New Radio and Performing Arts

Last updated
New Radio and Performing Arts
Founded1981
Founder Helen Thorington
Dissolved2017
TypeArt nonprofit
Location
Key people
Helen Thorington, Regine Beyer, Jo-Anne Green

New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA), and its satellite project Turbulence.org, [1] was an American organization that commissioned and archived new and experimental radio art, sound art, net art and mixed reality art. [2] It was founded in 1981 by Helen Thorington. In 2003, NRPA opened an office in Boston, Massachusetts. The organization closed in December 2017.

Contents

New American Radio

NRPA is known for its New American Radio series, a weekly public radio program of its commissioned experimental sound art pieces from 1987 to 1998. Their archive, available online since 2002, includes "over 300 works by artists such as Helen Thorington, Gregory Whitehead, Hildegard Westerkamp, Jacki Apple, Pauline Oliveros, Christian Marclay, and Terry Allen". [3] New American Radio is archived at the Library of Congress, Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen, Germany, Wave Farm, New York and Wesleyan University.

Turbulence.org

With the launch of Turbulence.org in 1996, NRPA expanded its mandate to "regularly commission net art from the US and abroad" and it now holds the largest archive of such work. [4] Through open calls, competitions and awards, the group supports exhibitions "in real space, as well as on the Web," [5] "from full-blown museum exhibitions to esoteric hacks," [6] and acts as an "incubator" for "high-tech art". [7]

Turbulence logo.png

From 1996, NRPA's main focus was on supporting established and emerging artists to create net art/Internet Art or networked hybrid art (art for both virtual and physical space) by: 1) commissioning work for Turbulence.org (over 225 commissions ranging from $1,000-$25,000); 2) providing exhibition venues on- and offline; 3) archiving the work. Notable commissioned artists include Martin Wattenberg, Brooke Singer, Golan Levin, Annie Abrahams, Mary Flanagan, Scott Kildall, Kate Armstrong, Michael Tippett, Nathaniel Stern, Michael Takeo Magruder, Cory Arcangel, Stephanie Rothenberg, R. Luke DuBois, Ursula Endlicher, MTAA, and Zoe Beloff. [2]

In 2018, Turbulence.org was exhibited at The New Art Fest in Lisbon. [8] and Turbulence: Presentación del archivo digital at Extremadura and Iberoamericano Museum of Contemporary Art (MEIAC) Badajoz, Spain. Turbulence.org is permanently archived at MEIAC, the Electronic Literature Organization, the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York and the Library of Congress.

Collaborations

NRPA partnered with many organizations, festivals, galleries, educational institutions Brown University, Cornell University, Emerson College, Wesleyan University) and networks to extend its online activities into the physical world; these included Art Interactive, the Boston Cyberarts Festival, Huret & Spectre Gallery, Lumen Eclipse and Pace Digital Art Gallery. It also partnered with other online platforms, including Ars Virtua, Electronic Literature Organization, Low-fi, MGFest, Rhizome, and Upgrade! International. These activities collectively broadened NRPA's network/audience and, perhaps more importantly, encouraged artists working in more traditional media to experiment with emerging networked technologies.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jodi (art collective)</span> Internet artist collective (1994–)

Jodi, is a collective of two internet artists, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, created in 1994. They were some of the first artists to create Web art and later started to create software art and artistic computer game modification. Their most well-known art piece is their website wwwwwwwww.jodi.org, which is a landscape of intricate designs made in basic HTML. JODI is represented by Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cornell University Library</span> Library system of Cornell University

The Cornell University Library is the library system of Cornell University. As of 2014, it holds over eight million printed volumes and over a million ebooks. More than 90 percent of its current 120,000 periodical titles are available online. It has 8.5 million microfilms and microfiches, more than 71,000 cubic feet (2,000 m3) of manuscripts, and close to 500,000 other materials, including motion pictures, DVDs, sound recordings, and computer files, extensive digital resources, and the University Archives. It is the sixteenth largest library in North America, ranked by number of volumes held. It is also the thirteenth largest research library in the U.S. by both titles and volumes held.

MTAA is a Brooklyn, New York-based conceptual and new media art duo composed of M.River and T.Whid. The two artists founded MTAA in 1996. Their often humorous studies of networked culture, the economics of art and digital materials take the form of web sites, videos, installations, sculptures and photographic prints.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lumen Eclipse</span> Arts gallery located in Massachusetts

Lumen Eclipse is a public media arts gallery located in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded to expand public awareness of local, national, and international artists. The gallery is situated on two mounted displays on the Tourism Information Kiosk, just outside the Harvard Square MBTA stop, screening motion art daily. The gallery may also be viewed on the Lumen Eclipse website.

Yael Kanarek is an Israeli American artist based in New York City that is known for pioneering use of the Internet and of multilingualism in work of art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cary Peppermint</span>

Cary Peppermint is a New York-based conceptual, new media, performance, and environmental artist. Peppermint was born in Rome, Georgia, in 1970 and received in M.F.A. from Syracuse University in 1997. Peppermint has conducted a series of Dadaist and Fluxus inspired digital, networked performances via his website RestlessCulture, an ongoing, post-cinema living documentary database. In Artforum, Mark Tribe called this series of work “twenty-first-century takes on Warhol's Factory.”

Rhizome is an American not-for-profit arts organization that supports and provides a platform for new media art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scott Kildall</span> American artist

Scott Kildall is an American conceptual artist working with new technologies in a variety of media including video art, prints, sculpture and performance art. Kildall works broadly with virtual worlds and in the net.art movement. His work centers on repurposing technology and repackaging information from the public realm into art. He often invites others to participate in the work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet art</span> Form of art distributed on the Internet

Internet art is a form of new media art distributed via the Internet. This form of art circumvents the traditional dominance of the physical gallery and museum system. In many cases, the viewer is drawn into some kind of interaction with the work of art. Artists working in this manner are sometimes referred to as net artists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ecoarttech</span>

Ecoarttech is an experimental, postdisciplinary, mixed media environmental art collaborative founded in 2005 by artist Cary Peppermint and literary writer/critic Leila Christine Nadir. The collaborative explores the complex relationships between modernity, technologies, networks, and concepts of nature and culture. Merging primitive with emergent technologies, ecoarttech’s work investigates the overlapping terrain between “nature,” built environments, mobility, and electronic spaces. In furtherfield.org, Sophia Kosmaoglou writes, "Refusing to regard technology merely as a tool, Ecoarttech expand the uses of mobile technology and digital networks revealing them to be fundamental components of the way we experience our environment... By drawing our attention to the increasing replacement or mediation of physical experiences by technology, Ecoarttech challenge the widely reproduced distinction between nature and culture." In visualMAG, Teresa de Andrés describes the artists as "determined to blur the frontiers between city and countryside by using technologies in a creative way... they invite us to lose ourselves in unexplored lands, sinuous urban alleys and arid mountains to the south of the Earth.

Gustavo Romano is a Buenos Aires-born contemporary artist who works in a variety of media including actions, installations, net art, video and photography. He uses media and technology devices as well as objects belonging to people's daily lives, decontextualizing them and trying to force viewers to think about their routines and preconceptions. He won the Platinum Konex Award from Argentina in 2002, and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. He lives and works in Madrid.

Ursula Endlicher is a New York City based Austrian multi-media artist who creates works in the fields of internet art, performance art and installation art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lauren Cornell</span> American curator

Lauren Cornell is an American curator and writer based in New York. Cornell is the Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Chief Curator of the Hessel Museum of Art. Previously, she worked at the New Museum for twelve years and was the executive director of their affiliate Rhizome (2005-2012).

Angela Washko is an American new media artist and facilitator based in New York. She is currently associate professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University. Washko mobilizes communities and creates new forums for discussions of feminism where they do not exist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jody Zellen</span> American painter (born 1961)

Jody Zellen is an American artist and educator. Her practice, consisting of digital art, painting, video art, and drawing, has been showcased by way of interactive installations, public art, and curated exhibitions. She is also known for her art criticism.

Brooke Singer is a New York City–based media artist, co-founder of the art, technology and activist group Preemptive Media, and a professor of New Media at Purchase College, State University of New York. She works across disciplines engaging technology and science as an artist, educator, and collaborator. Her work exists in the form of websites, photography, maps, installations, workshops, and performances that involve public participation with an eye to social change.

Kathy Rae Huffman is an American curator, writer, producer, researcher, lecturer and expert for video and media art. Since the early 1980s, Huffman is said to have helped establish video and new media art, online and interactive art, installation and performance art in the visual arts world. She has curated, written about, and coordinated events for numerous international art institutes, consulted and juried for festivals and alternative arts organisations. Huffman not only introduced video and digital computer art to museum exhibitions, she also pioneered tirelessly to bring television channels and video artists together, in order to show video artworks on TV. From the early 1990s until 2014, Huffman was based in Europe, and embraced early net art and interactive online environments, a curatorial practice that continues. In 1997, she co-founded the Faces mailing list and online community for women working with art, gender and technology. Till today, Huffman is working in the US, in Canada and in Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen Thorington</span> American artist and writer (1928–2023)

Helen Louise Thorington was an American radio artist, composer, performer, net artist and writer. She was also the founder of New Radio and Performing Arts (1981), a nonprofit organization based in New York City; the founder and executive producer of New American Radio (1987–1998); and the founder and co-director of Turbulence.org (1996–2016).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gretta Louw</span>

Gretta Louw is a multi-disciplinary artist who has worked with artforms as varied as digital media and networked performance, installation and video art, and fibre art. She lives and works in Germany and Australia. Her artistic practice explores the potential of art as a means of investigating psychological phenomena, particularly in relation to new technologies and the internet. Her focus is on how new digital technologies are shaping contemporary experience.

Michael Takeo Magruder is an American/British new media and digital artist who uses digital technologies to create work that connects with real-time data, virtual worlds and networked mobile devices.

References

  1. Mirapaul, Matthew (2003). How to Make a Sonic Purée From Pop Snippets. The New York Times. Retrieved on 2010-06-8
  2. 1 2 Turbulence.org (2010). About Turbulence. Retrieved on 2016-05-8
  3. Rhizome (2003). Rhizome Digest: Highlights from the New Media Art Field. Retrieved on 2010-06-8
  4. Andrews. Jim, "Net Art at turbulence.org." American Book Review, May/June 2006, Volume 27, Number 4, p. 19, 35.
  5. McQuaid, Cate (2006). Internet-based interactive art show New England Initiative II is a virtual stunner Boston Globe, Boston, Massachusetts, December 28, 2006.
  6. Sisario, Ben (2004). Internet Art Survives, but the Boom Is Over. New York Times. Retrieved on 2010-06-8
  7. Delson, Susan (2001). If Picasso Were A Programmer, Forbes.com.
  8. Information about the project at a patrimoniocultural.gov.pt, a website of the Government of Portugal