August Black

August Black is a conceptual artist living in Vienna, Austria. Among other artistic activities, he has been active in the areas of telecommunications and networked radio since 1996. Collaborating with others, he's devised a technique for performing _live_ radio on a shoestring budget from ambiguous locations ( the rooftop of the University of Lapland under a midnight sun, on the streets of Amsterdam, from an office in Berlin, from the swimming pool of his neighbor...) transforming the location at hand into material and subject for conceptual play. His radio work can be heard mostly on the free radios of FRO (105.0 MHz Linz) and Orange (94.0 MHz in Vienna).

http://funda.ment.org
http://standupradio.org


Statement

Increasingly, we are living in a world of connections; machines connected with machines, people with machines, people with other people sitting behind a machine. Increasingly, distance is measured in shorter amounts of time ("How long does it take to get there?" "2 hours by plane"). What interests me personally about "Open Air" is this peculiar state of connectiveness where shouting distance reaches globally; where the naive/utopian idea of a network can happen in wild and mysterious ways, at various rates of transfer - sometimes with a connection covering distances faster and more thorough than the speed of sound, sometimes slower than the average postal delivery, but always as part of a strategy of communication unfolding plurally in the present.