Imagine for a moment that you are a commuter. You drive 30 minutes to work every morning and reverse the journey in the evening - for a total of one hour in your automobile, five days a week. Now imagine that you've totaled your car. Tough luck, but you still need to get to work every day while your insurance company sorts things out. Maybe you take the bus? Or, maybe you pull your bicycle out of the garage? Now you're pedaling up hills, splitting lanes of traffic, and coasting through red lights. The trip takes an hour each way.
There are at least two possible attitudes you could have (and they aren't mutually exclusive!): first, you take pride in your physical conditioning and your new feeling of connection with the landscape, maybe even a righteousness about being so eco-friendly; second, you begin to appreciate that car you're not driving.
It is a timely coincidence that we have the opportunity to deliver a paper about the Building Sound radioprogram on the advent of its second year. While the first twelve shows have been a process of thinking by doing, this conference is a good excuse to think about what we've been doing and to outline some of thenew opportunities and challenges that internet radio offers for the production and distribution of architectural research.
Before proceeding any further, some introductions -
We: are members of the Building Sound working group of the Institute for Advanced Architecture.
Building Sound: is an internet radio program devoted to exploring radio as a medium for experimental architectural representation and dialogue. It is produced by the Institute for Advanced Architecture forRadio IMC-LA, and has been broadcast monthly on killradio.org since May, 2003.
The Institute for Advanced Architecture: is devoted to advancing architecture through research, exchange,and exhibition. It began in 2000 and currently has members in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Newark, New Jersey.
The Independent Media Center: is a network of collectively run media outlets, originally established by various independent and alternative media organizations and activists in 1999 for the purpose of providing grassroots coverage of the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. Now, there are centers in dozens of cities on all continents (excluding Antarctica). Radio IMC-LA is the part of Los Angeles' Independent Media Center that focuses on radio programming.
killradio.org: is a collective organization committed to using media production and distribution as a tool for promoting social and economic justice. Starting in Los Angeles during the 2000 Democratic National Convention protests, killradio provides the physical, technical, and organizational infrastructure for the internet radio station, on which Building Sound is broadcast.
The IAA has pursued its mission of research, exchange, and exhibition through digital media projects, an online bulletin board and website, writing, and gallery exhibitions. Radio was not something that we chose in advance, but rather an opening within which we sought to work. This opening points toward anew field of action for architecture, a site for the development of another language for architectural research. In the spirit of Cortina's How to Speak Italian in 20 Lessons, we have included a broadsheet as an introductory guide for how you might produce a radio show and get it broadcast. The following, however, is a set of relations derived from the Building Sound experiment:
Read the paper (PDF)
