Mini-FM transmitter building workshop, part of the B.Y.O. BATTERY series.

On July 24 I hosted a mini FM transmitter building workshop for ten people at The Anteroom, an non-profit artist run space based in an ex Masonic Lodge in Port Chalmers, run by the media artist Charlotte Parallel. The workshop was part of a four-part series of D.I.Y creative technology and skill-sharing events Charlotte curated called 'BYO Battery’. You can read Charlotte talking about the series in an article in the Otago Daily Times HERE.  

This workshop's intention was to make transmission technologies accessible, with participants constructing their own simple hand made ultra low watt transmitter with which to narrowcast their own sounds.  Grounding this practical making within wider theoretical reflection and discussion of how DIY analogue technologies might inform our understanding of communications within the post-digital present, drawing on the histories of DIY radio making and free radio experiments in 1970s and 1980s Italian and Japanese media art and activist histories, we also discussed the use of transmission media for artistic and non-centralised cultural purposes. With participants coming from various artistic backgrounds, including dance, experimental music and film, as well as wider community participation, it was a stimulating day. True to the spirit of the series, everyone also brought along their own 9v power source. 

Dunedin winter DIY

DIY preamp building on the coldest night of the year... many thanks to electronics wunderkind Nigel Bunn for his inventive circuit bendings...

Mini-FM transmitter building at the Physics Room, rotate your state for Radio Kiosk

a Mini FM transmitter building workshop, hosted by The Physics Room Contemporary Art Space in Christchurch on the 5th of June 2006, with New Zealand media artist Adam Hyde at the helm, was organised to coincide with the making of a Mini FM radio station, Radio Kiosk, curated for a public art site in Central Christchurch by the collaborative media and sound art duo ((ethermap (Zita Joyce and Adam Willetts). 

Radio Kiosk, to which I contributed historic recordings of rotate your state, a long-lived experimental sound programme I hosted in its final years from 1998-2002 on student radio station RDU98:3FM, was a graceful conceptual reframing of various historic and contemporary broadcast radio experimental music programmes. 

It effectively became an appropriately formally partial, transient and fleeting archive of localised unknown NZ experimental radio practices, and a pointer toward strategies for the further elaboration of such histories. My rather anecdotal essay on Rotate for Radio Kiosk is republished below (as is a terrible washed-out pic of L, R: myself and fellow DJ K8 in the RDU studio, doing the show sometime in the mid-1990s):

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Rotate Your State 

Broadcast through the 1990s on rdu, 98.3fm, Christchurch Rotate Your State, as it was originally called, (before being shortened to the more casual, sentimental ‘rotate’ somewhere along the way, a gesture partly respectful of the baton-passing networks of underground radio tradition, partly a back-pat for the dearly loved haven of live-to-air sonic pondering it became), was a show that ran on Christchurch radio station rdu, spanning the 1990s with a bit of overflow into the 2000s, from 9-11 on Thursdays, and then, for the last two years, at the same time on Sundays. 

Two hours a week for over ten years is a lot of audio, and a temporal stretch one cannot hope to compress in a compilation like Radio Kiosk, but perhaps the tip of rotate’s sonic iceberg might at least be hinted at by the shows I have included here, which represent four of the show’s hosts, and include rotate’s idiosyncratic ads, pieces of radio art in themselves, which in their cyclic aural signposting perhaps best defined the show’s distinct, if interrelated, eras. Thus, instigator and patron saint .leyton’s taciturn layered vocals, post-industrial ambient reverb soundscape, and “heartbeat-with-carcrash” coda becomes K8’s recontextualised, giggle-inflected personal answering machine message to a friend, recorded while she was in the studio doing the show (“Hi, I’m at rotate and you’re not home, it’s a really good sesh’ if you’ve been listening…!”), which in turn becomes the rather more anonymous, strongly Stockhausen-indebted mash of vocals & static-between-stations which defined rotate’s final three years under my curatorship (then under the DJ name of a:version), all in their own way ‘showing not telling’ what the show was all about: ultimately, the pure creative and intellectual joy of mucking around with sound, of melting into flux all ideas of solid musical genre boundaries, as well as (often) the boundaries between the sonic storage artefact and the performative live event. 

 Because rotate was radio made by people who spent at least part of their everyday lives as artists (musicians, actors, curators, writers), it was also essentially both an excuse for us to listen to things we liked, and to find other, unusual things, to collect unlikely sonic objects and force them into even more unlikely and disorienting juxtapositions. So tapes found in op-shops, our favourite films re-envisaged as radio plays, and ancient records borrowed from the public library’s mouldering back-room stacks sat alongside favourites from record collections constantly being replenished and modified with treasured compilations ordered (often ‘blind’) during the frontier days of internet mail order lists. We navigated by our own logics but provided enough thematic clues for the curious. One example among many: in 1998, Oval’s Marcus Popp was in town (an appearance largely instigated by Radio Kiosk co-curator, ((ethermap’s Zita Joyce, in her then-role as rdu programme director), and to celebrate we dedicated a whole show to this glitch-pioneer’s music, finding that between two of us we had enough to fill a whole (rather minimal!) two hours. When one of our duo, K8, who was the support dj before Popp’s performance the next evening, informed him of this show he said with bemusement it was the first time he’d heard of such a pronounced event of ‘endurance radio’. 

rotate as a forum taught us much about radio as aural cultural research, of the value of the long history of radio and sound art and of sound’s intersection with other artforms, of the creative potential of unearthing the world as sonic material, as found scraps and jewels and fields of force and broken shards, of juxtaposing the sublime and the ridiculous, the bombastic and the minimal, the compelling and the superfluous. Such ‘serious play’ sustained our belief in broadcasting as an active, rather than a passive passtime. It infected us with its sense of dry humour, and charmed us with its cryptic artistry and studiously meticulous non-definition, becoming a kind of wallpaper music for those listeners who were, for whatever reason, also in a convivial state of mind to become obsessed with the detail of such curvaceous, chaotic sonic arabesques. 

While live to airs and interviews were more common in later years, we never let the show lapse into any kind of professionalism, believing strongly in the notion of student radio being akin to a kind of “on-air artist run space”. In this, we gave broadcast time, often live, to sound-makers, both locals and visitors, who shared our experimental aesthetic, and were unlikely to be heard elsewhere on the airwaves. More small scale DIY tricks in the studio could be as basic or quirky as panning rdu’s archaic soundboard’s speaker dial from left to right and back again at intervals, so that the sound would also travel as such on the receiving end, or indulging in the occasional live vocal experiment. We didn’t take rotate ‘seriously’, believing it utterly ephemeral, but it was simultaneously full to the brim with ‘serious music’, and we invested everything into it, as it became both mirror to and part of the everyday fabric of our lives. 

We perhaps knew, even at the time, that we could not easily have gained elsewhere what a few years at its helm taught us about how to listen with agency, and that the notion of djing as an intent and concentrated form of independent creative curiosity that we developed through rotate would stay with us in our various ways far into the future. We seldom broke its momentum with talk, wanting listeners to get completely lost, or else to ring up and talk to us, hoping to reconfigure the linear hegemonies of broadcast toward more of an experiential circuit, or more of a one-on-one communicative relationship. We always wondered who was out there listening, and hoped, that if there were indeed more participants in our experiment than merely us, that they were having as much fun as we were. 

 sally mcintyre, june 2006

'from Mini FM to Hacktivists : a guide to Art and Activism' and Mini FM building workshops led by Tetsuo Kogawa at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery

The Govett Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth's recently arrived curator of Contemporary Art, formerly NYC based art critic Mercedes Vicente, put together an exhibition entitled from Mini FM to Hacktivists: a Guide to Art and Activism as her first contribution to the gallery's programmes. 

Drawing somewhat on lines of thinking around pre-internet prehistories, in the way so wonderfully set out in Annmarie Chandler & Norie Neumark (eds)'
At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet, Vicente included New Zealand practitioners as part of this dialogue.

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From Mini-FM to Hacktivists: A Guide to Art and Activism

2005-12-10 until 2006-03-03

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

New Plymouth, New Zealand (Aotearoa)

 The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery is pleased to present From mini-FM to hacktivists: a guide to art and activism from 10 December to 3 March 2006. Curated by Mercedes Vicente this is her first exhibition as the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s new Curator, Contemporary Art. The artists featured include: Greg Bordowitz (US), Fiona Clark (NZ), Alannah Currie (NZ), John Di Stefano (NZ), Marcelo Expósito (SP), Annie Goldson (NZ), Adam Hyde (AMS/NZ), Zita Joyce (NZ), Tetsuo Kogawa (JP), LTTR (US), neuroTransmitter (US), Paper Tiger TV & Deep Dish TV (US), Oliver Ressler & David Thorne (AU/US), Martha Rosler (US), Allan Sekula (US), The Yes Men (US), 0100101110101101 (Eva and Franco Mattes) (IT)

Vicente says: “From mini-FM to hacktivists examines contemporary artistic and activist practices in the context of alternative media and provides the historical grounding for today’s internet collaborations. It illustrates a new paradigm of counter information in communications as well as in artistic practices.”

Three components make up the show including; installation works; an interactive media lab; and a programme of documentary screenings in the Gallery theatre. This exhibition presents the mini-FM project of Tetsuo Kogawa, founder of free radio in Japan in the early 80s, whose model has influenced media activists and artists such as the collective neurotransmitter and artists Adam Hyde and Zita Joyce. Representing the anti-globalisation movement is Allan Sekula’s Waiting for tear gas (white globe to black) 1999-2000, a photo reportage of the Seattle World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests. Martha Rosler revisits one of her most emblematic photomontage series Bringing the war home: house beautiful 1967-2005, which draws a parallel between the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. Marcelo Expósito’s video Radical Imagination (Carnivals of Resistance) 2004 documents the Reclaim of the streets movement which brought commercial life to a standstill in London in 1999.

Taking the form of guerrilla cybertactics the collectives The Yes Men and 0100101110101101.org clone news and spoof websites creating a great deal of confusion and succeeding in exposing the effects and ideologies behind global corporations. Fiona Clark uses photography as a political tool to fight community issues. Her series Arial views 1980, presented for the first time in a Gallery context, were used by local Te Atiawa Iwi in a court case against the destructive waste generated by an expanding Taranaki energy industry.

The media lab includes a selection of recent video productions by Paper Tiger TV and Deep Dish TV who have been providing shows for public access TV via cable and satellite in the US since the 80s. An extensive programme of documentary films will feature works by Annie Goldson, John Di Stefano, Greg Bordowitz, LTTR, Leon Narbey, among others, whose strong social and political commitment as a natural progression of their own politics introduce public awareness and change. Vicente has recently returned from New York after opening her show "If it’s too bad to be true, it could be disinformation". This exhibition has received reviews in both The New York Times and ArtForum and will travel to the Blackwood Gallery in The University of Toronto at Mississauga, Canada from 4 January to 28 February 2006.  

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I reviewed the show for Flash Art International, although the link to this is no longer online.

Public programmes included a weekend of workshops by Japanese Mini FM pioneer, philosopher and radio artist, Tetsuo Kogawa. The ADA network archived a page with some information and photos of the workshop HERE, and I’ve also used one above (credit to Stella Brennan). 

On a personal note, I built the transmitter which would eventually be used as a core component in the radio cegeste project in these workshops, and am so very grateful to Tetsuo for both his generosity of knowledge and his facilitative role in starting me on this line of praxis.

Here is the original writeup for the workshops:

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BEGINNERS WORKSHOP FOR ADULTS

Saturday February 4^th, 1-4pm

Tetsuo Kogawa will introduce this workshop with a lecture on the mini-FM movement, and the means and objectives of "hacktivism" in electronic technology, providing a projection on the history and uses of mini-FM.

After the lecture, he will conduct a workshop for adults (10 people maximum) on how to build a simple mini-FM transmitter. Later performing with the transmitter for 30 minutes showing the interesting characters of airwaves and demonstrating the possibilities of transmitters as an art form. Participants will experience how to broadcast themselves with their newly-built transmitters.

This workshop is free but requires pre-registration due to limited space. To register and further details please phone 06 759 6060 or emailgovettinfo@govettbrewster.com .

ADVANCED WORKSHOP

Sunday February 5^th, 3:30-6:30pm

Following the beginners workshop this advanced workshop (10 participants maximum) will deconstruct a simple transmitter and will transform the pre-existing simple transmitter into a more powerful radio and a TV transmitter. The advanced participants will learn how to make a power meter, a booster and an antenna.Tetsuo will set up a FM radio station for the community and a micro TV station for indoor video experiments in the studio where the workshop will take place and will demonstrate the multiple possibilities of these transmitters.

This workshop is free but requires pre-registration due to limited space. To register and for further details please phone 06 759 6060 or emailgovettinfo@govettbrewster.com.

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RADIOART PARTY and PHONE INTERVIEWS

Sunday February 5^th, 6:30-9.30pm

After the workshop there will be a radio party open to all workshop participants and general audience that will take place in one of the galleries. Tetsuo will set up one or two temporary micro radio stations in this gallery (every participant will have their own station if there is enough free frequency space) and will be open to the public participation. There will be various radio programs and radio art performance shows. Visual, sound and dj artists are invited and encouraged to participate.

Towards the end of the radio party, he will conduct live phone interviews to media activists such as DeeDee Halleck (founder of Paper Tiger TV, US), Franco Berardi aka. Bifo (founder of Radio Alicia in Bologna, IT), Peter Wilson aka. Hakim Bay (US), Elisabeth Zimmermann (Director of Kunstradio, Vienna), and Tonic Train (Sara Washington, co-founder of Resonance FM, London, and Kunut Aufermann). Tonic Train will have a sound performance. Other participants to be confirmed.

These phone interviews will be broadcasted live in the Gallery by the newly set-up transmitters and possibly streamed in the internet. Adam Hyde (NZ/NL) will join to the radio party with live streaming from Amsterdam. A PA system and video projector will feature some of these live interviews in the Gallery.