Networks

Public Supply I, WBAI, New York, 1966, Radio Station WBAI New York City
Dimensions: 20 miles in diameter, Extant: October 8, 1966 8:30 - 10:00 PM -

- First broadcast work

Student in residence, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey

'At the same time, I started in another direction which I now call Networks; these are inter-connections of lay people again, having a dialogue with sound that is beyond language. I did the first one, also in the middle of the sixties, with a radio station in New York City. It involved doing something which was unheard of at that time: I plugged the telephone system into the radio station. I installed ten telephone lines at the station and asked people to call in during a two-hour period with whatever sounds they wanted. It created a live sound collage made with the participation of anybody within a twenty-mile radius the ten million people who were living there. These Networks gradually progressed into a series of radio/telephone events, in different cities. In the middle of the seventies I realized one for the whole of the USA with two hundred radio stations and five cities where people called into. I made huge trans-continental loops to transform their sounds.It was called Radio Net. At that time the word ‘network’ wasn’t a word in general us; it was a word that engineers knew but if you mentioned ‘network’ in a cultural context or any kind of conversation except with an engineer, no-one would know what it was. With these network ideas, I was also trying to go beyond the event and make them into entities. I was trying to figure out how I could take over a radio station twenty-four hours a day, or a network of radio stations. Fortunately, though, the Internet arrived. As of last year there is a work, Auracle, which is there twenty-four hours a day at a site called www.auracle.org. It is a point of meeting to create a network of people who play an instrument together using their voice'.

Hans Ulrich Obrist interview with Max Neuhaus

22 Aug 05

hans-ulrich-obrist-interview-with-max-neuhaus-2005

“Radio Net.” For two hours on 200 NPR stations in 1977, sound artist Max Neuhaus conducted a massive experimental audio symphony using processed sound from callers all around the nation. It’s a vivid reminder of the audacious experimental artistic force NPR once was.Previously unpublished video of the preparations for and execution of Radio Net:

Public Supply I - WBAI, New York City, 1966, 2 hours

Public Supply III - WFMT, Chicago, 1973, 2 hours

Radio Net - Continental USA, 1977, 8 hours

Track #1 East transmit loop (New York, WNYC)

Track #2 Midwest transmit loop (Dallas and Chicago)

Track #3 South transmit loop (Atlanta, WABE)

Track #4 West transmit loop (Los Angeles)

 The concept of Audium dates from 1978. First published in German in: Vom Verschwinden der Ferne: Telekommunikation und Kunst, Dumont, Cologne, 1990.“all the activities we engage in to produce sound – from speaking a language to the way we play an instrument and how we compose – are part of a circular process”  Max Neuhaus

Excerpted from a talk given at the New School for Social Research, New York, March 1982 with addenda from 1984 and 1990:

AUDIUM

Audium proposes to create the impetus and means for an international human interchange with sound. It will form an entity for verbal and nonverbal aural exchange on a global scale: an aural community.

For most of it's past, music has taken a very different form from what it has become for us today. Historically, making music has been a communal activity rather than a performance for spectators. Highly developed musics evolved as group actions, indigenous to a community, and encompassing all its members as active participants. This once widespread human sound activity - a form of aural interchange separate from the verbal articulation of ideas --has been lost in most contemporary societies.

Spoken language, the original form for language development, evolves quickly, inventing vocabulary according to its needs. The basis for the development of each of the worlds existing languages has been simply the combination of a particular group of people in vocal contact with each other trying to communicate.

The project is composed of two parts, a Telephone Concourse and Broadcast Arenas. Telephone Concourse

Audium proposes to extend the concept of the teleconference into an international public place. It will form a specialized network of teleconferences: a Telephone Concourse.

The telephone creates what we might call an acoustic or aural space --- a point of contact through sound. The nature of this telephone space itself provides a different foundation for social activity. Its visual anonymity, its nonphysical nature and its independence from geography, have provided us with a new forum for the development of human activity.

During PUBLIC SUPPLY I, two people living in different sections of New York City, who had been childhood friends but who hadn't seen each other in twenty years, recognized each others voices and had an emotional reunion on the air. To me, this crystallized the idea of the communications network I had assembled as a public place --- they met in the same way that they could have, but didn't --- on the street.

The Telephone Concourse adds an additional dimension to the previous works. It proposes a social network as well as a musical one. It might be thought of as a construction of different spaces, where each teleconference is a space in the construction and has its own particular entrances and exits. Each of these spaces is connected by "passageways" to certain other spaces in the network - -- an intricate "building" constructed from sound interconnections rather than physical ones. It is accessible from any telephone, people move between groups by changing teleconferences, they enter or leave the Concourse by picking up or putting down the telephone.

http://www.kunstradio.at/ZEITGLEICH/CATALOG/ENGLISH/neuhaus2a-e.html

An internet-based architecture for live audio interaction worldwide with participation open to the public at large. http://www.auracle.org/, a networked sound instrument, controlled by the voice and played over the Internet

'I started in another direction which I now call Networks; these are inter-connections of lay people again, having a dialogue with sound that is beyond language. I did the first one, also in the middle of the sixties, with a radio station in New York City. It involved doing something which was unheard of at that time: I plugged the telephone system into the radio station. I installed ten telephone lines at the station and asked people to call in during a two-hour period with whatever sounds they wanted. It created a live sound collage made with the participation of anybody within a twenty-mile radius the ten million people who were living there. These Networks gradually progressed into a series of radio/telephone events, in different cities. In the middle of the seventies I realized one for the whole of the USA with two hundred radio stations and five cities where people called into. I made huge trans-continental loops to transform their sounds.It was called Radio Net. At that time the word ‘network’ wasn’t a word in general us; it was a word that engineers knew but if you mentioned ‘network’ in a cultural context or any kind of conversation except with an engineer, no-one would know what it was. With these network ideas, I was also trying to go beyond the event and make them into entities. I was trying to figure out how I could take over a radio station twenty-four hours a day, or a network of radio stations. Fortunately, though, the Internet arrived. As of last year there is a work, Auracle, which is there twenty-four hours a day at a site called www.auracle.org. It is a point of meeting to create a network of people who play an instrument together using their voice'.

Max Neuhaus