Mission Statement
To support, promote and preserve innovative audio culture in NZ
The Audio Foundation is a peer-based facilitative organisation dedicated to New Zealand sound culture.
Our purpose is to provide support to a nation-wide network of distributed practitioners whose work involves an exploratory approach to sound.
Firstly, by acting as an incubator, initiating events, workshops, projects and networking opportunities which maximise potential for artistic development within this culture.
Secondly, by acting as an archival resource, providing a framework for digital preservation of historic and contemporary audio recordings, and instigating associated research into current and historical experimental music and audio culture within New Zealand.
These aims are in the interests of contextualising current audio art and experimental music's place and possibilities, both within a specifically New Zealand (art-) historical context, and in relation to parallel cultural narratives elsewhere.
We are unique in our focus on the peripheral, the cross-genre and the emergent, foregrounding artists and practices which, both then and now, often fall into the slippery territory between categorisational and disciplinary distinctions.
In our work, we hope to raise awareness and appreciation of the extraordinarily rich living history of innovative experimental music and sound work that has long marked our small but creatively fertile islands.
AUDIO FOUNDATION AIMS
• To support and promote the creation, production, and dissemination of innovative New Zealand audio projects through provision of online information resources, national networking infrastructures, events, heritage and exhibition services.
• To support and promote research in and the development of innovative artistic potential primarily concerned with audio.
• To foster a coherent identity and history for NZ audio culture, and to promote this to the wider public.
• To facilitate public audio events of a high standard, offering alternative opportunities to small groups and professional specialized communities in the audio culture of NZ.
• To forge alliances with industry, art organisations and other institutions to assist in the creation of resources and support for the sound/noise/outsider music community.
• To build the Audio Foundation through sustained communication, provision of information resources, preservation of contemporary and historical NZ audio culture, membership incentives and self-perpetuating successful initiatives of all kinds.