Radio Silents
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OFF LABEL Festival
OPEN SPACE, Victoria
November 9 - 15, 2011
(Part of Digital Art Weeks, Zürich)
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Radio Silents is a radio transmission consisting of layers of blank reel-to-reel tape broadcast from a low-power transmitter in the gallery space. Radio Silents is in response to two texts, one by Heinrich Böll (Murke’s Collected Silences) and Walter Benjamin (On the Minute). Both of these texts include different experiences of broadcasted silence. In Benjamin’s case, the accidental silent broadcast is a moment of terror, one to recover and repair. In Böll’s case, his protagonist, a radio producer who steals strips of reel to reel radio recordings of silent pauses in between sounds on the radio, finds solace in the radio silence. In fact he seeks them out and edits them together, listening to the collected silences later at home in the evening as a form of reverie.