Simulcast – a group exhibition of radio works

Group exhibition of radio-themed works featuring Zita Joyce, Ivan Mršić, Sally Ann McIntyre and Jay Hollows – with accompanying text by Andrew Clifford and the exhibiting artists.

“Although its primary usage makes it hard to imagine radio as anything more than a corporate or governmental institution, the expressive and social possibilities of radio as a medium provides limitless ways to upend this monolithic tradition. Artists can transcend these usual functions to exploit the potential of the ether as a creative space for a timeless “wireless imagination” that predates our own existence, and will continue for much longer.” – Andrew Clifford.

Simulcast will include an an FM transmitter-building workshop presented by Rachel Melanson followed by a performance evening featuring Ivan Mršić, Jay Hollows and Andrew Clifford. This exhibition coincides with the recent launch of the new Audio Foundation low-powered and web-streaming radio station – AFM (for more information on AFM please check out http://audiofoundation.org.nz/afm).

Special thanks to Coopers and CNZ

Thursday 7 March, 5.30pm opening
Runs until Saturday 30 March

Mini FM Transmitter building workshop:
Join artist Rachael Melanson for a mini-FM transmitter building workshop at Audio Foundation
Wednesday 20 March
5pm – 7.30pm
$10 materials fee, limit of six participants
Please book in advance – admin@audiofoundation.org.nz

Performance evening:
Ivan Mršić, Jay Hollows and Andrew Clifford
Wednesday 20 March
8pm onwards
Audio Foundation
Koha entry

Artist bios and work info:

Jay Hollows
Auckland based artist working in sound, video, installation, and performance. Interested in capturing everyday moments and gestures from found and recorded footage. Taking influences from cinema and rock culture enactments, including villain and front man personas and the male posturing that takes place there. Performance and video works include the use of off the shelf technology (particularly megaphones and transistor radios) playing into the sense of the everyday. Jay is currently studying for his Masters Degree at Elam School of Fine Arts.

AK Bandwidth Band
Colour Video/Sound
Jan 28 2013 2:10pm -2:36pm

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Ivan Mršić is a Croatian New Zealand interdisciplinary artist, percussionist, composer and improviser, who works in different mediums using rotational method based on chance as practise. He performs with sound objects and experimental acoustic instruments that he builds, including modified kitchen sinks and everyday objects. He collaborated with several Japanese artist Ko Nakajama, Kentaro Taki, Tsubasa Kawamoto, Shoji Hano, group Superflux, Phil Dadson and provided sound for et al.’s exhibition at Michael Lett gallery. Mršić completed Master of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts.

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Zita Joyce explores the forms, spaces, and sounds of radio as a lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Canterbury.

Radio Wormhole (Christchurch-Auckland)

Radio Wormhole channels the ambient sounds of Christchurch into the Audio Foundation gallery in Auckland, and carries the gallery sounds back again. It is a live connection between two very different spaces: the Audio Foundation, nestled into Myers Park, and the Pallet Pavilion, a permeable community events structure in the expansive openness of central Christchurch. In the Audio Foundation gallery, the listener will hear the daily sounds of Christchurch’s demolition and construction, and the life and events of the Pavilion itself. For Christchurch listeners, the Audio Foundation, and other works in Simulcast will mark out a distant gallery space. Radio wormhole connects these two locations through multiple translations and transformations of sound – audio, to webstream, to radio waves. This chain articulates the distance between locations, while radio signals silently mark out the space of each location within the other, requiring visitors to ‘tune in’ to experience the overlapping site.

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Sally Ann McIntyre programmes the Mini FM station Radio Cegeste as a temporary, site-specific, project based platform for transmission art. She was recently included as one of 150 historic and contemporary artists engaging with the medium of transmission in the book Transmission Arts : Artists and Airwaves, (PAJ, 2011).

radio cegeste : selected radio memorials
modified radio memorial #1 (a fissure in the line of a public silence)
(2011-2013)
a single-take field recording of simultaneous tunings of various stations broadcasting the 2 minute memorial silence on New Zealand public radio at 12:51pm, exactly one week after the Christchurch earthquake of 22.2.2011. the varied idea of silence represented on the radio (birdsong, prayer) is contrasted with the silence of the room and the street outside. recorded in Freemans Bay, Auckland, 1.3.2011, using domestic radios already present in the house. recording cut to 7” lathe acetate by Peter King, each individual record has a different locked groove. edition of 10.

‘a private swamp / was where this tree grew feathers once’ : a radio memorial in 4 movements
(2011-2012)
site and context specific work for mini FM transmitter and field recordings. audio library of four 10min field recordings collected at the sites of four abandoned or partly demolished early 20th century houses in inner city Christchurch, all within the geographical area known as the ‘four avenues’, all once called home by the artist. field recordings made in the last week of 2011, transmitted back onsite within one of the four spaces in the early days of 2012. previously unbroadcast.

‘dear friends who have died are all talking to me tonight / all at once’
(2009/2011)
site and context specific work for mini FM transmitter and field recordings. eight 5min field recordings collected between 2:45 and 5:05 on Wednesday 18.3.2009, while walking around the inner city gallery sector of Christchurch. recordings then narrowcast after midnight within Rice & Beans project Space, Dunedin, in late 2011 as a ‘graveyard shift’ radio show on the last day of the space’s lease. work re-constructs and re-imagines personal and public memory through the medium of transmission, as an appropriate framework for uncertain, shifting structural and social realities, in effect, building a temporary architecture of airwaves in which the ghostly palimpsest of lost spaces can exist, reflecting on the mortality of old buildings and the project spaces and artist studios which call them home. duration : 24:55. programme originally made for Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform based in Chicago, IL, USA . http://theradius.us/episode23

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Andrew Clifford
Between 1992 and 2007, Andrew Clifford produced and presented programmes for Radio New Zealand and 95bFM, including Art on Air. His own (occasional) sound practice also harnesses the airwaves to manipulate invisible noise fields. He is currently a board member for the Audio Foundation and has a chapter in the book Erewhon Calling. Regular articles appear in magazines throughout the Asia-Pacific region, and recent essays have been published in books about Sean Kerr, Reuben Paterson, John Reynolds, and a chapter on invented instruments for Home, Land and Sea: Situating Music in Aotearoa.

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Rachael Melanson

Rachael Melanson is is a UK-based artist and writer working in both analog and new media, as well as print, traditional crafts, participatory events and installations – creating works as ‘a multi-sensory collage of past, present and future with which I aim to engage audiences, facilitating a time and space that might generate ideas and creative discussion around the topics investigated’. Melanson is a graduate in BA (Hons) in Music and Visual Arts at the University of Brighton, UK.