Resonance104.4fm

Ed Baxter writes: I was under the mistaken impression that I should make a formal presentation at last week’s AmbITion conference, Do The Arts Speak Digital? – the audio from which will soon form a series of podcasts and broadcasts. This is the text (quite long for a web posting – sorry) that I was going to present, but didn’t.

Do the arts speak digital? At Resonance104.4fm, the community radio station for which I work, the answer is certainly affirmative. And the object lessons to be drawn from some of our output provide a partial indication of the variety of expressive and logistical possibilities allowed by digital technologies; and of the symptomatic meanings that attach to diverse kinds of activity, digital or not.

Let me offer a few examples of some projects we’ve recently realised. First, one which suggests how through technological development cheap substitutes for expensive practices arise and allow for what would otherwise appear impossible. Immediate results are the goal here: the content can look after itself – which is not to say that it is irrelevant, but rather that those who are providing it can be trusted to get on with it.

Live rock climbing on the radio may seem at first glance like a striving after novelty in keeping with the dictates of Kelvin McKenzie’s Topless Darts or Alan Partridge’s Monkey Tennis. Realised as part of a Europe-wide series called Intimacy And Distance, “Suspension of Belief” was a radiophonic artwork that deployed the cheapest available technology to create an open-ended, long-form broadcast of an epochal kind. In it, former UK bouldering champion Gaz Parry used a hands-free Nokia N95 mobile phone to communicate from the cliff face of the Penon d’Ifach near Alicante as he made an ascent lasting a little over five hours. To make it a bit funkier, simultaneously the doyen of climbing writers, Jim Perrin, chipped in with a series of numinous monologues from a farmhouse in the Pyrenees. Unable to see or hear Gaz down in Spain, Jim reached blindly and compulsively into himself and extemporised on pet themes in a kind of counterpoint to the single-minded climb itself. The protagonists met only in radio space, fitfully and dramatically. As often in such experiments, the revelatory meaning of the project only emerged in its execution: the mobile telephone battery eventually died, some distance from the summit, leaving our climber silently suspended in the upper air while we listeners in the lower depths contemplated his fate. This failure of power flung open the door of the imagination to reveal that he had always been out of reach, his experience utterly unknowable, his fate and his consciousness something the listener could never truly experience. The centre of “Suspension of Belief” was this geographically and experientially remote, singular and truly unreachable activity. As far from a “sharing” experience as one could wish, I think.

Another example: AudioBoo the Dunwich Dynamo, a project by The Bike Show. Twenty four hours before this all-night ride to the Suffolk coast, host Jack Thurston announced that coverage of what he calls “the greatest London cycle event, bar none” was going to be “a novel experiment in what Nathan Barley would probably refer to as a self-facilitating, crowd-sourced audio mashup’.” Technology: an iPhone. Software: free. Parameters: three minute snippets uploaded to the web. Sound quality: not bad. Instructions to participants: “Record moments from the night. Record anything you like. Add the tag DD17 and all the snippets will be aggregated into a big pool of sound, a unique record of a unique night.” The downside? “Interesting to hear the powers of reasoned speech decline as the night wore on,” Jack observed. “And there appeared to be problems uploading out of 3G range – something that AudioBoo.fm should look into if this is really going to become a platform for mobile audioblogging.”

With these successes under our belts, we plan next a dawn till dusk broadcast of next spring’s Virgin London Marathon as a purely audio phenomenon, deploying every possible technological mechanism and describing the city from a multiplicity of perspectives.

Secondly, there are projects which offer profound insights into the broader social meanings that digital applications have brought into being. The Flickerman, written and produced by Lance Dann, is a thriller series set in a world of information overload and obsessive compulsive on-line documentation. Its hero, Cornelius Zane-Grey, is convinced that his life is being secretly filmed and posted on Flickr, from the randomly accessed contents of which the narrative seems to derive. A classic ratiocinative tale of intrigue turned inside out, one in which the crime results from the victim’s gathering of clues, The Flickerman is the most important radio drama – and one of the most important artworks – of the last decade. It is currently unclear if our next experiment in radio drama, The Whale in the Room, written entirely in Twitter by Paul May and five collaborators, will throw up similar surprises: but it seems likely, if only because creativity in the digital realm, as in so much pop culture, so often takes the form of misappropriation, misuse and perversion.

The elements of The Flickerman which ring so true as drama are rooted in the practical realities and banalities of our work at Resonance. It’s currently possible for us to monitor the audio being fed into Resonance’s Day Archive from any location accessible via 3G. To do so our production manager Chris Weaver uses PuTTy running on a Nokia N95. Once logged into the server, using the standard method of RSA public key exchange, the user starts the command line audio meter program JACKmeter which connects to the first two inputs (for stereo operation) offered by JACK, the low-latency audio framework: the server is now running.

You can get visual feedback of the audio output of the station wherever you are, using open source software. So your work follows you home in your pocket and turns the tables on you. (Why do I think of the final scene from The Conversation where Gene Hackman tears up all his floorboards searching for a rival’s surveillance device?). Like a lot of insidiously invasive mechanisms, JACKmeter’s patterns look pretty cool on the mobile screen, like a piece of 1960s kinetic art. (The only visitor to the Vasarely Museum in Budapest one morning, back in the communist era, I was followed at three paces by no fewer than four security guards. A portent!)

After all this boasting, it is important to state that Resonance doesn’t function in isolation. The Radia network, which has plans to hire its own pan-contintenal satellite in the near future, is a hotbed of homespun innovation. Joshua Fried’s Morning Drive Time, broadcast on free103point9 in New York, samples and mashes morning drive time shows from commercial stations live into an audio soup which updates the satire and savvy of Negativland; while Pit Schultz and Diana McCarty’s Backyardradio in Berlin offers an example of the digital technology providing the back-end, which is to say, the transmission technology. Hacked router software is configured to find other routers to link up in a network; and at the same time serve audio streams to mini-FM transmitters plugged as USB sticks in the back of the routers.

In the world of business development, meantime, Schulze & Webb’s Olinda is a prototype digital radio which incorporates your social network, showing you the stations your friends are listening to and with the ability to be customised with modular hardware, the design of which mimics the modularity of a software Application Programming Interface. Commissioned by the BBC, Olinda aims “to treat radio owners not as listeners but hearers… [as] active participants in a broadcast, discussing and reacting to the radio with other hearers, more like an engaged audience sitting together, instead of isolated listeners all consuming radio independently from one another. Olinda aims to start conversations: the radio should make a person’s friend ask about it when they enter the room. It should prompt a listener to deepen friendships by giving opportunities to listen to the same programming.”

Of course I want to get hold of an Olinda radio and muck about with it. But why am I just a tiny bit suspicious? Partly because anyone who wants to “start conversations” should as a rule be held at arm’s length. Partly because Olinda suggests the restoration of a Reithian wealth of surprising broadcasts arranged in contradistinction to the single-minded, monotonous output of the BBC’s commercial rivals (something which Resonance has already been achieving for more than seven years). And partly because people do talk about radio in any case – at least my friends do – and are not isolated, merely wanting a bit of time on their own now and then.

Still, as we all know, digital applications have indeed changed listening habits. Digital prevents chance encounters, disrupts the continuum of Bergsonian time, offers discrete singularities in place of surfing the airwaves. Where once you recognised yourself in an object – 25 years ago it’d be a pop song, for example – and haphazardly sought out objects by which to define yourself, now the objects seek you out, pursue you, beg for your attention. Endless objects, identical or near-identical, the rapid succession of which forms a rhythm, one characterised by its invasive nature, its objective revivification of a best-forgotten past which lies as a dead hand on the biologically embodied present, and its indication that future habits can be mechanically predetermined. Radio as a meaningful term is deliberately misused by Last FM and other extensions of Erdős-Bacon Numbers theory for reasons of commerce or ideology; or else is overlooked by those proponents of spectacular kitsch who seem to have the upper hand in the arena of public art. But as a mass medium to which artists now have access radio truly provides one of the clearest models for modes of aesthetic development in the immediate future. At Resonance FM, we have created an audience of over 200,000 from scratch, produced 35,000 hours of ground-breaking work and engaged hundreds of volunteers who contribute dozens of hours to the project every week – all achieved with a full-time staff of only three and at a tiny fraction of the millions spent on the late, lamented 4Radio. That suggests some real human need which I’ll leave the anthropologists and Media Guardian to study.

Finally, looking further afield and still further into the future, physicists at Berkeley have constructed “a fully functional, fully integrated radio receiver, orders-of-magnitude smaller than any previous radio, from a single carbon nanotube. The antenna and tuner receive signals via high frequency mechanical vibrations of the nanotube rather than through traditional electrical means. Its creators have already used the nanotube radio to receive and play music from FM radio transmissions such as the Beach Boy’s Good Vibrations. The nanotube radio’s extremely small size, they say, “could enable radical new applications such as radio controlled devices small enough to exist in the human bloodstream – or simply smaller, cheaper, and more efficient wireless devices such as cellular phones.”

I look forward to the day when the delegates at an Arts Council England conference will form an orderly queue to have their brains injected – relatively painlessly and “Nothing To Pay Till April the First” – with a single carbon nanotube radio set permanently to Resonace104.4fm. Until then, we must sit here and pick our teeth and dream.

I’d like to thank Chris Weaver, Richard Thomas, Knut Aufermann and Honor Harger for sharing information and ideas with their usual generosity; and Rachel Baker for the visionary provision of the context for this short paper.

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