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As part of the arcane transmissions performance series, cloaca projects and The Lab present The Other Spectrum, including of a lecture by Rick Prelinger (Prelinger Library) on “useful radio,” and a live transmission art performance by Anna Friz & Jeff Kolar.
The Other Spectrum: Useful Radio
A Lecture by Rick Prelinger
Useful radio is defined by its utility, as distinct from broadcast radio whose function is to entertain, inform and exhort. Useful radio regulates the labor and mobility of humans, animals and vehicles on land, sea and in the air; supports state functions, including combat, policing and surveillance; enables infrastructures of production, distribution and consumption; and links networks of technically- literate and non-technical people. As a multidirectional system of transmitting and diffusing commands, instructions and situational information, useful radio has from its origins simultaneously mapped and reproduced geographies of power and control. At the same time, manifestations like citizens band (CB) and low-power handheld radios have enabled uncountable acts of resistance and rebellion. Useful radio has played a key role in workers’ organizations, civil rights and antiwar movements and youth rebellion, and it might be considered the pulse of the January 6 Capitol riot.
Rick Prelinger, Emerit Professor of Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz, is an archivist, filmmaker, writer and educator. He began collecting “useful cinema" (films made for specific purposes at specific times, such as advertising, educational and industrial films) in 1983. His collection of 60,000 films was acquired by Library of Congress in 2002, and since that time Prelinger Archives has again grown to include some 40,000 home movies and 7,000 other film items. Beginning in 2000, he partnered with Internet Archive to make a subset of the Prelinger Collection (now over 9,700 films) available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world, and his feature project No More Road Trips? received a Creative Capital grant in 2012. His 35 Lost Landscapes participatory urban history projects have played to many thousands of viewers in San Francisco, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere. He is a board member of Internet Archive and frequently writes and speaks on the future of archives. With Megan Prelinger, he co-founded Prelinger Library in San Francisco in 2004. Since 2016, he has been researching and writing about useful radio.
https://prelingerlibrary.org/home/
The Other Spectrum
A Transmission Art Performance by Anna Friz and Jeff Kolar
Anna Friz and Jeff Kolar have collaborated together for more than a decade on various musical and radiophonic projects around the world. Taking a deep dive into Rick Prelinger’s radio listening archives as well as their own, Anna and Jeff create a radiophonic world that traverses historical and live shortwave, UHF and VHF bands; from air traffic control to citizen’s band, from encrypted security systems to emergency scanners. Employing actual and sampled radio together with electronic instruments, the artists tune and detune the ordinariness, the urgencies, and the intimacies of everyday radio communications, exploring the musicality and the geographies of transmission ecologies.
Captioning produced with technical collaboration from Abram Stern.
Anna Friz is a radio, sound and media artist. She has presented work internationally since 1998; recent venues include The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Sonandes Bienal Internacional de Arte Sonoro (La Paz, Bolivia), Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro (Valparaíso and Santiago, Chile), Bienal Sur (Argentina), Heroines of Sound Festival, Berlin Germany), esc Medien Kunst Labor (Graz, Austria), Donaueschinger Musiktage 2024 (Donaueschingen, Germany), Radio Art Zone (Esch-Zur-Alzette, Luxembourg), Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, Austria), RE:SOUND Festival (Aalborg, Denmark) and more. Her radio artworks have been commissioned by national public radio in Canada, Australia, Austria, Finland, Germany, Denmark, and Spain, and heard on public and independent airwaves all over the world. Anna is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and won the Karl Sczuka Prize in 2024. She is currently Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Jeff Kolar is a sound artist, composer, and founder of Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform established in 2010. His work, described as “wonderfully strange” (John Corbett) and “characteristically curious” (Marc Weidenbaum), activates sound in unconventional, temporary, and ephemeral ways. His solo and collaborative installations and performances often investigate the mundane sonic nuances of everyday electronic devices. His work has been exhibited internationally at the Smithsonian Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, CTM Festival for Adventurous Music, Radio Revolten Radio Art Festival, and reviewed in The New York Times, The Wire Magazine, Red Bull Music Academy, and more. He has ongoing collaborations with Anna Friz, Jennifer Monson, Zeena Parkins, jonCates, and NRRF Radio Collective.
The Lab graciously acknowledges the support of the National Endowment forthe Arts’ Grants for Arts Projects program in the production and presentation of arcane transmissions.