Walker Art Center
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Translocal Channel (Frequency Clock), February 8, 2003
http://channel.walkerart.org
           
Translocal Programmers

Danger Museum
lives and works in Singapore/Norway
Fran Ilich  b.1975  (Mexico)
lives and works in Mexico City and Berlin
Fatima Lasay  (Philippines)
lives and works in Philippines
Re:combo
lives and works in formed 2001, Recife, Brazil
Sarai Media Lab  (India)
lives and works in India
The Thing
lives and works in United States
Trinity Session
lives and works in South Africa
Walker Art Center
lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Launch the Translocal Channel

"DIY [Do It Yourself] communities and self-organizations are the main source of sustainability, the main force in the revival and continued development of today's post-planning cities. The creation and development of alternative art spaces is a perfect example. Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone shifts constantly between the existing center and the periphery creating a kind of 'emptiness' that subverts the established order.--Hou Hanru, "Initiatives, Alternatives: Notes in a Temporary and Raw State"

As part of the "zone" of the Temporary Autonomous Sarai of Raqs Media Collective and Atelier Bow-Wow, and in recognition of the dynamic importance of DIY communities, Translocations has asked a number of artist organizations around the world to program the Translocal Channel.

The Translocal Channel is a kind of incunabular global C-Span for the arts based on a streaming media player and scheduling software called Frequency Clock, itself developed by the artist group r a d i o q u a l i a (Adam Hyde and Honor Harger). Basically, Frequency Clock allows for distributed programming of multiple channels of streaming media content viewable over the Internet. As such it knits together geographically separated programmers, a loose network of hosting nodes, and a global audience with new media content that does not need to meet the homogenizing mcglobal standards of commercially driven, broadcast media. It is truly a set of translocal flows.

The Translocal Channel becomes a platform within the Temporary Autonomous Sarai--and on the Internet--for programmers around the world to insert their own point of view into the exhibition, from the periphery to the (Walker Art) center, so to speak. Content ranges from a bi-weekly two-hour live mix of sounds by Brazil-based Re:combo to a weekly series of programs by Trinity Session in South Africa to artist work from southeast Asia programmed by the Danger Museum to a lecture series on "New Ideas on Globalization," featuring such notable speakers as Tariq Ali, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Carol Becker.

Danger Museum
The Danger Museum is a nomadic organization whose codirectors are the artists Miho Shimizu, Řyvind Renberg, and Woon Tien Wei, working respectively from Japan, Norway, and Singapore. The Danger Museum adapts to each location that it visits and questions the basic functions of the art institution, hoping to fill the gaps that the art museum leaves behind. The Danger Museum's working practice is dedicated to bringing together projects from different cultural, geographical and social contexts. By creating a meeting point for artists, the Danger Museum aims to promote practices that are not widely documented. Danger Museum was established in 1998 and has previously been seen at Contemplation Room, Overgaden Gallery, Copenhagen (2002), The Show, Insa Art Centre, Seoul (2002) and Soft, International Institute of Visual Arts, London (2002).

Fran Ilich
http://delete.tv
Raised in Tijuana, Mexico, Fran Ilich is a filmmaker, novelist, screenwriter, new media artist, border activist, and organizer. Ilich serves as the general director of Cinemátik, the first cyber-culture festival in Latin America, as well as the editor at large of Sputnik Digital Culture, an online daily news service and monthly print magazine. He also moderates nettime-latino; edits the Mexico City edition of Rhizome; and is the author of the best-selling novel metro-pop. His screenplay of Interacción was broadcast on the Discovery Channel in Spanish and Portuguese and took second place at the 1st International Awards of Hispanamerican screenplay by the New York Film Academy & USA Network in 1997. His film Una Ciudad Sin Estilo was screened at the next SUPPOSED TO BE SMASHED TOGETHER? 5minutes III International Conference in Amsterdam in 1999 and is now part of the database of the Internationaal Instituut Voor Sociale Geschiedenis. Ilich's current project Modem Drama is a digital film collaboration with Ciberfeminista.org, a group of young Mexican feminists working with the Internet. His latest film will be shown at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Fatima Lasay
Fatima Lasay is an artist, writer, researcher, and assistant professor of new media art at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. She obtained her BFA in Industrial Design and MFA at the University of the Philippines.

Lasay's new-media projects include Manipulation (2000, Galeri Situ, Manila), Geocentricity and Gimokud the Melting Soul (2001, online), Healing Cultures through Digital Art (2002, online), and the Digital Media Festival 2000-2002 (Corredor Gallery,Manila).

Lasay may be contacted by e-mail (fats@up.edu.ph) or through the College of Fine Arts, Bartlett Hall, E. Jacinto Str., University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City 1101, Philippines. Her Web site is at .

Re:combo
Re:combo is a Brazil-based but now worldwide collective of "musicians, software engineers, DJs, professors, journalists, and computer geeks," who combine live events, peer-to-peer networking, and music resampling as their medium.

The Thing
Since its inception in 1991, THE THING has provided a flexible and supportive venue for developing, supporting, and presenting innovative media art and cultural criticism concerned with exploring the possibilities of digital aesthetics.

Initially, in 1991, THE THING took the form of a dial-up bulletin board system (BBS) that facilitated discussion and experimentation, primarily within New York City arts communities. In 1993, when UUCP (UNIX-to-UNIX copy protocol) technologies permitted broader communications throughout a small and scattered but vibrant community of like-minded people, THE THING took advantage of this to promote international exchanges and collaborations. And in 1995, when the rapid growth of the Internet made open activities on a full-time and global scale viable, THE THING again expanded and intensified its efforts by initiating individual and collaborative efforts with an extraordinary variety of artists and emerging new media artists.

Over the last decade, THE THING has played a seminal role not just in fostering a generation of network-oriented artists, critics, and curators, but also - and equally important - searching out ways to interconnect their diverse interests and activities.

From sponsoring a prescient electronic edition by the noted artist Peter Halley in 1993, the ranks of artists who were among the earliest to explore the possibilities of electronic networks through THE THING includes Beat Streuli, Mariko Mori, Martin Kippenberger. THE THING also presented the work of emerging (and now well-known) new media artists such as John Simon, Heath Bunting, Sawad Brooks, Vuk Cosic, Mark Napier & Andy Deck, Ricardo Dominguez, Prema Murthy, John Klima, Diane Ludin, and Daniel Pflumm. Similarly, then-emerging and now notable curators such as Benjamin Weil and Jordan Crandall undertook many of their foundational projects and networking activities in conjunction with THE THING.

Perhaps the strongest testimony to THE THING's protean status and activities is the fact that it has spawned independent "THING"s in Berlin (1993), Vienna (1993), Frankfurt (1994), Amsterdam (1994) and Rome (1999). While the success of these projects has been mixed depending on local conditions, all are still in operation. That the name "THE THING" is regarded internationally as a rubric for a constellation of interests and ethics confirms that THE THING has played a vital role in fostering an open dialogue between the established artists and arts institutions, digital culture, new media arts, and emerging artists.

One of the projects presented by The Thing is Radio Polyphony,a sound piece created by Paulo Vivacqua (Brazil), Federico Marulanda Rey (Colombia), Peter Lasch (Mexico), and Kelvin Park (S.Korea), in collaboration with THING.FM.

The piece consists of four sound channels composed in such a way that they can be heard either independently or mixed. Each channel is delivered over a different radio frequency or internet stream (or both), sometimes simultaneously, sometimes not. The piece therefore shuns a unified listening experience, and it is not accessible to any audience as a whole. Nevertheless, events will be organized around those times and places in which it will be possible to hear some or all channels at once.

The four channels are:

1) Internet stream 1: Generative sound process in SuperCollider. This stream can be heard at: http://audio.thing.net:8000/icy_1

2) Internet stream 2/Mini FM transmitters: Looping pre-recorded composition. 2 CD players generate a mix of prepared sounds. As the CDs are of different length, the loops go on for several days without repetition. This stream will be up by the end of this week.

3) Radio broadcast 1: Computer composition in MetaSynth.

4) Radio broadcast 2: Pre-recorded composition.

The piece will be unfolding from Feb. 28 to April 18.

The project's website provides an ongoing overview of the piece, while serving as its final score. It lists the net addresses and the specific frequencies and ranges of broadcast sources playing the different channels during the development of the piece. It is accessible for the duration of the event at http://fm.thing.net/radiopolyphony.

The Trinity Session
Directors: Stephen Hobbs, Kathryn Smith, Marcus Neustetter
The Trinity Session is an independent contemporary art production team practising in public art projects, project initiation and production, curating, researching and critical writing. Specialized interest areas include urban development and criticism, technology, pathology and the body, electronic art and online culture.

The end of 2000 saw a radical change in how the local artworld was structured, with several galleries and institutions closing or restructuring in the face of a tight economic climate less favourable to contemporary arts and culture. As a result, we believe that the processes of absorbing, producing, communicating and representing art will shift in interesting ways that will often seem invisible in the so-called artworld landscape. We are interested in intercepting such interstices and making them tangible, working with a number of socially-focused visual art and research projects and curated exhibitions.

By acting as correspondents and consultants, and approaching the work process from a network and "accommodation and exchange of information" angle, the purpose of our working dynamic is to produce in a cross-platform, multidisciplinary way with artists, institutions and corporate brands and services. Our interests lie in closing some of the gaps between contemporary art, fashion and culture by interpreting and visualising trends and developments in collaboration with these like-minded partners.

Individually, Trinity members lecture at various institutions in Gauteng and have been commissioned to write for a number of publications including www.artthrob.co.za, Art South Africa magazine, the Taxi and Fresh series' (artists' monographs), Flash Art International, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Fine Art Forum and Contemporary.

Current developments include relaunching a project room/ gallery space, The | PREMISES, in Johannesburg and reconnecting sanman (Southern African New Media Art Network), a resource that promotes new media art and technology amongst audiences and artists in South Africa and networks companies, institutions and individuals that share similar interest in this field.
http://www.onair.co.za
ts@onair.co.za

Walker Art Center
Walker copresents New Ideas on Globalization with the University of Minnesota Humanities Institute, the Institute for Global Studies, and the European Studies Consortium.



To promote cultural difference and hybridity in contemporary art, one must first and foremost consider the need to create alternative contexts, namely institutions, for art activity.
The local is becoming the alternative, and it contributes to a redefinition of the nature of the audience through the involvement of communities.
The real challenge that we are facing as curators and museum workers is how to unfold an "alternative" within the social constructs of cultural institutions.
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