Conference session descriptions

Saturday Sessions

9:00 am
In One Ear and Out the Other
by Robyn Ravlich
A presentation by Robyn Ravlich on imaginative radio works that seek to use and transform sound elements to create distinctive sound worlds. Robyn will draw upon her own productions and the range of original radio works created by Australian sound artists and composers during an annual Australia Council for the Arts residency hosted by ABC Radio

.10:30 am
Deep Wireless Panel
Introduction
Darren Copeland (NAISA) & Neil Sandell (CBC Radio's Outfront)
Deep Wireless commissioned artists
Robert Hoare, Steve Wadhams, Sarah Boothroyd, Thelon Oeming
This spring, the CBC Radio 1 program Outfront and New Adventures in Sound Art collaborated and co-produced the fifth Deep Wireless commissioning/residency programme. Four artists were chosen to produce radiophonic artworks for broadcast on Outfront, and in performance as part of the Deep Wireless Festival. During this session, the participating artists will play excerpts from their commissioned pieces and talk about what they discovered about creating radio art that will work on the radio and in live performance.

.1:00 - 2:45 pm
Workshops / break-out sessions
Workshops are included in your RWB registration, but you must register in advance for the workshops of your choice.
Some workshops have limited space.

Listening Sessions
With Hans Ulrich Werner and Gregory Whitehead (limit to 5 per day)
With Hans Ulrich Werner and Gregory Whitehead (limit to 5 per day)
Limited to 5 participants per session (pre-registration required), each participant is asked to bring a 5 minute (max) example of a radio production that he or she has completed or is currently working on and play it for comments and feedback from everyone present, including moderators Hans Ulrich Werner (Germany) and Gregory Whitehead (USA).

Wireless Imagination workshop
by Tetsuo Kogawa (via live internet) and Stephen Kelly
This workshop will let you experience what radio transmission is like and how the transmission technology has been monopolized by the specialists and authorities. It would be a minimum experience of radio transmission that could also be developed into radio art and micro radio. The transmitter that the participant will make has only a 30 meter radius of transmission, but people would experience a convivial wireless imagination.

Listening
with Andra McCartney
This workshop session will focus on soundwalk listening. We will go on a group listening soundwalk (wheelchair accessible) in the area of Ryerson University, and discuss what we hear during the walk. Following this, we will listen to some examples of soundwalk radio pieces by artists such as Hildegard Westerkamp and radio shows such as CBC Outfront, and discuss methods of making soundwalks engaging for the listener in a radio context. This workshop will take place rain or shine. If it is raining, bring an umbrella. They also work well as wind protection for your microphone!

It Goes By Once: Creative Documentary Production
by Steve Wadhams
An intensive workshop in the art and poetry of sound. Knowing how to create gripping stories for radio means knowing how to grab the ear and keep hold of it. It means listening for the vivid detail in location sounds and spoken words and finding an authentic 'voice' for the storyteller.This workshop will teach aspiring and experienced documentary producers and reporters, as well as any others who write for broadcast media, how to "compose" for the ear, especially the jittery, impatient ear that's typical of most audiences today. Ears and minds which won't and can't rewind or flip the page back to see what you were trying to say. You've got just one chance to be understood. Participants will learn how to maintain interest in a story, how to convey complicated ideas by simple images, how to write and speak so that listeners stay with you. The "grammar" of sounds and their effective, even sensual and seductive use to paint memorable mental images. Rhythm and pacing. Choosing when you want to jar or disturb your audience.

3:00 pm
Radio that hears the soundscape
by R. Murray Schafer, Hans Ulrich Werner and Robyn Ravlich
A reflection on the role of the soundscape on radio and an overview of the various radio initiatives that Murray, Hans and Robyn have been involved with that include the soundscape as a topic and primary sound element.

Sunday sessions

9:00 am
Radio Art in a Period of Change
by Heidi Grundmann
The Roots of international Radio-Art of the 1990's.

In my presentation I will try to relate how, by coincidence, I was able, in 1987, to found Kunstradio, the still ongoing weekly program for international radio-art on Österreich 1, the cultural radio-channel of ORF (Austrian National Radio). What was founded as a weekly program was soon to become a unique platform for international radio-artists and their projects, which many times extended far beyond the weekly broadcasting slot and even the broadcast medium itself.

One of the factors that made it possible to found Kunstradio, when the opportunity arose, and define it as space for original radio projects by artists, was my knowledge, that there were artists out there (i.e. outside of Austria with its then monopolistic broadcasting system) who called themselves at least occasionally radio- artists, e.g. when they found access to the small studios and the broadcasting time on community or campus radios (a phenomenon then unknown in Austria) and produced not only art for radio, but radio as art or art as radio.

I will attempt to throw some light on the important work of some Canadian artists who, in the 1970's and 1980's developed radical works of radio-art and/or were among the initiators of innovative sometimes worldwide telecommunication projects using the then new peripherals to the telephone such as Slow Scan Television, FAX and computer communications. Such projects can also be read as containing a strong critique of the traditional one-to many communication paradigm of traditional mass media including radio.

10:30 am
THE BIG SLOPPY and other temporary theories of radio art
by Gregory Whitehead
The Big Sloppy
In navigation, it is useless to try to map where you are going, if you have no idea where you are. And it is equally as useless to talk about an art of radio without at least a tentative (poetic?) idea about the nature of radiophonic space. Yet whatever theory we invent must be open to sudden revisions or utter discard, based on fresh contact with strange vibrations in the wildness of electrified infinity. Drawing on twenty years of paddling around in the fog, Gregory will float a few temporary theories about where we are, when we talk about an art of radio. Are we in a warehouse of undelivered feeling, or is it a cave of the imagination? Is it a ghostland, or a dreamland, or an ocean full of bottled urgency? Or is it just a massive Big Sloppy, overgrown with mushrooms and entropy?

1:00 - 2:45 pm
Workshops / break-out sessions
(1 - 2:45 pm each day - note you must register for the workshop of your choice; some have limited availability)

Listening Sessions
With Hans Ulrich Werner and Gregory Whitehead (limit to 5 per day)
Limited to 5 participants per session (pre-registration required), each participant is asked to bring a 5 minute (max) example of a radio production that he or she has completed or is currently working on and play it for comments and feedback from everyone present, including moderators Hans Ulrich Werner (Germany) and Gregory Whitehead (USA).

Wireless Imagination workshop
by Tetsuo Kogawa (via live internet) and Stephen Kelly
This workshop will let you experience what radio transmission is like and how the transmission technology has been monopolized by the specialists and authorities. It would be a minimum experience of radio transmission that could also be developed into radio art and micro radio. The transmitter that the participant will make has only a 30 meter radius of transmission, but people would experience a convivial wireless imagination.

Making
with Andra McCartney
This workshop session will focus on doing a recording, and discussing options for editing such work. We will go on a recording soundwalk (wheelchair accessible) in the area of Ryerson University. Following the walk, we will listen to excerpts of these recordings and discuss how we might approach the editing process. Participants are also encouraged to bring previously-made soundwalk recordings for discussion. Please bring your own recording equipment (any kind) and headphones. This workshop will take place rain or shine. If it is raining, bring an umbrella. They also work well as wind protection for your microphone!

It Goes By Once: Creative Documentary Production
by Steve Wadhams
An intensive workshop in the art and poetry of sound.
Knowing how to create gripping stories for radio means knowing how to grab the ear and keep hold of it. It means listening for the vivid detail in location sounds and spoken words and finding an authentic 'voice' for the storyteller.This workshop will teach aspiring and experienced documentary producers and reporters, as well as any others who write for broadcast media, how to "compose" for the ear, especially the jittery, impatient ear that's typical of most audiences today. Ears and minds which won't and can't rewind or flip the page back to see what you were trying to say. You've got just one chance to be understood. Participants will learn how to maintain interest in a story, how to convey complicated ideas by simple images, how to write and speak so that listeners stay with you. The "grammar" of sounds and their effective, even sensual and seductive use to paint memorable mental images. Rhythm and pacing. Choosing when you want to jar or disturb your audience.

3:00 pm
Harmon e Phraisyar
by Jim Whelton
Jim Whelton will discuss an approach to developing scripts - adapting trash and stealing from life; actors and non-actors - everybody is radiogenic; his idiosyncratic guide to sound effects and radio foley - simplicity when t works, density when it doesn't and why there's never enough time; and music and other disasters - why we should eliminate taste and genre and embrace a decidedly indifferent approach to all sound.

3:30 pm
Lets go wireless
In the first part of the session, Eleanor King and Stephen Kelly will discuss their art practices, looking at and listening to their own works which specifically deal with audio art and radio. The remainder of the session will open to a trans-local transmitter performance inviting audience participation.