Listen Up! Radio Art in the USA
It is with great pleasure with a note of sadness that I announce the publication of Listen Up!, a landmark collection of artists’ writings on radio art production in the U.S.A. This book, edited by Anne Thurmann-Jajes and Regine Beyer, is the first to explore the history and development of radio art in the United States as a distinct sound art practice. My contribution, co-authored with Lou Mallozzi, sound artist, SAIC professor, and co-founder of Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) in Chicago, is titled “Opening the Ether: Radio Art at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago.”
As co-founders of ESS in the 1980s, Lou and I have been involved in shaping radio art both locally and nationally, and I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to reflect on our shared history in this context.
I’m deeply grateful and honored to have been invited by the book’s editors, Regine Beyer and Anne Thurmann-Jajes, and to be included among so many history-making artists who helped define this lesser-known yet important field of media art. The note of sadness stems from the fact that two of my personal mentors, Jacki Apple and Helen Thorington, are no longer alive to celebrate this achievement. They were visionary leaders who supported and contributed to our efforts. For those of us who remain, this book serves as a posthumous tribute to their vision, leadership, commitment, and enduring legacy. It is also important to thank the Centre for Artists Publication at the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art in Bremen, Germany for its interest and invaluable support.
The book is divided into two sections, “Current Essays” and “Historical Texts.” Jacki’s and Helen’s writings are included both sections. While this book’s focus is on the United States many essays provide an international connection and relevance. For example, Sabine Breitsameter’s contribution, “Reconfiguring the Apparatus Radio Art: in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Ireland,” makes the case for radio art as inherently a crossover of spatial and art genre borders. The preface and introduction by Beyer and Thurmann-Jajes place this history in an international context as well, with respect to the history of German and Austrian radio, with its interest and support of thought-provoking art production by Americans and Europeans.
Radio was of a period when it deeply registered in everyday life from the 20th Century ending in the early 21st Century. In her essay Jacki Apple cites the irony that the radio art no longer “lives” on the radio. For its audible existence radio art carries on in storage, on CDs, on websites, and in the archives of university libraries. I should add, for “Sounds From Chicago,” also in the Creative Audio Archive at Experimental Sound Studio. But is it really over, a past practice?
Happily, my many friends and creative collaborators, Anna Friz, Jeff Kolar, and Peter Courtemanche are still making radio as art for performance and broadcast transmission. Elizabeth Zimmermann is still directing the weekly program “Sound Art: Kunst zum Hören,” in Vienna, formerly “Kunstradio-Radiokunst.” I’ve been honored to created radio works with their support. And in New York, I want to call out the wonderful efforts of the Wave Farm. They are contributors to Listen Up! and continually offering artists’ residencies, with live online, terrestrial, and physical study facilities for transmission arts. In the department of Art and Technology / Sound Practices, where I teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I am with colleagues, faculty and students, who are using and making art with radio technologies. These are indicators that radio art, or shall we say, to be more inclusive of the diverse range of technical and creative possibilities, transmission arts, are alive while perhaps more “off the grid” of corporate controlled media and public broadcast networks.
