Director's Introduction to the festival

We have just entered the second century of broadcasting. And it finds us on the apex of massive change.

The switch off of analogue broadcasting has now started and will continue apace throughout 2008. Information and entertainment which has been sent via the airwaves since the beginning of the 20th century is going digital.

What does this mean for the future of broadcasting? Does the switch to digital create greater possibilities for cultural and community participation in broadcasting? Or will the switch create more complex regulatory frameworks, which disempower potential broadcasters? Will the airwaves fall silent after the switch off? What is the fate of the part of the spectrum that radio and television use now? Will this valuable natural resource be opened up for public use? Or will these frequencies be sold to mobile telephone companies or the military?

The answers to these questions may define our entertainment culture for the next decades, and will provide the backdrop for AV Festival 08.

Variations VII by John Cage

John Cage's Variations VII is the Opening Gala of AV festival 08 on 29 February 2008.
Photograph: John Cage, preparing a piano, c.1964. Courtesy of the John Cage Trust.

At the same time as traditional broadcasting faces transformation, the internet has emerged as a key network for the distribution of audiovisual material. It seems that the webcasting revolution promised at the end of last millennium is just beginning to bear fruit. Then, artists such as Van Gogh TV, Active Ingredient and Nina Pope & Karen Guthrie (Broadcast Yourself, Hatton Gallery Newcastle) used technologies such as videophones and streaming media to create channels for artistic broadcasting. Now, the immense popularity of user-generated audio and video online networks, such as
MySpace and YouTube, are creating a parallel universe of radio and television on the internet. We’ll show how a new generation of student filmmakers are inhabiting and shaping these online spaces, in AV:IRAL, which will be screened online at our YouTube channel, and on site during the festival at (Design Centre, Sunderland & AV Hub, Middlesbrough).

Broadcasting is also on the move. Podcasting is enabling our favourite internet radio and television programmes to become mobile, downloaded to our media players. The mobile telephone companies who
paid so dearly for a slice of the high-speed 3G network will soon begin to fulfil their promise to deliver audio and video services.

Thus the landscape of broadcasting is changing irrevocably. Not only is there a clear need to debate the form of broadcasting in its second century, but also to reflect on the past century of radio and television. How did it originate? How has it changed our lives?

For AV Festival 08, artists, filmmakers and musicians have created works which illuminate all aspects of broadcasting. Policy-makers, researchers and activists will discuss the switch off and speculate about the future of radio, television and the spectrum (The Television will Not be Revolutionised, 6-7 March & Community Radio Night, 4 March). Engineers, technologists and hobbyists will give hands-on workshops in transmission technology (Radio Craft Lab & Waygood’s Radio Rally). Concerts and events will commemorate broadcasting accomplishments and celebrate a century of the airwaves (Variations VII, 29 February, Radiophonia, 1 March, and War of the Worlds, 5 March).

Antenna

At AV Festival 08, we will discover that ever since the first experiments in wireless transmission by Nikola Tesla2, broadcasting has been a mechanism to enact social change. The power of broadcasting to shape public behaviour was graphically portrayed in 1938, by dramatist, Orson Welles, in his now legendary adaptation of War of the Worlds. The broadcast blurred the factual format of newscasting, with a fictional story of alien invasion and sparked panic amongst radio listeners. We celebrate the 70th anniversary of this crucial moment in broadcasting history, with a new version of the radio play staged by acclaimed theatre director Joanna Read (Middlesbrough Town Hall, 5 March).

Broadcasting continued to witness and transmit social history with images joining sound on the airwaves, as television became part of public life. AV Festival 08’s screening programme TV at the Cinema brings television to the big screen, showcasing landmark programmes, such as Ken Loach’s pioneering drama Cathy Come Home (Tyneside Cinema, 6 March), a graphic depiction of homelessness which inspired real policy change in 1960s Britain. Later political satire, such as the incendiary Brass Eye (Tyneside Cinema, 8 March), showed how television had become a platform to mock the political establishment. You can voice your own opinion about television, by voting for your favourite show online at our Alternative Top TV poll (www.avfestival.co.uk/toptv). The winning TV show will be shown at a gala screening (Tyneside Cinema, 7 March).

As broadcasting became increasingly ubiquitous, it became not only a means of observing social reality, but also increasingly a mechanism to shape it. Harun Farocki’s Videogram of a Revolution depicts the so-called television revolution in Romania in 1989, where broadcasting played a critical role in the fall of Ceau?escu regime. And politicians’ ruthless manipulation of television is vividly brought to life in Brian Springer’s Spin (both at Star and Shadow Cinema, 5 March).

AV Festival 08 will also ask what role have artists played in shaping the trajectory of the airwaves, showing how they have experimented with elemental substance of broadcasting — electromagnetism, radio waves and resonant energy. These dark materials are evident in Yuko Mohri’s new work Bairdcast (Discovery Museum, Newcastle), which shows how the fabric of early television can be transformed into contemporary installation.

In our conference Music & Machines VIII (Culture Lab, 29 February – 1 March), we will explore the origins of artistic experimentation with the airwaves showing how artists insisted on the spectrum as a new landscape.

John Cage’s philosophy of the radio spectrum as a part of the physical environment is borne out in his 1966 works, Variations VII (AV Festival Opening Gala, Baltic, 29 February), and Radio Happenings I–V, in which Cage remarked, “all [radio] is making audible something which you’re already in. You are bathed in radio waves”.

The notion of radio as a pervasive medium, which surrounds us and moves through us, is made tangible in Joyce Hinterding’s large-scale antenna work (Aeriology, Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland), which makes audible the very low radio frequencies which resonate continuously throughout space.

Slovenian artist Marko Peljhan has been creating works that make the radio landscape perceptible since 1998. The latest of these is Scatter! a large-scale outdoor durational performance (AV Festival 08 Closing Gala, Baltic Square, 8 March) which will audio-visually map the radio sky in real time.

José Luis de Vicente & Irma Vilà’s Atlas of Electromagnetic Space (Institute for Digital Innovation, Middlesbrough) also maps the inscrutable topography that is the electromagnetic spectrum, in this case
through an interactive data visualisation.

These and other artists at AV Festival 08, such as Tetsuo Kogawa the founder of miniFM in Japan (who will speak at Music & Machines and lead a workshop at the Radio Craft Lab), Brian Springer, an American filmmaker and spectrum activist (who will present his film Spin, and perform in Scatter!), Resonance FM (who are in residence at mima, Middlesbrough), and German radio artist Knut Aufermann (who will lead AV Festival programming on NE1FM), all survey the broadcasting landscape, and indeed alter its topology with their projects.

AV Festival 08 is also part of NewcastleGateshead Initiative’s dynamic EAST 08 programme of events. The exhibitions by Yuko Mohri (Discovery Museum), Ryota Kuwakubo (Design Centre), the screening of Digital Stadium (Design Centre), and Tetsuo Kogawa’s lecture and workshop all elements of EAST 08.

These artists — and your presence — will ensure AV Festival 08 becomes a catalyst for debate about the future state of broadcasting, and also a celebration of a century of on air and online transmission.

Honor Harger
Director, AV Festival 08