Since I was unable to attend in person, I was glad to have the opportunity to listen live online to some of the discussion from the Transmission Arts Colloquium hosted by free103point9 and community radio WGXC-FM a little more than a week ago. That program, featuring all of the featured colloquium guests, is now available for on demand listening at the WGXC website.
John Anderson of DIYmedia.net and Brooklyn College also wrote a short report of his weekend at the Hudson Valley Wave Farm, home to WGXC and a studio for transmission artists to work in residence. John notes that free103point9 started as an unlicensed micro-powered radio station, growing into a licensed community station and arts community located on 30 acres of woodlands.
John says that,
“Being primarily a teacher, journalist, and policy wonk, I often felt way over my head when issues of aesthetics and theory raised their heads (as they did often). I tried to employ policy-knowledge to help us suss out just where points for the fruitful transgression of communications law and regulation exist. Overall, engaging with these aspects of the larger world of transmission was a mind-expanding experience like none I’ve ever had.”
Listening to the live broadcast I thought that John’s contributions lent a nice foundation for the much of the discussion, given that the aesthetics and cultural politics of radio are always in dialog with a regulatory framework. I appreciated the international perspective introduced by participants from Austria, the UK and elsewhere, which only highlighted for me how the uses and place of radio differs from culture to culture and country to country, and that the US system of commercial radio and only semi-public financed public radio is not remotely universal.
I enjoyed how the panel of guests was rotated through the studio, giving the opportunity for each person to speak with host Tom Roe and the audience, as well a couple other panelists, before rotating in a new group of guests. I think Roe did a fine job of making such an arrangement work well, keeping the conversation fresh, without any one guest or topic dominate the discussion. I hope that additional audio from the weekend’s colloquium will make it online.
