Here is her bio:
Anna Friz is a sound, transmission and media artist, and media studies scholar. Her work reflects upon media ecologies, infrastructure and environment, time perception, radio and transmission art histories, and critical fictions, with a focus on listening, improvisation, site-specificity, and repurposing technologies. Since 1998 she has created self-reflexive radio for broadcast, installation or performance, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. She also creates large-scale audiovisual installations and composes for film, theater, and contemporary dance. Her most recent works include the outdoor transmission sculpture Solar Radio (with Absolute Value of Noise) at Wave Farm, NY; the 22-hour live radio performance Fog Refrain, and We Build Ruins, a series of media art works expressively considering mining and industrial corridors in the high altitude deserts in northern Chile. Anna is currently Associate Professor of Sound in the Film and Digital Media Department of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Anna’s work and uses of radio and sound interest me, especially the radio section. I’ve been doing reading into radio sound-art work as I wanted to incorporate radio within one of my portfolio works for next year. I think this should help give me some inspiration.
BREAKWATER
This project is an 8-channel installation piece that explores the breakwater in Vienna Austria. It uses field recordings of underwater sounds taken with a hydrophone and contact mics. Short wave recordings and electromagnetic recordings. Open air as well. It explores the idea of where multiple points meet, and swell together to create a communal experience.
I didn’t manage to find audio links to listen to this work but it does sound interesting, I built an electromagnetic microphone this year and find its usage of it super interesting, the sounds are there but we don’t see them.
GHOST IMBISS
Ghost Imbiss is a collaboration with other artists using limited minimalist broadcast technology to see if they can transmit small delicate sounds. Sounds used were saliva, mouth feedback device. AM/FM transmitters and receivers. Walkie-talkies, glass bottle and the voice.
This project sounds really interesting. I hope she plays some of this work in her lecture!
Post Lecture Reflection
Anna starts by speaking about her background, she began playing with sounds in her early 20s on a community radio station in Vancouver Canada. Working in the studio was the first chance she got to use sonic equipment. Using old equipment gave her hands-on experience. She very much thought of the studio as a performative space.
Because they only had a two-track reel-to-reel player, when creating anything she had to perform into the tape machine and use the mixing desk as a performative tool instead of having multi-track recorders.
She very much began being used to having a silent audience. This habit has stuck with her, even today thinking about what sounds to play, she finds herself doing the same as she did back then. Layering up layers and making a piece in real-time.
She has had a chance to present her sound work in many different places, from outside in the field, concert venues, installations and even more industrial places.
The pandemic has pushed her to be back on the radio, especially because of being at home. So she’s been interested again in radiophonic questions. Radiophonic has returned to the foreground for her. She decides to play us a piece which discloses her current electromagnetic interests.
She took part in a project where artists were asked to create a piece that reflects their position on transmission. She is really interested in thinking about media ecology and ecology more broadly and she is drawn into looking at depth into things that are underground and in the air. The surface tensions in the space. She says it comes from listening in boundless radio and areas of noise and rhythmic sorts of interference. Embodiment is also important to her, she doesn’t like that the radio voice is disembodied. There are bodies everywhere in the voice, you couldn’t habit a voice If you haven’t inhabited your body.
She’s also been further interested in this question raised by radio, this experience of distance. In communication media there has been this obsession with overcoming distance, She’s interested in the opposite, enjoying the distance between the transmitter and the receiver. During this time of covid, she’s been listening to a two-way radio, a place of practical communication. If it’s air traffic control or anyone else using a walkie-talkie or a two-way radio. The idea of useful radio is a way of digging into the evidence of human presence without looking at street traffic or other things that people might see.
She was invited to a festival with lots of other creatives for a 22hr festival performance. Some created pre-recorded and some created live pieces. She decided to make a 22hr performance, she was working with the notion of acoustic and electromagnetic sounds in the fog line on the bay area coast.
The fog is a super important part of the ecosystem she lives in, a lot of plants and trees rely on the fog as moisture in her area. Climate change is diminishing the amount of fog and this has affected the forests severely. The fog is this balm for the dry landscape and accounts for most of the moisture the plants need. The fog establishes space in this area, but also this ambiguous medium, it’s difficult to pin down its form.
She’s interested in morse code beacons that would help navigation in boats. These would give boats easier ways to navigate. Most are still discontinued but there are a few that get triggered once the fog begins.
In her 22 hr piece, she worked with field recordings, people and creatures within this sphere and electromagnetic sphere and radio workers using walkie-talkies. She then shows us a part of the piece.
She discusses the walkie-talkie field recordings that she uses within this piece, she’s interested in how this represents humanity without photos of traffic for example.
She now wants to show us another piece that also has a visual element, but she’s interested in the nonhuman element of this previous idea she’s discussed. She created a live performance video that she was doing during covid at home through Twitch.
She now wanted to show us the video as now we know what’s going on in the air, this piece shows us what is going on underground.
She’s also been thinking about radio and transmission systems, and she’s been researching this desert in Chile. It’s well known because high-powered telescopes are located there, and star viewing is incredible there. It’s also a place historically been fought over during colonial times as a site of extraction, salt mining and also ongoing massive issues of copper and lithium mining. This area has undergone a real transformation in this industry, and as a medium maker this is the materials that she uses, the demand during the pandemic has increased for these materials. When she is recording and filming in these mines the scope is expanding and expanding.
She then says she will play us a multichannel installation with three screens, one screen is focused on the salt flats and a part of the desert that isn’t transformed yet by human activity and is adjacent to the location of a huge lithium mine. This area was once the bottom of the sea but now is at a very high elevation.
When working on Longform projects she wants to create a tenant on how to approach the project. Her project in the desert has been about attention to time, duration, and the interplay between soft and hard power. This isn’t just human and non-human, but hot air rising from the desert, that the turkey vultures use to cruise on. The dune is about to collapse into the close city. How the desert outlasts everything.
In her discussion, she also talks about bodies being a field recording device which is interesting itself, something I’ve been thinking myself for a while.
I found her talk overall thoroughly interesting and relatable towards my practice, the Anthropocene is definitely a large issue within this work and other pieces of hers. The uses of two-way and short-wave radio and the thoughts around the silent listener and the imaginary listener are of interest to me. She also discusses using pieces of equipment within her work that create the problems, recorders and laptops with lithium batteries from the minerals that are extracted within the desert. The question that ponders is if the field recording and the works are self-aware and can justify a balance between the need to listen as a way of understanding and wanting to create environmental change and or if this adds to the problem.