Brett Ian Balogh: A Noospheric Atlas of the United States (2009)

This work in progress aims to map the hertzian space created by the United States’ mass media broadcast stations. This space is not definable in traditional terms of surveyed boundaries of state and local territories, but rather by electrical fields and consumer markets in the air around us. Geospatial data provided by the FCC is rendered as translucent shapes whose color is determined by the type of service (AM/FM/TV). The resulting image depicts a landscape formed by our collective communications. The project is planned as a series of print atlases as well as a web-based, interactive map database.

More interesting projects at Bret’s website HERE

Neighborhood Public Radio – Talking Homes

Neighborhood Public Radio is an independent, artist-run radio project committed to providing an alternative media platform for artists, activists, musicians, and community members.

Our motto: If it’s in the neighborhood and it makes noise .. we hope to put it on the air.

Neighborhood Public Radio – Talking Homes.

Radio Theory: LA RADIA (1933) by F.T. MARINETTI and PINO MASNATA

LA RADIA MUST NOT BE

1. theater because radio has killed the theater already defeated by sound drama

2. cinema because cinema is dying (a) from rancid sentimentalism of subject matter (b) from realism that involves even certain simultaneous syntheses (c) from infinite technical complications (d) from fatal banalizing collaborationism (e) from reflected brilliance inferior to the self-emitted brilliance of radio-television

3. books because the book which is guilty of having made humanity myopic implies something heavy strangled stifled fossilized and frozen (only the great freeword tableaux shall live, the only poetry that needs to be seen)

LA RADIA ABOLISHES

1. the space and stage necessary to theater including Futurist synthetic theater (action unfolding on a fixed and constant stage) and to cinema (actions unfolding on very rapid variable simultaneous and always realistic stages)

2. time

3. unity of action

4. dramatic character

5. the audience as self-appointed judging mass systematically hostile and servile always against the new always retrograde

LA RADIA SHALL BE

1. Freedom from all point of contact with literary and artistic tradition. Any attempt to link la radia with tradition is grotesque

2. A new art that begins where theater cinema and narrative end

3. The immensification of space. No longer visible and framable the stage becomes universal and cosmic

4. The reception amplification and transfiguration of vibrations emitted by living beings living or dead spirits dramas of wordless noise-states

5. The reception amplification and transfigurahon of vibrations emitted by matter. Just as today we listen to the song of the forest and the sea so tomorrow shall we be seduced by the vibrations of a diamond or a flower

6. A pure organism of radio sensations

7. An art without time or space without yesterday or tomorrow. The possibility of receiving broadcast stations situated in various time zones and the lack of light will destroy the hours of the day and night. The reception and amplification of the light and the voices of the past with thermoionic valves will destroy time

8. The synthesis of infinite simultaneous actions

9. Human universal and cosmic art as voice with a true psychology-spirituality of the sounds of the voice and of silence

10. The characteristic life of every noise and the infinite variety of concrete/abstract and real/dreamt through the agency of a people of noises

11. Struggles of noises and of various distances that is spatial drama joined with temporal drama

12. Words in freedom. The word has gradually developed into a collaborator of mime and gesture. The word must be recharged with all its power hence an essential and totalitarian word which in Futurist theory is called word-atmosphere. Words in freedom children of the aesthetics of machines contain an orchestra of noises and noise-chords (realistic and abstract) which alone can aid the colored and plastic word in the lightning-fast representation of what is not seen. If he does not wish to resort to words in freedom the radiast must express himself in that freeword style which is already widespread in avant-garde novels and newspapers that typically swift quick synthetic simultaneous freeword style

13. Isolated word repetitions of verbs in the infinitive

14. Essential art

15. Gastronomic amorous gymnastic etc. music

16. The utilization of noises sounds chords harmonies musical or noise simultaneities of silence all with their graduations of appaggiatura crescendo and decrescendo which will become strange brushes for painting delimiting and coloring the infinite darkness of la radia by giving squareness roundness spheric in short

17. The utilization of interference between stations and of the birth and evanescence of the sounds

18. The delimitation and geometric construction of silence

19. The utilization of the various resonances of voice or sound in order to give a sense of the size of the place in which the voice is uttered.
The characterization as the silent as semisilent atmosphere that surrounds and colors a given voice sound or noise

20. The elimination of the concept or the illusion of an audience which has always had even for books a deforming and damaging influence.

RECOMMENDED READING: Ether: the nothing that connects everything

Ether The Nothing That Connects Everything Joe Milutis Table of Contents
Diagrams the interconnections among cosmic consciousness, hermetic avant-gardes, and technological progress. Every culture has its own word for this nothing. Synonymous with the idea of absolute space and time, the ether is an ancient concept that has continually determined our definition of environment, our relations to each other, and our ideas about technology. It has also instigated our desire to know something irrepressibly beyond all that. In Ether, the histories of mysticism and the unseen merge with discussions of the technology and science of electromagnetism. Joe Milutis explores how the ideas of Anton Mesmer and Isaac Newton have manifested themselves as the inspiration for occult theories and artistic practices from Edgar Allan Poe’s works to today. In doing so, he demonstrates that fading in and out of scientific favor has not prevented the ether, a uniquely immaterial concept, from being a powerful force for material progress. Milutis deftly weaves the origins of electrical science with alchemical lore, nineteenth-century industrialism with yogic science, and network space with dreams of the absolute. Linking the ether to phenomena such as radio noise, space travel, avant-garde film, and the rise of the Internet, he lends it an almost physical presence and currency. From Federico Fellini to Gilles Deleuze, Japanese anime to Italian Futurism, Jean Cocteau to NASA, Shirley Temple to Wilhelm Reich, Ether traverses geographical boundaries, spiritual planes, and the divide between popular and high culture. Navigating more than three hundred years of the ether’s cultural and artistic history, Milutis reveals its continuous reinvention and tangible impact without ever losing sight of its ephemeral, elusive nature. The true meaning of ether, Milutis suggests, may be that it can never be fully grasped. “A valuable example of how we might begin to rethink our discipline and consider sf texts horizontally, in relation to contemporary culture outside the field, as well as vertically in terms of the ongoing evolution of the genre itself.” —Extrapolation “Joe Milutis has spun together a fascinating and complicated network of associations—artistic, scientific, intellectual, and popular—about how we understand the concept of the space between things. And the fact that he picks and chooses his examples based entirely on what inspires him personally is understandable. After all, that’s what the book is really about. Milutis’ book is a manifesto for something that seems to be driving artists everywhere. Ether is a vehicle for all of these desires, as well as a nice accounting of the people who have begun tapping into them. And if they’re all as excited and prodigious as Milutis claims, we’re on our way to seeing something new emerging from the ruins of the 20th century.” —PopMatters “Ether has some three hundred years of influence. Here the ideas of electricity are woven with alchemical lore in a presentation that surveys the ether to ideas of space travel, film and even computers.”—Midwest Book Review “Milutis writes compellingly about how present-day electronics and the Internet have “etherized” life and commerce, and that this has material effects on how we live.” —Forecast Joe Milutis is assistant professor of art at the University of South Carolina. His writing has appeared in such publications as ArtByte, Wide Angle, Film Comment, and Cabinet. 224 pages | 22 halftones, 2 line art, 4 graphs | 5 3⁄8 x 8 1⁄2 | 2006