Crossing Borders: Internet, Performance, and Other Networks Promoting New Productions and Forms of Listening
The following is a small sample of sound artists presently active in Brazil. The first one is Floriano Romano. Romano began his activities as a sound artist producing a radio show about and with visual artists on Radio Madame Satan, broadcasted from a studio somewhere in the center of Rio de Janeiro. O Inusitado (The Unusual), as the program was named, was broadcasted from 2002 to 2004. It was intended to “conduct a series of poetic, musical, and plastic experiments inside a sprawling space in horizontal ultrasonic waves […] of a radio in this city in flight.” After this period Romano started carrying out performance experiments, interventions with sound objects in public spaces: for example, strolling in shopping streets, malls, or supermarkets with a backpack-mounted radio speaker that repeated “Attention, do not pay attention” or walking through the air-polluted center of Rio de Janeiro and other cities with his gas mask look-a-like Máscara Sonora, which includes two speakers that incessantly produce coughing sounds. In addition to these interventions, Romano works in partnership with other artists, such as Eliana Carvalho and Clara Kutner, for whom he built a sound stage upon which they have danced in Corpo Ressonante (Resonant Body) in the Dance Panorama at the School of Visual Arts. Another collaboration took place with the production “Crude (Music for Walls)," composed by Guilherme Vaz, performed for the first time at the Paris Biennale in 1973, and reproduced for the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro in 2011.
Thelmo Cristovam is a researcher in psychoacoustics, improviser, noise-artist, and sound and radio artist. Currently he also works with photography, video, and text. Cristovam studied physics and mathematics at the Pernambuco Federal University, where he was inspired by the areas of dynamic systems, chaos theory, and non-formal logics when thinking about the sound art he would start producing. In 2001 he started his experiments in electroacoustic composition. In 2003 he began researching real-time composing in the context of free improvisation. He also developed a project involving astronomy, astro-seismography, and astro-seismology, resulting in a work with cosmic sounds, specifically sounds of solar flares that are at their peak.[10] One of his most impressive projects, which had the support of Petrobras and FUNARTE-MINC, was an extensive sonic geography of remarkable Pernambuco landscapes, such as the Fernando de Noronha island and the Catimbau Valley.
We can speak of a new climate for sound art in Brazil, although the inclusion of sound art is still understood to be quite alternative in relation to radio program broadcasting. This can be seen by the invitation of the group Mobile-radio.net to install a radio station during the 30th São Paulo Art Biennial in 2012. The group broadcast a wide range of productions through its low power transmitter in FM, which could be heard only up to the limits of Ibirapuera Park (as Brazilian telecommunication rules allow no bandwidth for this kind of alternative radio, even if supported by the Biennial brand), later reaching a wider audience as web radio. It broadcasted interviews with artists who were exhibiting at the biennale, items on public school children who took guided tours of the biennale, and programs by sound art groups.[11] Paisagens & Poéticas: São Paulo (Landscapes & Poetics: São Paulo) was a program produced by Renata Roman who, each week, combined her own field recordings of a neighborhood in São Paulo with poetry read by a poet resident in that neighborhood. A more pop-oriented program was produced by MCs Rogerio Krepski, Henry Mussumano, and XTO, a web radio station broadcasting from a van in a random street of São Paulo each day. At the same time, the BSP Radio/mobile-radio programmed regular broadcasts from Radio Resonance (London), RadiaLx (Lisbon), ORF-1Kunstradio (an experimental Austrian public radio station), and Radia retrospective with selected programs from radios belonging to the worldwide network Radia.
With the possibilities of the internet, new producers are emerging. Free from the formal and thematic restrictions of conventional radio stations, these independent producers operate across broad fronts: from programs dedicated to phonographic files (e.g. Goma Laca by Biancamaria Binazi), recordings of live performances (e.g. Alexandre Marino from Al Revés), broadcasting international works and channels, to cultural and artistic announcements connected to radio productions (e.g. Debora Pill and Elizah Rodrigues). These new actors are rediscovering radio and giving it vigor, providing clues that the broadcasting channels consolidated in Hertzian waves are, less and less, places where radio can reinvent itself. There are podcasts, radio stations that publicize and provide broadcasting space for events in museums as well as exhibitions of contemporary art, workshops, blogs, and performances. It seems that experimental radio can survive without the backing of official broadcasters, a support that was vital and motivating for the first experimenters of the 1970s up until 2000. Perhaps, at some future bend in the road, educational and public broadcasters, and even commercial ones, may realize the need to incorporate this creative potential so that they do not become mere curiosities in a museum of communications.