1977
Radio Net, 1977

“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 It’s a vivid reminder of the audacious experimental artistic force NPR once was.Previously unpublished video of the preparations for and execution of Radio Net: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)

'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

Advertisement, article continues Belowe this ad hans-ulrich-obrist interview with Max Neuhaus, 22, Aug05