Category Archives: Democratic media

Radio Whispers (Bhagavad-Gita)

by

0

A project of Geelong After Dark 6 May 2016. Venue: Telematic Cafe located at Beavs Bar

IMG_20160501_102737

The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to Public occasions is a step in the right direction.

    —  Bertolt Brecht «The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication», 1932

Telematic Cafe teams up with THE PULSE 94.7 FM – Geelong region’s community radio to deliver the apparatus of radio that is inclusive of its users throughout its entire cycle of communication. Radio Whispers (Bhagavad-Gita) works as a collective radio model – people-generated communication space within the system of radio. The three activity stages enacted for participation within Telematic Cafe are:

  • send,
  • listen,
  • talk.

Radio Whispers become a process in which information is fed into, processed, interpreted and transmitted for yet another interpretation. Participants randomly select and submit (send) numbers of Bhagavad-Gita quotes. This information flow generates a feedback of quotes recovered in the form of written text which is used to read them for live transmission (talk).

Radio experience continues at the listening stage.  Instead of delivering a soundscape feeding into the space of everyday noise, Radio Whispers re-broadcasts the audio signal from FM to AM band and captures it through self-made devices  – crystal sets and headphones – replicating early days of the radio. Listening from crystal sets becomes an intimate and meaningful radio experience for the listener.

Containing a total of 700 verses Bhagavad-Gita is written in Sanskrit, but has become a global text – translated in many languages and in many versions, it is also a subject of constant interpretation. Mixed with the English reading of quotes by participants are songs of rap music, (rhythmic vigorous chanting) in national languages which feature global adaptation of this US-born music genre to powerfully express political views and identities of marginalized or not marginalized groups of people, communities or nations.

 

Live broadcast: THE PULSE 94.7 FM 6 May 2016 6pm-8pm AEST. Radio listening with crystal sets within Telematic Cafe continues till 10pm. 

Team:

Marita Batna (concept)
Michael Morgan (concept)
Leo Renkin, THE PULSE 94.7 FM (concept)
Terry Guida
Matt Gogarty, THE PULSE 94.7 FM
Darby Hewitt, THE PULSE 94.7 FM
Steve Juhaz
Toki Babai

Crystal sets by Geelong Amateur Radio Club. Thank You to Lou Blasco

Bhagavad-Gita website.

 

Advertisement

Bush Video (1973-1975)

by

0

” Hello … this is BUSH VIDEO transmitting some printed messages. We are people who are putting our heads into the common information space of video communication. We define video as a tool for the reception, codification, and transmission of audio/visual information, and as the technological extension of the human brain’s memory/image processing, storage, and retrieval system. After consciously and unconsciously, seeing and dreaming, video and metavideo 24 hours a day for the last four months we are now giving a brief report of “these instrumented revisits to paradise” (Bucky) and the discovered educational, social integrational, global culture participational, and simply world turning-on potentines of video communication which make the present pre-programmed, one-way broadcast TV as obsoletely relevant as the town crier.” [1]

The hippie video collective Bush Video – pioneers of democratic media in Australia – are best known for their seminal project at the student festival in Nimbin (1973). They gave out cameras to festival participants and laid a cable network for community broadcasting. The contributed material was shown on multiple monitors around the festival. Back in Sydney, these were used in the studio which was the home for a ‘collaborative anarchy’ centered around experimentation with electronic video.  Read the full story of Bush Video documented by Stephen Jones here.

Poster for Bush Video Theatre (1973). From http://scanlines.net/person/bush-video [2]

Poster for Bush Video Theatre (1973). From http://scanlines.net/person/bush-video [2]

One of the Bush Video’s founders Mick Glasheen on the ecological aesthetics of the electronic medium (from the conversation with Stephen Jones in 2005):

“I was drawn to the organic nature of it, … it seemed to me that video and electronic art is really an image of … energy! It’s live light energy! Electromagnetic fields that are made visible! And so I was just attracted to that, [and I thought] … This is amazing! That we’ve got our hands on this… that we can look at… Just like … the first time I saw a television image I couldn’t believe it. You know, there’s this glowing cathode tube with an image there that was alive. So I just felt that there’s life there, this new life-form, that could be felt – when you’re doing video effects, when you’re doing feedback, the feedback effect of video, Bush Video pursued hours and hours of this feedback… Then I was feeling drawn to that because it was this kind of… it seemed to be that that’s where the life was… in this machine. And what could be coaxed out of this? How could this be understood? What was this? And years and years later I kept on puzzling about what is this? What is the philosophy behind it? What is the scientific principle that’s going on here? I didn’t understand what it was at all. But now it seemed to come out that it’s like a Mandelbrot set, in its kind of feedback formula. Like, this simple iterative process.” [2]

[1] Quotation from article ‘Bush Video Tharunka (August 1973)’ – http://scanlines.net/object/bush-video-tharunka on Scanlines: Media Art in Australia since the 1960s (scanlines.net).

[2] Quotation from article ‘Bush Video’ by Stephen Jones – http://scanlines.net/person/bush-video on Scanlines: Media Art in Australia since the 1960, scanlines.net.