Specialising and Exhibiting
Week2-Sound Arts Lecture Series
Anna Friz creates media art, sound, and transmission art, working across platforms to present installations, broadcasts, films, and performances. Her creative and scholarly works often reflect upon media ecologies, land use, infrastructures, time perception, radio and transmission art histories, and critical fiction. She specializes in self-reflexive radio for broadcast, installation, or performance, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. Currently, her focus is on a series of audiovisual works under the title We Build Ruins, which expressively consider mining and industrial corridors in the high-altitude desert in northern Chile; and a 22-hour radio artwork based on field recordings along the northern California coast within the fog line, commissioned for Radio Art Zone, a 100-day radio art station for Esch2022, which will be broadcast in the south of Luxembourg by Radio ARA on 87.8 FM.
https://absolutevalueofnoise.bandcamp.com/album/solar-radio-embodied-radio-device
We Build Ruins: Umbrella title for a suite of pieces created from fieldwork in the Atacama desert in Chile from 2017-2022. Consisting of audiovisual, audio, and radio works, We Build Ruins reflects on landscape, infrastructure, and environmental change, exploring the micro and macro scales of human intervention and activity in harsh yet complex environments which occupy the space between urban sprawl and wilderness, and investigates the role of people as agents in the myth-making and storytelling process which bring critique and create counter-narratives to those of progress and growth that propel unsustainable extractivist corporate and state-sponsored industries.
Embodied Radio Device is a collaboration between Absolute Value of Noise and Anna Friz. The two team up to present a mixture of sounds based on artificial intelligence and human controlled synthesizer systems. Absolute Value of Noise’s outdoor installation work – Solar Radio – provides the “artificial”. It responds to its environment and the state of the sun by playing with simple AI sound synthesis algorithms. Anna Friz brings an analog feel to the piece, working with her voice and a variety of radio gadgets and cottage-built electronics. Here and there, Absolute Value of Noise adds a few breaths on the cornet.
I am very interested in how Anna Friz making radio as an instrument, so I spent time on reading her blog post: SOLAR RADIO AT WAVE FARM.
She mentioned:” Some years in the future, or perhaps in a surplus version of the present, a solar-powered artificial intelligence wakes with the sun. Its body is a small radio tower with solar cells and a modest signal. With sufficient solar intensity it powers up and responds to the environment, playing with simple AI sound synthesis algorithms in an attempt to imitate and broadcast what it senses nearby, such as insects, birds, frogs, wind, falling rain, changing weather, or magnetic phenomena. It hums and sings, perhaps accompanying a chorus of crickets or a passing bear, perhaps transmitting a memory of a bird from the recent or distant past and the song it sang then. The human culture that created this small artificial intelligence may have changed radically or may no longer exist, but it continues its sonic explorations, generating and remembering sounds, and transmitting signals to the inhabitants of its immediate animate world.”
Solar Radio relates to electrical power and small-scale computational systems. It moves away from the idea of power being instant and ubiquitous. Technologically, it embraces its limitations rather than combating them within the rhythms of the environment and the sun. It also speculates on relationships between artificial intelligence and the world that could take place beyond human intention or control. It is also an outdoor sound installation featuring a small artificial intelligence mounted to a short radio tower waking with the sun and sleeping when the light grows dim. It monitors the seasons and the amount of energy available to it through its solar cells, generating an evolving composition in response to environmental conditions. It captures sounds with very high sensitivity, talking about the juxtaposition between organisms and electronics. I really loved the different sizes of sounds from the solar radio, it could capture micro sounds like raindrops, and also could detect the environment.