Events

27.09.18 - 20.12.18

Radiophonie. Übertragungen zwischen Wellen und Rauschen

The lecture series "Radiophonics - Transmissions Between Waves and Noise" accompanies the exhibition "Radiophonic Spaces" at the Museum Tinguely in Basel in the fall semester of 2018. Supplementing the exhibition the lecture series will negotiate the relations between sound and radio waves and between the technical, asthetic and political dimensions of radiophonics.

07.05.18 - 09.05.18

Radiophonic Cultures - Sonic Environments and Archives in Hybrid Media Systems

The interdisciplinary conference “Radiophonic Cultures”, which takes place from May 7th till 9th 2018 at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, investigates the history of radio and its sounds as a history of the tensions and interactions among its technical, aesthetic, and political dimensions and thus plumbs the depths of future radio’s potentials.

19.10.17 - 20.10.17

Workshop 05: Cultural Techniques of Radiophonics

Sound, as a temporal phenomenon is deeply entangled with the processes of its productions, transformations and transmissions, as well as their chains and cascades. Radiophonics – which links acoustics with electromagnetic oscillations – then, cannot be analyzed based only on its finished or closed things but rather its operations. The workshop Cultural Techniques of Radiophonics traces the mutual relations between the practices of producing, composing and listening to sound, radiophonic technologies and sonic environments. What sound is - or can be - is articulated and stabilized in these processes, but at the same time possibilities of destabilization – the misuse of technical apparatuses and the transgression of cultural codes, the deterritorialization of sounds and the disruption of habits of listening – can arise and point to something new or different. It is especially these moments of shifting perspectives – or rather: points of audition – that make tangible how aesthetic, technical, epistemic, and political aspects of radiophonics mesh and generate each other reciprocally.

27.10.16 - 28.10.16

Radio Space is the Place

International conference in correspondence with RadioRevolten – International Radio Art Festival

08.09.16

Workshop 04: Laboratory Cultures of Sonic Experience and Historical and Contemporary Studio Techniques

In thinking about the sound studio as an experimental system, the workshop is following the traces of the production of radiophonic knowledge: the experiments on hearing in the nineteenth century physiological laboratory – eg. by Hermann von Helmholtz –, the experimental physics of Heinrich Hertz that stood at the beginning of radio itself, the crucial acoustic research by the Bell Labs since the 1920s and the recurring figure of the experiment in the discourses on sonic aesthetics of the early german radio-play as well as in Pierre Schaeffer’s research into sound that was to be musique concrète. But what does it actually mean to talk about laboratories and experimental systems in relation to music and sonic composition as in the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, the Studio GRM in Paris or the Studio für elektronische Musik in Köln when they are not scientific settings in a strict sense? How can the approaches and concepts that have been so successful in the history of science or the science and technology studies be made productive in the techno-aesthetic practices of the sound studio? Against the background of different approaches to the laboratory the workshop seeks to untie the spatial, institutional and technical arrangements of sonic exploration.

07.04.16

Workshop 03: Noise in music and radio

The ambiguities of 'noise' and 'noises' – between disturbance, excess and non-musical as well as non-linguistic sounds of things and environments – mark the history of radiophonic cultures in the multiple intersections and convergences of – broadly speaking – two main lines of negotiating and dealing with noise(s). On the one hand the history of 20th century music sees an expansion of the sonic material processed and thus by a transgression of the dimension of the tone – defined by Hermann von Helmholtz as periodic waves, towards an organization of sound that is including noises. On the other hand the handling with 'noise' as a disturbance of the transmission of signals in a technical 'engineering' perspective has shaped concepts of noise, that, especially spreading out from Claude Shannon's theory of communication, have impacted discourses like systems theory and media theory among many others. The workshop set out to explore the different implications and notions of 'noise' between radio technology, musical composition and sonic environments.

26.02.16

Workshop 02: Archives and Auditive Knowledge Formations. Radioarchives in transition towards digital organization

In regard to radiophonic cultures the questions concerning the archive are crucial: For the historical research the actual institutional and material radio archives are not simply a source for material, the radiophonic archive has to be reflected as a condition of possibility of a 'sonic past' and as a radiophonic arrangement of its own right that is configuring the politics, aesthetics and epistemology of radiophony. Taking up on this concept of the radiophonic archive in particular the Weimar archive project and the data mining project at the Elektronisches Studio Basel are exploring options of a reorganization of radiophonics under the conditions of its digitization and database structures. Accordingly, the second Radiophonic Cultures workshop focuses on these two interrelated aspects of radiophonic archives as dynamic processes in the past and the future.

14.09.15 - 15.09.15

Workshop 01: Radiophonics

Centered around the concept of radiophonics and its historical and systematic implications, the projects first workshop aimed at a mutual reflection on the subprojects' relation to each other in the overall project's research structure. The concretions in the focusses and approaches of the individual research projects were presented and discussed in order to balance the overall research architecture of connections and shared areas of research. Two main interfaces of cooperation between the subprojects were at the center of consideration: one connecting the research in media studies and musicology and one connecting the archive project in Weimar to the data mining project at the electronic studio in Basel.