Radius: DECADE

24/7 FM and Online
Live Performance + Opening Reception
on The Quarantine Concerts:
Thursday, May 14, 2020 At 6PM CDT

Radius is an experimental radio broadcast platform established in 2010 that produces, exhibits, and distributes work by radio and transmission artists from around the world. Radius provides artists with live and experimental formats in radio programming and features new episodes by artists who use radio as a primary element in their work. The goal is to support work that engages the tonal and public spaces of the electromagnetic spectrum. http://theradius.us

“Slowness [...] allows us to experience our present with all its different speeds, and in all its complexity and diversity.” - Lutz Koepick The Aesthetics and Politics of Slowness: A Conversation

Radius’ new exhibition DECADE examines slowness, calling attention to radio’s relationship to time. In this celebratory moment, Radius will present new commission works by Hali Palomboand DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult, as well as a new 24/7 FM and online broadcast exhibition of the Radius Library and Episode archives.

Radius Episodes 91 and 92 are new episodes commissioned specifically for the Experimental Sound Studios’ presentation of DECADE. Episode 91 features a video installation to be viewed outside ESS’s Audible Gallery, a live performance, and broadcast of Hali Palombo’s GRAND DETOUR, a slow-scan television broadcast and soundscape depicting 32 desolate Midwestern scenes. Empty malls, weathered parking structures, shuttered toll booths and other cast-offs are revealed line-by-line via slow scan television, an increasingly obsolete method of image transmission via radio signal.

DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult’s The Gold Line will be featured as Episode 92. “The gold line” is a nick-name for the physical route that high frequency algorithms make between the New York and Chicago stock exchanges via a network of microwave radio radio repeaters. This episode documents a ‘slow’ road trip following these microwave repeater outposts and their surroundings using image and sound, learning about past and present uses of these transmission towers that are both a material memorial to radio history, and a physical reminder of passing time.

Radius DECADE broadcasts live throughout the run of the exhibition from May 14, 2020 until June 14, 2020 locally on 87.9-FM in West Edgewater neighborhood, 89.7-FM in Heart of Chicago neighborhood, and streaming online 24/7 at http://theradius.us. 

Radius DECADE premieres May 14, 2020 at 6:00 PM CDT on ESS’s The Quarantine Concerts with live performances and screening by Hali Palombo and DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult.