SCHEDULE of broadcasts live on-site at the Getty Center
EPISODE 1 1/31/17 3-5pm
"Live Observational Field Report from the Getty Museum"
Artists John Birtle and Jasmine Nyende file a live observational field report from the Museum Courtyard, reporting on describing all aspects and actions of all the things that are happening in the immediate area. Striving to be as objective and as detailed as possible with everything they can see, Birtle and Nyende flip the close-analysis the Museum's artworks typically receive onto the interstitial spaces and the visitors themselves, delivered as a deadpan, literal news report.
An unprecedented pairing, virtual reality and journalism, brings the public to the news. It reenacts and will soon be recording stories in as much definition as a lens can bare. What are the implications of this for radio journalism and sound? Virtually Real News, a special broadcast from Problematic Radio (KCHUNG) featuring a few expert guests, will both discuss the potential of virtual reality sound and its implementation in radio journalism, and attempt to configure and execute a virtual reality recording of the broadcast.
Featuring Christy Roberts Berkowitz, Jahi Sundance, Hannah Harris Green, Sofia Hultquist, Anne Jimkes, Adam Tillman-Young, and Jonathan Sims.
EPISODE 3 2/7/17 and 2/12/17 2-3pm "Newspaper Reading Club"
Artists Fiona Connor and Michala Paludan host the "Newspaper Reading Club," where participants are asked to read the daily newspaper of their choice as they normally would, but verbalizing the process of skimming, commenting and personal editorializing that naturally occurs. Established in 2011, the "Newspaper Reading Club" takes many forms including performances, radio broadcasts, publications, and posters that investigate how people retrieve their news and how they engage with larger narratives of current affairs.
A recording is made of each reading. These recordings are later transcribed to produce texts which become personalized documents of wider political trends. Through this process each edition of the Newspaper Reading Club comes to speak to the location in which it is held and the particular events present on the day of the reading.
The process of a printed text becoming oral and then being transferred back into a written document is central to the projects broader interest of making visible the structures by which information is transmitted and absorbed. By re-distributing the final transcribed document back into the public domain often in the form of a poster or publication, the Newspaper Reading Club transforms one way media dissemination into a circular dialogue.
In the 2013 The Newspaper Reading Club participated in the 13th Istanbul Biennial and Routine Pleasures at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in 2016, other Newspaper Reading Club's have been held in Los Angeles, Tijuana, Melbourne, New York, Auckland and Christchurch.
Saturday, February 11, performance at 4:00 p.m., video screening at 5:00 p.m.
Sunday, February 12, performance at 4:00 p.m., discussion at 5:00 p.m.
Location: Breaking News exhibition galleries, West Pavilion
KCHUNG Radio program "Performance Now" discusses the latest happenings in the world of performance art, hosted by John Tain and Carol Cheh. For this special episode they host two performances by legendary artist, dancer, choreographer, and writer Simone Forti. Forti will perform News Animations, a piece she first developed in the mid-1980s that translates the imagery and language of newspaper reports and newscasts into improvised movement compositions.
Following Forti's Saturday performance, three recent video pieces by the artist will be screened, each a story of a body and voice navigating the comings and goings of the world: Zuma News (2015), Flag in the Water (2015), and A Free Consultation,(2016). On Sunday, a discussion will take place after the performance between Forti and "Performance Now" hosts in the Museum Lecture Hall.
Simone Forti "News Animations" 2/11/17: Listen | download
Simone Forti "News Animations" 2/12/17: Listen | download
Conversation between Simone Forti and John Tain: Listen | download
EPISODE 5 2/11/17 7-8pm "The Invisible Cruising Ground"
A story about the changing meaning of public spaces to queer communities, mixing location recordings, and interviews and commentary with live guests.
Hosted by Hannah Harris Green, with guests Dino Dinco and Cole M James.
Writing postcards to elected representatives with museum visitors, who are invited to read their messages on the air. Postcards, writing materials, and stamps provided, as well as addresses for representatives.
Hosted by Veronique D'Entremont.
EPISODE 7 2/25/17 4-5pm "Public Fiction"
This program will be a "live essay" on the translation of fact into fiction and fiction into fact, as seen on television. This collection of ideas. delivered live, will be footnoted by clips: a string of archival footage from art and activism for public access television; segments from contemporary news coverage and TV fictions based on the "just-past."
By Public Fiction's Lauren Mackler.
EPISODE 8 2/26/17 2-5pm John Berger's Ways of Seeing Live Reading
Join us for a collaborative table reading of Ways of Seeing, the influential essay by British writer John Berger, who died in January of this year. Originally broadcast on BBC television in 1972, Berger's text is a tool kit for deciphering the meaning and impact of images in media and art. A lineup of local artists, curators, and creative figures will read the book in its entirety to celebrate Berger and his ever-relevant thinking.
Join us for a program of live performance and presentations by KCHUNG News correspondents, marking the culmination of KCHUNG's residency at the Getty Center.
Hosted by Jasmine Nyende DJ Set by Evan Walsh (Pass the Paintbrush)
ARCHIVE of field reports from KCHUNG contributors around the world
Susannah Tantemsapya "The Land Recordings"
The Land was initiated in 1998 by artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lerdchaiprasert. It is nestled amongst the rice fields close to the northern mountains of Thailand. In March 2016, I visited the land for the first time after hearing about it for 12 years. It was a magical experience, almost like a walking meditation. It was so quiet there that sometimes all I heard were the birds, the wind and the sound of my feet treading along its dirt paths. I learned how to plant rice—sinking knee deep into the earth—and eventually how to build a mud house with some of its committee members nearby. This burgeoning place intersects art with experimental architecture, ancient agricultural practices and an openness spirituality in all its forms. The collective ethos of the land is reminiscent of KCHUNG itself, "to cultivate a place of and for social engagement."
Meso Mechanics (Tania Doles and Andy Petr) "Water Report"
An audio collage of broadcast reports on the rise in global sea levels, water shortages, and other issues related to water and environment, incorporating synthetic textures and noise to create a musical and narrative arc.
"No Binary For Clear Tears" is anchored in themes involving repetition as a form of abstraction and the cultural modifiers that determine "the other,” (or non-socially accessible). The sound piece follows a series of battles in which local people engage with Russian T-72 tanks in the city of Darayya, Syria. This engagement of geo-political powers renders opportunities for thought such as: power structures and the consequences of post-industrial hypercapitalism, the allocation of resources and its association to human suffering, how ideology acts as a pacifier of identity and its relationship to the mechanisms of global history, the friction which arises from suppressing history, as well as Hito Steyerl's notion of "the poor image", and its implications: has the proliferation of images served or severed our ability to connect with one another authentically?
A monthly radio broadcast, featuring a bricolage of historic and contemporary folk and songs of labor and protest, current labor reports, the state of working class people in America, conducted by Frau Fiber, former East German garment worker, turned textile activist. Recent shows have featured Denim, Garment Workers Center report, and Frau Fiber's Pledge to Mend America.
By Frau Fiber, with archive support by Carole Frances Lung
This episode of The Conversation Art Podcast features guest De Nichols, an 'artivist,' civic organizer and former community engagement manager at Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) St. Louis. Much of the conversation focuses on the controversial Kelley Walker exhibition from this past fall (2016), which climaxed in a disastrous artist talk at the museum that alienated the community, led to boycotts, and ultimately included De Nichols' resignation from the museum.
On January 21, 2017 Margie.LA attended the Women's March Los Angeles to protest the election of a misogynist, racist, and fascist president. This is a recording of a protest.
"George and Kaye Go Home" is an experimental play that addresses the questions surrounding the labor of care in a series of fictional episodes. George's health is deteriorating, but Martha, his caretaker, has little sympathy. Gloria Steinem makes a cameo appearance at the beginning of this episode, as George and Martha duke it out.
Actors in this episode: MJ Brown (Martha), Jim Priest (George), Emily Anderson (Kaye), Grace Marie (The Narrator)
Written and directed by Elisabeth Houston
Michael Piña, Jessica Toth, Marschal Bellinger, and Jonathan Montgomery "Nature Boy"
Nature Boy is a general science talk show hosted by PhD students at the University of California, Riverside. An irreverent take on the often over-revered field of scientific research, Nature Boy airs the first Sunday of every month on KCHUNG Radio.
Yelena Zhelezov, Jasmine Nyende, Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, Becket Flannery, Margaret Haines, Arif Mueller, Kate Cooper and others "ET Radio Emergency Telethon (I want to believe)""
This program is an anti-fascist broadcast. Each monthly episode targets the tenets of atavistic authoritarianism in its three-fold domination on nature, on our bodies, on others, through a series of group conversations and subsequent phone calls (or telethons) to powers which need to be held accountable, and converge within the episode's conversation. The shows are messy, with many people (and cities) in the studio at once, calling (on the phone) on state and/or corporate power in disharmony or harmony. Broadcasted with jajajaneeneenee radio in Amsterdam, NL.
The first episode followed the January 20th Inauguration, taking place on the 22nd of January 2017, including excerpts from anti-inauguration protests in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Netherlands and Athens, Greece. This episode discussed the Women's March and world-wide "sister" marches in opposition to Trump, and the potential for democratic politics. Gentrification was also considered, both as the seizure of neighborhoods, and as a mindset which views all public goods as simply another source of profit. Gentrification is the take over by the wealthy of spaces and systems that allow for livable life.
The first episode also transmitted a recording from the Cameron Parsons Foundation archive, where Cameron reads a 1914 suffragette Hermetic text as part of a series of spells and acts in the 1970s to "free women and all the oppression and roles they are cast into." The text was found by poet Goddess Aya in the 1950s at Gilbert's in Hollywood and subsequently shared with Cameron and printed in Aya's 1968-1971 diy zine/project Matrix.
KCHUNG Radio Residency at the Getty Center 1/31/17 — 4/30/17
Los Angeles' artist-run community radio station KCHUNG is in residence at the Getty Center in connection with the exhibition Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media. While in residence, KCHUNG contributors will produce 8 episodes live on-site at the Getty, and assemble an archive featuring a diverse breadth of content from KCHUNG's artistic community, including interviews, performances, and live reporting, to explore both exhibition themes and current events.
KCHUNG is an artist-run radio station operated from Los Angeles' Chinatown by a community of over 200 visual artists, musicians, writers, and other creative thinkers. Founded by artists Solomon Bothwell, Luke Fischbeck, and Harsh Patel, KCHUNG was created to redefine community radio as accessible and transparent, offering a community of listeners the ability to create their own content and learn about broadcasting. Today the station has grown to more than 200 contributors, who broadcast over 100 regularly scheduled shows each month.
In 2016, KCHUNG was awarded a Creative Capital grant to launch an in-depth news service entitled News Body, it is an experimental platform dedicated to user-sourced, urgent news. The Getty residency will serve as an opportunity for KCHUNG's artist community to further develop the News Body project, and to workshop methods of reporting, interpreting, and distributing news content. Broadcasting in-depth news programming and building opportunities for spectacle, performance, and live engagement, KCHUNG's residency imagines alternative uses and definitions of the news, while exploring its ever-evolving role in contemporary society.