Making airwaves
Radio artist redefines the medium
BY Saara Liinamaa
Photography by Steve Payne
Sound and radio artist Anna Friz is always thinking inside and outside of the radio box. And her most recent project is the most ambitious yet: a massive performance piece with 55 radios and four FM transmitters for the Radio Revolten festival in Halle, Germany, which starts in late September. Blending live, on-site sound with pre-composed samples compiled from different sources, Friz is investigating how radio captures “what we don’t hear that comes from the living.”
Friz, who is based in Montreal, is not only a practising artist and producer, but also a radio theorist and scholar currently pursuing a PhD in communication and culture at York University.
Her enthusiasm for, and knowledge of, radio is boundless —she even provides introductory demonstrations, with a range of FM transmitters on hand, to clueless arts writers on how radio broadcasting works.
While many contemporary artists share her interest in sound and transmission, Friz is distinctly committed to radio as “the source, subject and medium” of her work, exploring what makes radio unique. While she approaches radio both as a mass-media form and an individual experience, she says one of her key interests is “not so much how radio is, but how it could be”—how we desire and dream through our media.
While Friz confesses to a childhood curiosity with the “people” living inside the radio, her adult interest in radio began when she started volunteering at UBC’s campus radio station, CiTR. She eventually became the Vancouver station’s program director, but soon found herself moving away from regular radio programming toward the production of experimental sound pieces and, finally, to fully realized art projects, much to her own surprise (who plans to be a sound artist?).
In 1998, she learned how to make her own one-watt FM transmitter (“It’s not hard,” she claims), and co-organized her first radio performance, which involved an eight-hour guerilla broadcast from the decommissioned bear pit in Stanley Park, Vancouver. The response? “People had very different reactions,” she says, from fascination to anger—disgruntled spectators even threw peanuts at the two performers.
Through her creative interrogation of radio, Friz’s art encourages us to rethink the medium as a cultural and aesthetic form. While radio’s mass-media plight is an important area for critical engagement, Friz also reminds us to look at its smaller, more localized and diverse applications. “These actions represent some of the most interesting current activities,” she explains. Instead of approaching radio as a straightforward process of broadcast and reception, she wonders: Can we conceive of it as a multi-directional network or dialogue?
Friz notes three distinct veins within her artistic practice. Following what she considers its most “conventional” aspect, she produces original radio pieces for broadcast in Canada and abroad. She is a regular contributor to Austrian radio art program Kunstradio, and has also produced works for public radio in Denmark, Mexico and Germany.
She also makes performance or installation art works that are as much about sound and the process of radio transmission as they are about creating a collective environment for “the unseen realm of radio space.” Finally, she takes radio “on the road.” And sometimes this road leads back to her own home. From her part-time Toronto residence, Friz periodically runs Free Radio Parkdale. She uses an extremely low-watt FM transmitter to broadcast (or, rather, microcast) to the immediate area, and invites local residents into her home to present their own material and create, at least for a moment, a community radio station.
