Radio Obscura

Recycled Radio / Sound Art
(2006 / on-going)

Exhibited at:

• Kunst Vlaai (Art Pie International) / Amsterdam, The Netherlands / May, 2008
• Villa de Bank / Enschede, The Netherlands / June, 2007

Radio Obscura is a concept for packaging sound art pieces in a visual package. The objects are old radios, rescued from trash dumps, second-hand shops or flea markets. They are rewired to allow a modern MP3 player to be plugged in, and painted over with a dull light grey colour that makes them into almost anonymous objects, their identities partially obscured. But their shape, the dials knobs and buttons, the window with the frequency indicator, shatters any notion of ubiquity.

Although the soundworks are contemporary -- programs such as Take Me With You to Hamra Street (2006), The Days Are Broken (2006), Extreme Frequency Café (2005), and Music for Extreme Frequencies (2004) -- the aged mono speakers give them an old feeling. At the same time that the radios are updated for 21st century MP3 players, they down-date the soundworks to mid-20th century audiophonics.

There are two acts of remediation being performed by the Radio Obscura. First, old radios that are not yet old enough to be museum pieces but are too old to be functional, whose value has been reduced to at best semi-antique curiosities and at worst fodder for landfills, are remediated into MP3 playback devices. Second, the soundworks themselves, originally art radio broadcasts and later internet webcasts, are remediated as sound installations. No longer a "program" to be tuned into or downloaded and listened to from start to finish, they become part of an object that can be looked at, touched, and listened to within a space at more or less random intervals. The spectator probably hears only fragments, like a radio that one walks past on a street where one hears a small part of a program before moving on into some other aural space.