September 18, 2004
Automated Prayer Machine
Immersive Radio
The Automated Prayer Machine repositions radio as an antidote to despair. We create an expansive radiophonic sound environment by manipulating signals rebroadcast through a low-watt FM transmitter to multiple receivers in the audience. Digital video projection, live accordion, violin and voice complete the circuit, activating the metaphorical prayer machine.
"Bridging locative media and radio, as well as offering a critical and feminist voice, is the work of Anna Friz...and Annabelle Chvostek...Automated Prayer Machine...seeks to "proactively change the function of radio" by integrating radio speakers into (what was) the audience, thereby "activating acoustic listening space that also has a radio quality... making one aware of being out in the audience, in an immersive radio experience."
Mixing live radio samples, shortwave noise, fundamentalist talk radio, and prayers sent via voicemail and email, Chvostek and Friz are reinserting community voices and empowering wireless practice and discourse by spanning the tradition of radio with an awareness of context and location that addresses the crucial tensions of the wireless arts. For Friz, "radio addresses the same subjects new media tried to address. The hopes are and were the same, the barriers are the same: Who are you when you are in this mediated state? What is it that you want? How profound is this communication, and through the distance and nearness of geography? In new media, the tool still leads the work: beware the tool that leads." From "Sound Tracks and Data Footprints Stalking the footfalls and echoes of the wireless invisible," Tobias C. van Veen, HorizonZero, Issue 15.
Posted by jo at September 18, 2004 08:39 AM
