basic.fm & or-bits.com: 128kbps objects

or-bits.com is inviting artists to submit work for inclusion in the project 128kbps objects, a week-long internet radio broadcast on basic.fm that will explore the idea of objects in transformation.

basic.fm is a net radio broadcast project initiated by Pixel Palace. We are looking after it and nurturing it in the hope that one day it will grow up to be big and strong. basic.fm stands for Broadcast Art, Sound and Independent Culture. It is a slow growing project; each month we add new features and work.

The project 128kbps objects will look into contemporary notions of object-hood across a variety of artistic practices, mediums and sites, investigating the potentials of displaying objects sonically. It will take into considerations the characteristics of the web-tool employed, the internet radio, such as the erasure of visual language, the loss of direct interaction with artistic content, the relationship between speed and quality, for which, for instance, all the sonic data above quality threshold of 128 kilo bytes per second are cancelled out.

How would an object manifest itself, be thought of, described or narrated when its inherent material quality are taken away, when the viewer is not confronted with its visual appearance? How can an art object be thought of in relation to the nature of its reception and social presence within the context of an internet radio broadcast?

Many and varied are the discourses about the relationship between object-hood, medium and distribution, starting from Walter Benjamin’s observations on mechanical reproductions, and many are the trajectories these discourses have opened up: from looking at base materiality to social interaction, from the aura of the work of art to the disappearance of medium-specificity.
For Maurice Merleau-Ponty “to turn an object upside-down is to deprive it of its meaning” because it looses its spatial coordinates when confronted with the viewer, it looses its “natural position”. (in “Phenomenology of Perception”, 1945). Rosalind Krauss discusses spatiality through looking at the relationship between the object and the viewer’s field, and when writing about Robert Smithson’s mirrors in thw work “Enantiomorphic Chambers” (1964), says “it is not just the viewer’s body that cannot occupy this space, then, it is the beholder’s visual logic as well; Chambers explores what must be called a kind of “structural blindness”” (in “Formless. A User’s Guide”, 2007). Others, such as writers and critics more concerned with the status of the digital object or the so-called Post-Internet art, write about objects in connection to current “Internet-users tactics” employed by artists (Artie Vierkant in “The Image Object Post-Internet”, 2010), focusing on information dispersion, multiplicity of formats and convergence of mediums; “objects have lost exclusive singular spatial properties. They exist and manifest in fluid forms through different media. In this, there is no moral hierarchy or pure differentiation in authenticity” as Gene Gene McHugh writes in the press release of Harm van den Dorpel’s show “Rhododendron” at W139 in Amsterdam (“Endless Problem”, 2011).

or-bits.com has invited an array of artists, new and already featured on its online exhibitions, writers, curators and organisations to create a work or represent an existing one in response to the above text.

We also want to open up this project to other artists we don’t know and we are looking for contributions that will reflect and expand on these themes, or question them.

We look forward to receiving your contributions,
or-bits.com and basic.fm

Submission Guidelines:

Submission can be in the form of a sound work, music, a reading, a performance or an interview. They can be proposed to be broadcasted as a one-off or as a series to be presented at different times during the week of broadcast. This is an unpaid opportunity.

If you are submitting/describing potential playlists, or excerpts of other artists’ works, you will have to include a full list detailing name of artist, title of work, year and copyright holder, i.e. Distributor/record label (basic.fm holds PLL/PRS licences).

Sound files should be in mp3 128kbps format.

Deadline for submissions: 8 October 2012
Dates of broadcast: 22-28 October 2012

Submissions should be made via the basic.fm website: http://www.basic.fm/?page_id=1291