THE VIRTUAL

Raccorps : a web-radio project



Presentation of the organisation

APO33 is a collective of artists (musicians, sound artists, a philosopher and a computer scientist) created in 1997 with the aim of promoting some of the new types of music and sound practices that do not receive large media coverage. The purpose of APO33 is to create the conditions for the development of all the kinds of music and sound practices which contribute to the advancement of sound creation. These kinds of music and sound practices include those called electronic music, concrete music, contemporary written music, sound poetry, sound art or those that have no name : we group these multiple practices under the name of audio art.

To enable the development of audio art, APO33 organises several activities : concert programming in different places in the city of Nantes and its suburbs, the formation of spaces of creation, experimentation and research open to the public, the production of CD’s on the label Fibrr, the organisation of educational interventions in schools and other structures and the development of artistic research and interventions with the CIA (Cellule d’Intervention d’APO33).

The CIA (Cellule d’Intervention d’APO33)

The CIA is an artistic action group composed of the members of APO33. The CIA develops research projects and organises artistic interventions. Its mission is to « play » with the situations and contexts to which it is invited. The CIA mainly uses the sound medium as a field of action and as an instrument of articulation of its interventions.

The main project being developed by the CIA during the year 2003 is called Raccorps.



Raccorps

As a continuation of our activities of creation and research, we are setting up, during the year 2003, a research laboratory focused on the relation between audio art and numerical or multi-media tools.

The general theme that directs our research is : the virtual.

The purpose of this research laboratory is to conceive and invent, through an artistic realisation, new possibilities of use and development of numerical tools.

Collaboration

The research project is being carried out in collaboration with the research project AGGLO initiated in the SCAN (Numerical Arts Creation Studio) of Villa Arson in Nice. AGGLO is a research project which is being developed during 2003 ; it groups 19 researchers and computer scientists around numerical artistic practices, notably audio-numerical practices. One of the artist-researchers of APO33 is also a member of the AGGLO team on the question of audio-numerical practices and has as a mission : the pooling of the results of the two research projects.

Orientation of research of the Raccorps project

This laboratory on the virtual has two main orientations :

Networking : creating a community of research by developing

Distance group work

Links between different projects of creation

Streaming : transfer of audio and visual information in real time

Artists and researchers invited

To develop this research programme, we are inviting national and international artists and researchers to intervene in an artistic event or work in the laboratory with the CIA.

Artists invited : Yannick Dauby, Jérôme Noetinger, Lionel Marchetti, Jean-Philippe Roux, Fabrice Gallis, Ralf Wehowsky, Brandon Labelle, Noisiv/Tob...etc

Publication

This research project has a practical aspect and a theoretical aspect. To publicise the results of our thinking, experiences and discoveries, we envisage the publication of a review. The purpose of this review is to transcribe the development of the research during 2003 in its theoretical and practical aspects, by following the different artistic interventions and realisations of the CIA. The review will also include articles from artists or researchers who intervened in the CIA laboratory.

Description of the artistic project : Raccorps

The research is realised through the artistic project called Raccorps. This artistic project has two forms of existence :

a virtual platform on the Internet : this platform consists in the construction, during 2003, of a web-radio linking different structures or cultural organisations at a local, national and international level. This web-radio works like a network radio with multiple transmitters, multiple access interfaces and multiple broadcasting channels.

The construction of the web-radio is organised around the question of the place given to the listener. The possibility of bilateral expression enabled by the Internet is explored to offer the listener an active role, thus giving him or her the possibility of being a sound composer.

The question we want to explore is : what becomes of the radio media with Internet ?

We hope that by 2004 the project will have become an autonomous platform of intervention for the artists or structures interested.

the installation in a determined time and space of the Mobile Radiophonic Device. The Mobile Radiophonic Device is conceived as an instrument of intervention and as a prosthesis. It is a gigantic device combining a hertzian radio device and the web-radio device with physical and modulable extensions of control interfaces playing with gesture, light, pressure, temperature, movement… This Device is installed in a specific space to reshape and reveal, through the transmission and transformation of live sound, the architectural and social organisation of that space.

Building a network device combining hertzian radio and web-radio enables us to experiment with and highlight the different uses and forms of the same tool of communication, the radio and the different effects of its intervention in a specific context. The hertzian radio produces a different social space from the web-radio : the hertzian radio produces a centralised space with one transmitter and several receivers while the web-radio can produce a network space with different and reversible transmitters and receivers.

The best context of installation of the Mobile Radiophonic Device is in a situation of social activity like a festival or an artistic or social event.. The Mobile Radiophonic Device can create a meeting point between the public, the artists and the web-radio. In this sense, the Mobile Radiophonic Device operates like a public presentation of the web-radio project.

To keep and continue the relation with the public, the CIA leaves a computer specially build to access to the web-radio, in each place of intervention of the Mobile Radiophonic Device.