About Turbulence
Turbulence is a project of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA). Now celebrating 15 years, Turbulence has commissioned over 200 works and exhibited and promoted artists' work through its Artists Studios, Guest Curator, and Spotlight sections. As networking technologies have developed wireless capabilities and become mobile, Turbulence has remained at the forefront of the field by commissioning, exhibiting, and archiving the new hybrid networked art forms that have emerged. Turbulence works have been included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial ('00, '02, '04), and its Bit Streams and Data Dynamics exhibitions; Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; C-Theory, Cornell University; Ars Electronica, Austria; International Festival of New Cinema and New Media, Montreal; European Media Arts Festival, Germany; and the Sundance Film Festival, among others.

Turbulence.org is in the process of being archived at the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. The project is discussed in Virtueel Platform Research: Archiving the Digital by Annet Dekker and Rachel Somers-Miles.

In July 2004, in partnership with Michelle Riel, then chair of Teledramatic Art and Technology at California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB), we launched the Networked_Performance blog to explore the shifting paradigms in performative cultural practice. Our goal is to take the pulse of current network-enabled performance practice, to obtain a wide range of perspectives on current issues and interests—which we feel are underexamined—and uncover common threads. With over 8,000 entries, and 3,000 visitors per day, the Networked_Performance blog reveals an explosion of creative experimental pursuits, as artists explore the migration of computing out of the desktop PC and into the physical world, and the continuing advances in the internet, wireless telecommunications, sensor technologies and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Launched in April 2007, Networked_Music_Review (NMR) focuses on emerging networked musical and sound explorations made possible by computers, the Internet, and mobile technologies. NMR gathers data about projects, performances, composers, musicians, software and hardware. It includes interviews with artists, articles, papers and reviews. It provides up-to-date information on conferences, workshops, competitions, and festivals. Fifteen experimental works were commissioned for NMR in 2008.

In 2008, NRPA and its project partners created Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art); the goal was to develop and publish an online, trans-disciplinary book that would address recent artistic developments made possible by computers and mobile connectivity. Networked proposes that a history or critique of interactive and/or participatory art must itself be interactive and/or participatory; that the technologies used to create a work suggest new forms a "text" might take. We commissioned five chapters and published them online using Wiki/blog technology to enable the public to revise, update, debate and translate them. Additional chapters have been added since the project launched on August 1, 2009.

New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA) was founded in New York City in 1981 to foster the development of new and experimental work for radio and sound arts. In 1996, it extended its mandate to net art and launched its pioneering web site, Turbulence. In March 2002, NRPA opened an office in Boston to extend the geographic reach of its existing programs and explore new ones, and continue to build its audience for experimental sound and net art.

Now celebrating its 30th year of service to artists, NRPA has a distinguished history in two experimental fields, radio art (New American Radio] and net art; it has commissioned ($1,100,000 +), distributed and archived hundreds of works, thereby supporting and advancing many artists' careers, and establishing itself as a vital resource for arts and educational institutions, and the general public. It is the only organization in the United States that has as its core mission the commissioning of networked art by both emerging and established artists.

New American Radio, a weekly national radio art series, commissioned and distributed over 300 original works between 1987 and 1998, and was ranked with such high-profile programs as ABC Australia's "The Listening Room," and Austria's "Kuntsradio." Its works, which won numerous international competitions, were aired throughout North America, Europe and Australia. 300 full-length works have been archived at Wesleyan University, 140 at somewhere.org.

New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. thanks the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the LEF Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, mediaThe foundation inc., the Murray G. and Beatrice H. Sherman Charitable Trust, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Music Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency, The Greenwall Foundation, and Trust for Mutual Understanding for their support.
More About New American Radio

NAR was launched in 1987 as a 13-part pilot edition with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (PBS). It invited established and emerging artists from diverse ethnic backgrounds and with widely varying interests to participate in the radio production process: playwrights who might develop exciting radio equivalents to "Black Cinema" and "New Asian Cinema"; young musicians and audio artists whose work could engage with state-of-the-art sound technology and speak to young audiences with deep roots in popular culture; avant-garde radio artists from abroad who could offer different cultural sensibilities and bring intellectual complexity to radio work; master storytellers whose narratives could break open tired story formulas and speak with a contemporary voice; and performance artists with a natural affinity to fuse voice, sound, and music.

In the process, NAR took on the exciting challenge of developing a vocabulary for emerging radio art genres, and of finding ways to make this as yet undeveloped field accessible to diverse audiences. Its key goals were to: (1) encourage the development of an artistic practice that recognized radio's distinct means, parameters and artistic possibilities; (2) make possible a body of radiophonic work that over time would prove of permanent value; and (3) include new and under-represented voices and works that brought alternative versions of reality to the medium.

With support from the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts and others, NAR became the only nationally distributed, weekly radio art series in the country. The series went off the air in spring 1998. However, NRPA has received 5 consecutive grants from the NEA to archive the series at Wesleyan University and online at somewhere.org.

Networked Performance & Other Events

NRPA continues to be involved in experimental sound projects, for instance, "interaXis," a web and real space sonic exploration held at Engine 27 (New York), the California Institute for the Arts (Los Angeles) and online at Turbulence. NRPA has hosted and archived over 20 multilocation performance events in which artists from across the country have collaborated to create real-time performances simultaneously for online audiences and audiences gathered in real performance spaces.

Throughout its 30-year history NRPA has made public presentations of artistic work a significant part of its activity. For instance, it co-curated the Whitney Museum of American Arts' 1992 series Performing Bodies and Smart Machines with Jeanette Vuocolo and Toni Dove, organized two series of net art presentations at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, NY (2001, 2002); co-organized and presented Floating Points: Net Art Now (2004), Floating Points 2: Networked Art in Public Spaces (2005), Floating Points 3: Ubiquitous Computing (2006), OurFloatingPoints 4: Participatory Media (2007), Floating Points 5: Mixed Realities (2008), Floating Points 6: Games of Culture | Art of Games (2009) with Emerson College, Boston; and organized and co-presented Programmable Media: Open Platforms for Creativity and Collaboration (2007) and Programmable Media II: Networked Music (2008) at Pace University. We have also collaborated with Pace Digital Gallery on three exhibitions: Turbulence @ PaceDigitalGallery2 (2011), David Crawford Restrospective (2010), and Turbulence @ PaceDigitalGallery (2009). Upgrade! Boston, founded in January 2005, is a monthly gathering of new media artists and curators that fosters dialogue and creates opportunities for collaboration within the media art community. At each meeting one or two artists/curators present work in progress and participate in a discussion. Upgrade! Boston is a node in the Upgrade! International network. Among many other collaborations, we presented Re:Writing: Writers, Computers and Networks with the Electronic Literature Organzation in Providence RI, and Boston, MA in spring 2005.

NRPA STAFF [see bios]

Helen Thorington, Co-Director: newradio at turbulence dot org
Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director: jo at turbulence dot org
Jesse Gilbert, System Administrator

CONTACT
New York: 129 Tysen Street, Staten Island, NY, 10301
Phone: 917.548.7780
Massachusetts: 124 Bourne Street, Roslindale, MA, 02131
Phone: 617.522.3856
Email: turbulence at turbulence dot org
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