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The Mobile Ö1 Atelier
Ö1, the cultural channel in the ORF – Austrian Broadcasting Company’s four-station radio network, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.With over 640,000 listeners tuning in daily, Ö1 is Central Europe’s most successful cultural channel. As part of its ongoing transition from a traditional cultural-format public broadcaster to a multimedia service provider, Ö1 has been developing new communications structures designed to link up with listeners. Opening up the program, getting in touch with the audience, and bringing more live, on-site productions into the mix are the main elements of this repositioning. And Kunstradio, Ö1’s art radio subsidiary, will turn 20 in 2007. Over the years, Ars Electronica has developed into an important and reliable partner of the ORF producers who create Kunstradio programming. From the very outset, ORF Kunstradio and Ars Electronica have shared the aim of working out an expanded conception of art and realizing it in actual practice.
This shared approach manifests itself in the idea of Ö1’s mobile atelier that’s being set up on Linz’s Main Square (Hauptplatz). This isn’t just a mobile broadcasting studio; it’s a production studio as well. It serves artists as a base station, and provides a facility for on-site creative work, an exhibition space, as well as technology to produce audiovisual projects and projections in the surrounding public space.
Architecture: Peter Haimerl; Construction: Dietmar Lupfer
Guerilladisco
Oliver Hangl / Kristian Davidek
On Linz’s Main Square, the mobile atelier will also provide a setting for the mobile Guerilladisco being produced by Austrian artist Oliver Hangl and FM4 DJ Kristian Davidek. The essence of Hangl and Davidek’s concept is complete independence from the facts and circumstances of the atelier’s immediate surroundings, which is achieved not only by mobility but also by the distribution of the music via wireless headphones. Non-participant passers-by and neighbors will thus be unable to detect a single note or decibel of this high-energy party; on the other hand, the impression its “pantomime”makes on them will be even more dramatic, since the use of two-channel-equipped headphones makes it possible to deliver two parallel DJ sets, each one featuring a different musical genre. Thus, the people partaking of this music will, in turn, have the choice between Channels A and B, so that the dancers themselves will also break down into two clearly differentiable sets.
Translated from German by Mel Greenwald
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