Tuesday 21 Oct 2008 will see the official launch of the book, Re-inventing Radio. I was one of several contributors to this important collection of essays, considerations, reflections and questions.

The book will have been launched at The MAK where I will have appeared on a small panel with the editors and performing GRIT #02. The performance will feature the found film experimental video piece, Rot Emulsion, by Andrew Thomas and myself.

I am, of course, terribly proud to be involved with yet another fine publication with the likes of Heidi Grundmann and her fellow travellers, and of course, another KunstRadio production.

Re-Inventing Radio
Aspects of Radio as Art
Frankfurt/Main 2008, Revolver, 544 pages, 200 images, English
ISBN 978-3-86588-453-4
25,- EUR

Edited by: Heidi Grundmann, Elisabeth Zimmermann, Reinhard Braun, Dieter Daniels, Andreas Hirsch, Anne Thurmann-Jaje.

It's been well over three months now since KunstRadio first invited me to propose a new piece for production and broadcast. The idea being that I would produce and perform the work during my stay in Austria. After much musing, reading and eyes to the sky, it was a walk through Graz's Schlossbergplatz early this evening that the piece came to me, bringing together my solo voice work, spectrum concerns and the recent collaboration with PD maestro, Frank Barknecht.

Requiem in A Modulation is multi-modal radiophonic composition for solo voice, aleatoric^[1] micro-tonal scales and valve radios. Inspired by Mozart's Requiem in A Minor, Requiem in A Modulation is a mass mourning the death of analogue spectrum. mass mourning the death of amplitude modulation - the analogue broadcast spectrum. Commissioned by KunstRadio for live broadcast, on-air and online, 2 December 2008.

Project notes and other work in progress for this piece on the wiki.

The NOTHINGKNOWN prototype was launched as part of the CPU series at ESC, Graz, on Saturday, 4 October. The opening was part of an organised day trip of various galleries coinciding with the start of the city wide festival,  Steirischer Herbst.

The soundscape was generatively created from a piece that ran for 9 days. It consists of field recordings made from Iban longhouse communities in 1999.

For more information, exhibition details and aknowledgements:
http://agarton.org/wiki/index.php?title=Nothing_Known

Note: this piece is frequently updated as changes are made in response to feedback and discussion with other participating artists and visitors to the gallery.

The ESC tech support person, Peter, helped to ensure my pieces were complete in the hour before people arrived by sharing the rendering and compressing load... we also managed to get a Toy Satellite showreel completed for another space at ESC. It become a popular spot for visitors to the gallery who found the soundscapes comforting, as someone described...

The NOTHINGKNOWN prototype turned out just as I had intended... I was moved by how it well it was received and that people have taken an interest in the Sarawak land rights issues the piece is largely drawn from.

Arrived in Vienna this morning stiff and achy. There's far too little leg room in Austria Airlines flights. I'd promised myself I'd not fly with them any more, but hard to tell who's flying who with all the carrier deals going. I thought I'd be on Thai Air, but they took me from Melbourne to Bangkok only.

I'll be based in Graz for at least a couple of months with plans for a white Christmas, the first ever, with family here. It's been a long while since I've worked on a gallery piece. The ESC Gallery is giving me that opportunity with my new installation, Nothing Known. When I think about it, I've had more invitations like this from Austria than any other country and certainly far more than at home.

Kenyah elder, Sarawak

I want to put the faces of indigenous Sarawak on large screens, the larger the better. At very slow frame rates one will see the faces shown in detail, in close up with the camera tracking over contours of skin, facial outlines, eyes...

I'd learnt in Sarawak that archiving cultural knowledge, indigenous cultural knowledge does little to protect it. It becomes remembered in research, coffee table chatter, gossip... the deepest transmission occurs through presence... physical, immediate presence. The songs, the dances, hunting, farming, the stuff of life, accumulated generational knowledge, wisdom... from what I'd seen, from the interviews we had with the eldest people in one of the Bidayuh Kampongs, one generation is all it takes to lose their story-tellers and musicians.

The story was the same in South Africa. Meeting the anthropologist Barbera Tyrrell (on her 94th birthday!) it was clear her attempt to record traditional and ceremonial garments from many African tribes was but a drop in the proverbial ocean. She'd told me that there were few people in the various Diaspora on the continent that could remember what their own people had worn let alone danced in at least one to two generations past.

More when I'm less tired and a charged laptop...