conceptual
framework
Re-Imagined Radio explores sound, storytelling, and imagination as research. Explore the theories and ideas guiding our creative practice, connecting radio art with listening as inquiry.
What we are
Re-Imagined Radio is a collaboration between academics and practicing artists who experiment with sound(s) as human expression. RiR uses literary (narrative, storytelling, listening, and imagination) and creative features of the radio medium to create shared listening experiences for contemporary audiences.
Who we are
Re-Imagined Radio is a collaboration between academics and practicing artists who experiment with sound(s) as human expression. RiR uses literary (narrative, storytelling, listening, and imagination) and creative features of the radio medium to create shared listening experiences for contemporary audiences.
What we do
Re-Imagined Radio offers radio storytelling to engage listeners' imaginations. Rather than text, code, or other formal systems, RiR combines dialogue, sound effects, music, research, and creative practice to offer radio stories that are compelling, engaging, immersive, and interactive. And then curates the resulting artifacts and information using several forms of the radio medium.
How we do it
Re-Imagined Radio begins with voice, music, and sound effects, drawing these fundamental elements from classic and contemporary dramas, comedies, aural and oral histories, documentaries, fictions, soundscapes, and radio art. RiR curates the results using several forms of radio and social media as stories to engage the mind's eye and spark the imagination.
Why we do it
Re-Imagined Radio believes the radio medium can combine literary experiences, like writing, reading, speaking, and listening, with features and affordances of digital media art, like immersion, interaction, and engagement. RiR remixes sonic forms to experiment with what radio storytelling can mean as contemporary community expression.
What does it mean?
Re-Imagined Radio remixes various sonic forms to experiment with radio storytelling as 21st century community expression and engagement.
Transmission Art
Transmission art is a multiplicity of practices and/or performances—like video art, theater, media installation, networked art, and acoustic ecology—that engage aural and video broadcast media. Often, transmission arts are live, participatory, time-based, dynamic and fluid, always open to redefinition, intent to put communication tools in the hands of artists / the public for the realization of democratic cultural communication networks. As a result, the media are used in ways different from their original (commercial) intention. Galen Joseph-Hunter, et. al. document how this interplay prompts redefinition(s) of artist and audience, transmitter and receiver, along with the telecommunications airwaves as the site for its practice (Joseph-Hunter)
Radio Medium
Andrew Dubber says the radio medium is a collection of different, but related, phenomena. It is a category of media content with its own characteristics, conventions, and tropes; an institution; an organizational structure; a series of professional practices and relationships; and more. As a result, radio work, content, technologies, or cultures should not be considered as single subjects or processes, but rather part of an ecology, especially within the digital media environment in which radio is increasingly situated (Dubber). Following Dubber's description, we believe the radio medium is capable of more than just commercialism. It is certainly creative. But more importantly, radio is capable of connecting sound(s) and listeners' imaginations. More dramatically, Fred MacDonald says only in radio does "audial suggestion and imagination [conspire] to create illusion" (57). We think this connection also prompts emotion, interaction, participation, and immersion. Ways of making story worlds, and ways of being in them.
Radio Art
Radio art uses radio technologies to transmit (broadcast) content to distant listeners for their consumption via receivers (radios). Radio art is characterized as a collision / collusion between the ancient traditions of orality and the instant information access of mass communication systems. Re-Imagined Radio proceeds under the following assumptions. Radio art evokes sound, hearing, and listening as real and concrete participatory practices. Radio art creates immersive contexts rich with aural and acousmatic narrative opportunities, a sequence of events experienced by listeners as telling about a person, place, event, idea, and more. Radio art provides new opportunities for sounds from various sources and cultures to create and sustain new narrative strategies and subvert historical media conventions.
Radio Storytelling
By Radio Storytelling we mean stories combining voice, music, and sound effects shared with our listening communities as radio broadcasts, live and on demand streaming, podcasts, and social media experiences.
Community Storytelling
Re-Imagined Radio began as live performances of radio programs in an historic movie theatre, and occasionally we continue that tradition. Community storytelling moves radio—which began as an experimental, popular fad in the 1920s, to "the most compelling medium in communications" (MacDonald 89). We outline this process in the following way. Radio art = an art form, a way to create art. Transmission art = a way to share that art. Radio + transmission art = a bridge between art and popular culture. The overlap of radio + radio art + transmission art = community art, sites for narrative and storytelling. The result = old medium, new engagement. Nothing to see. Everything to hear. Re-Imagined Radio.