2011 OPEN CALL SELECTION: BRIAN GILLIS & ROBIN LAMBERT'S FREE RADIO
With Free Radio, Lambert and Gillis proposed to build a functioning radio station inside the gallery with related educational materials and programming. The station will be built over the course of five days, used for a one-hour test broadcast when completed, and disassembled each week. The exhibition, and its related programming, will be on view at CUE from March 22 to May 5, 2012. To read the full proposal, click here
Short Synopsis:
Free Radio is a community-based project that used the CUE Art Foundation gallery from March 22 - May 5, 2012 as a laboratory in which a different local community was aided each week with the construction of an on-site broadcasting station and the development of broadcast programming relative to that community. Each one-week session was comprised of a series of activities directed toward community building, the development of a voice, archiving that voice, and learning skills associated with broadcast technology to disseminate that voice. Each session culminated in a public broadcast produced entirely by that community and transmitted to the greater New York City Metropolitan Area.
Partnering Communities:
March 30 - April 6:
Verbal Pyrotechnics
April 7 - 13: UpBeatNYC
April 14 - 20: Brooklyn Youth Company
with The Moth
April 21 - 27: Brooklyn Youth Company
with The Moth
April 28 - May 5: Occupy Wall Street
with Chris Cobb
Longer Synopsis:
Free Radio is a community-based project that used the CUE Art Foundation gallery from March 22 - May 5, 2012 as a laboratory in which a different local community was aided each week with the construction of an on-site broadcasting station and the development of broadcast programming relative to that community. Each one-week session was comprised of a series of activities directed toward community building, the development of a voice, archiving that voice, and learning skills associated with broadcast technology to disseminate that voice. Each session culminated in a public broadcast produced entirely by that community and transmitted to the greater New York City Metropolitan Area.
This process
was archived and will be perpetually transmitted via the Internet as well so as
to simultaneously preserve and broadcast the process beyond the walls of the
gallery and the range of the culminating broadcast. The ultimate goal of this
project was to use the idea of free radio to publically seed community
development and training relative to broadcasting so as to make the notion of
organizing a community to broadcast its voice something that is both more
valuable and accessible to the public at large.
Free Radio was conceived of by artists, was sited at the CUE Art Foundation, and driven by the reconsideration of a gallery as a cultural hub altogether so as not only to be a place that uses art to catalyze discourse and the dissemination of information, but also a site for tool building while mining and solidifying the identity of a community. Free Radio was born out of a belief that every community has a voice that could be a relevant part of a larger society, and an investment in the development and proliferation of this voice will make its community richer and in doing so contribute exponentially to a population outside of its own. This project was made possible by an international organization of people ranging from artists and computer hackers to scientists and educators who were in place to work with specific local communities to facilitate community individuation, the development of a voice, and the weekly building of a broadcast station and culminating broadcast for the dissemination of that voice.
Free Radio hybridizes the idea of a
sourdough starter and the notion that teaching someone how to fish is
more valuable and resonant than merely giving someone fish. Free Radio is
as much about being a witness as it is about being a participant. As such, a
primary concern is the incubation and perpetual broadcast of this process of
community individuation and the mass dissemination of a voice, whether live or
as an archived loop on the Internet. It is about the mass distribution of
open-source information, which uses as a point of departure the democratization
of a technology that is free to access, relatively ungovernable, easy to build,
and so important to a free society, radio.
Who is Free Radio?
Brian Gillis
Executive Producer
Robin Lambert
Executive Producer
www.robinlambert.ca
Elizabeth Dunn-Ruiz
Director of Programming
Mike Miller
Director of Information
John Park
Director of Technology
www.johnparkonline.com
Ryan Paxton
Director of Construction
Onsite Director of Technology
YOU!
The people who have a voice
and make up a community, that makes up a town, that makes up a county, that
makes up a state, that makes up a country, that makes up the world.