflected by the ionosphere and enable long-distance transmissions to be made.
Radio Real, a project by Radio Zero was locally broadcast in FM and streamed worldwide through the Radio Zero webstream, as the station's response to an invitation to be part of Ghost, a five tier residency giving improvisational space and time to various types of artistic communities. As they say on their site (and again, in confluence with my stated aims) here:
"GHOST is a cycle of five invitations made to collective projects which, in the context of an artistic residency, occupy the space of the Atelier Real in order to explore different ways of presenting their works and freely programming this experiment for two weeks. Their name is an acronym of [Guest + Host] and it is in the dynamics suggested by this relationship between opposites that we lay the basis for a working experiment; in this case, between the one who is receiving and the one who is received."
