Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves (review)

Transmission arts encompasses performance, video art, theater, sound art, radio art, media installation, networked art and acoustic ecology in a multiplicity of practices that engage aural and video broadcast media in an intermedia framework where the relationship(s) between artist and audience, transmitter and receiver can be redefined, along with the telecommunications airwaves as the site for this practice.

Transmission, the wireless sending and receiving of electric signals via electromagnetic waves, is central to transmission arts, where artists and practitioners seek a more expansive and demystified site for their creative practices derived through do-it-yourself, hands-on relationships with transmission technology, content sources and public and artistic access to the transmission spectrum. As an art genre, transmission arts is grounded in the transmission-based projects of Futurism, Hörspiel and radio-theater, postwar electronic music, Fluxus and Happenings, early video collective projects and telecommunications arts. Current communications technology, networking-and activism drive contemporary development.

With such a broad palette, acquiring an overview of the persons and practices associated with transmission arts can be difficult. To address this problem, Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves provides a genealogy of 150 artists and their artworks. This survey ranges from 1921 to the present, documenting the ingenuity and creativity of the artists, as well as their discoveries in broadcast, public works, performance composition, sound and text representing alternate worlds on the electromagnetic spectrum. The artists and works included in this volume are not exhaustive, but rather provide an accessible touchstone for understanding and appreciating this new art genre.

Transmission Arts is arranged into four sections by mode of presentation: performance and composition; installation; broadcast; and public works, networks and tools. Biographical backgrounds are provided for each selected artist, as well as a discussion of each artist's seminal work(s). A chronology of works and an extensive bibliography are also provided. Several of the artists represented in each section are well known: William Basinski, John Cage, Matthew Burtner, Negativland, Marshall McLuhan, Velimir Khlebnikov, Eduardo Kac, Tetsuo Kogawa, Orson Welles, Nam June Paik and Pierre Schaeffer, for example. Others are less known and therefore interesting and inspiring.

Together, these 150 transmission artists and their works form the foundation for a larger Transmission Art Archive under development with the guidance of free103point9, a nonprofit organization focused on cultivating and defining the transmission art genre. In addition to the more traditional linear works made for radio dissemination, free103point9 supports creative, multifaceted and interdisciplinary works across the full radio spectrum in its broadest definition. The free103point9 Transmission Art Archive is accessible at <www.transmis sionarts.org> where sound, video and image files for many of the artists can be enjoyed. From the earliest experiments with radio, to current-day web-or mobile-based platforms, transmission art is enlivened by technology, not beholden to it. The artists and their works featured in Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves provide an excellent and accessible introduction.