Experts discuss the historical development and current state of artistic communications projects. It is, first and foremost, radio art—represented at Ars Electronica by the many projects produced since 1987 by the Austrian Broadcasting Company’s Kunstradio—that is widely considered an important role model. In this context, though, radio art is not to be understood as Ars Acoustica, as a subset of sound art or as radiophonic music; rather, it is an artform that deals critically with the medium and the changes it has been undergoing—and particularly those that have resulted from the pressure of digitization. Artists began addressing these developments at a very early stage. They have come up with new forms of production and distribution, and, today, above all in the wake of the emergence of mobile and digital technology, are assigning a new function to the medium of radio within the realm of communication. Thus: radio art as New Media Art.
The title RE-INVENTING RADIO refers to this process that has been going on for many decades, one in which artists have been tirelessly taking up the radio that exists in the present in order to discover, over and over again, a different radio and the utopia of a “communications apparatus” (Bertolt Brecht) accessible to all that is inherent in it.

With: Heidi Grundmann, Bob Adrian, r a d i o q u a l i a , Inke Arns, Gene Youngblood
Moderator: Sabine Breitsameder

In cooperation with Ö1-Kunstradio – http://kunstradio.at

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