Radio Public: 'At Home On The High Street'

Here are a few images of Radio Public Art Festival held on Dudley High Street July 9 2022. This is all from the beginning of the day. I wish we had more photos but we got too busy to take them.

Radio Public happened as art festival in a variety of ways, including a found-sound MixCloud radio programme, street theatre, visual art and workshops. We called the sound-scape exhibition 'At Home On The High Street' because it describes how we wanted Dudley High Street to be felt as a space not as it currently is - but warm, cuddly and a bit silly - completely different to a normal day!

 Rachel setting up the Textures Printing Workshop

 The Observation 'Radio' Station displaying a collection of old radios.

 Some results from explorative Textures Workshops

The Observation 'Radio' Station again.

Textures workshop 'gallery' showing works made by passersby who dropped in and had a play at printing with us.

Radio Public - listening

Fourth week of meeting up with the Radio Public team at CoLab (2nd week in person for me) it felt like steps had been made and some ideas had hardened into intentions, although others were unsettled - only to be expected at this stage and that floaty openness that has characterised the project remains.  Bill and Helen have further exciting plans to create further opportunities for collaboration over the next couple of weeks by inviting new persons into the group and in arranging meetings at weekends.

I haven’t let ideas settle and you will have to forgive me for being slightly opaque in this post but I have several milling about that loosely revolve round the fabric of the high street and how to provoke attention to that. Some are partly formed of previous works that I think will perform well outside on Dudley High Street, while others may be compatible with other's ideas. 

I have deliberately prevented letting of these land to give them time to brew and warp, but I need to open them up so that process can happen in conjunction with others. By this I hope they will trigger a process of change that can evolve into work. 

I ended this week, or rather I begun the next, at 04:50 from the edge of a small wood nearby here, taking part in a world-wide collaborative art project, called Reveil9, created to stream a continuous dawn chorus over 24 hours from positions like mine around the world. Handily, Helen and Bill leant me a lavallier mic for Radio Public, so I was able to use that.

Setting up my ‘camp’ online initially seemed a bit tricky until I figured out that my Wi-Fi was blocking access to Soundtent. Once I figured that out the rest was very easy. Sitting in my cosy car by the wood watching my recording apparatus, while my head was in a too-early morning fuzz quite unpenetrable by hot coffee, and the occasional sparrow darted through the hedge, I listened to the rise and fall of birdsong over 40 minutes. This was a beautiful interlude to my usual bank holiday weekend which can be just a bit too indoors and screen-based - like most of life. 

There were times when all the songs of different birds repeatedly congealed into a single chord and then broke apart again, something I had never noticed before. I rarely make time to experience this liminal time, but now, having tested out how it works I am considering how to reposition and expand my contribution for Reveil10 next year.

Sketch of recording setup

Although I never did get to listen to my stream it was there in the listing right at the end of the stream. See pic for proof! However, searching for a recording led me to an enjoyable Female Pressure 97 mix on ResonanceFM by Crylighter: Link. 

If I find a link to Reveil 9 2022 I will update this post with it.

Radio Public - placing distance

Week 3

Week 1 and 2 blog Here

Sadly, attempts to join the group online in this week were undone by a combination of Easter school holidays, noise and lack of bandwidth. Instead I will proffer this image which I made inspired by our derive on Week 2. 

It is made on the iPad in Procreate by tracing over one thing from each of all the photographs I took, building these onto a deliberately flat single layer to create a snapshot of time. 

I think I always find exploring confusing although I enjoy doing it. There is so much to take in; synapses firing off from so much sensory input even over a small distance. Dudley High Street may be ordinary and unloved but it contains a huge variety of shapes and textures. Now placed over an accidentally blurred 'walking' photo, I hope the slightly arbitrary choices I made during this process go some way towards conveying those.

Radio Public

Week 1, Beginnings

"Something is beginning to happen here at Radio Public, so exciting! Week 2 at @colabdudley #social #art #Dudley" @goodlifecic

This April, following an exciting exchange of ideas and backgrounds on zoom, I signed up for a new project based in CoLab, Dudley High Street. To be part of an emerging community of practice in Dudley, facilitated by social artists Helen Garbett and Bill Laybourne of Workshop24 culminating in a festival of art in the High Street on July 9th.

Focusing on ways to change Dudley High St for the better, Radio is the project's means of transmission and reception, with a wide and flexible intention of making the inaudible audible; explicitly opening up space.

I'm attracted by opportunities to explore somewhere strange to me in ways that are not fixed, with the idea that I might create some kind of art that is site-specific - and I welcome a public deadline as this often helps art to actually happen. It also feeds my will to experiment. There are seven of us in the group including Bill and Helen, with a wide range of practice; including playwriting, sound art, visual art and animation, which holds all kinds of possibilities for future collaborations.

I'm still recovering from Covid, which has pretty much wiped me out, therefore as I couldn't attend the first week's meeting at CoLab, I sat at the end of a zoom call and felt a bit out of things. About halfway through, subjects of dialogue, evesdropping and documentation came up in conversation, and I felt in the right place on the edge of things with this half-view in that I had, to play around with documenting our start as a group. So I ended up tearing up my notes and started making a tower of torn paper written with half-sentences and comments I could hear. Some funny, some portentious, some hopeful, some exciting, some surreal - 'Are we the deer or the little old lady?' It was a fun way to be involved. Next day I machine-sewed them together into the washing line that we are holding in the pic. This began my route into the project.

Week 2, Percolation over flow

By the time week 2 arrived I was well enough again to drive up from Leamington and meet everyone for real. This week was slated for a psychogeographic Derive (aka 'a pookle,' aka 'a pootle,' aka ' a wander about') of the High Street, which is just outside the door to CoLab. Helen primed us to look for water and the skies handily provided! 

We split up into small groups and Helen and I wandered off down an alley by the side of the Wetherspoon's Full Moon Pub. This is a smooth cobbled alleyway, a typical transitional space, meant to be always passed through and never dwelt in, however I find these spaces often reveal the character of places better than the polished up frontages, and typically, given Dudley's  abundant past it did display a magnificent wealth in architectural textures and objects from life being lived. 

As usual my Derives tend to be short and full of intense examination so we didn't get much further than the alley in the time we had, and I could easily have spent twice as long there. 

Now I have to admit that I totally forgot that our aim was supposed to be sound-based and captured instead a host of visual images and relatively few sounds - and those I have are mainly trickling, dripping water - attractive in itself. It makes me wonder if perhaps my input into our collaboration can be around visually conveying sound - how is listening signposted otherwise?

At the end of the alley at the back of the pub sat a small collection of shiny kegs and on the other side a piece of fenced verdant wasteground, full of plastic litter, cans, brightly coloured broken signs, several species of plant life, and snails; as we discovered back at CoLab when a tiny and perfect snail rode across my notebook. I'd unknowingly brought it in on a fragment of concrete I'd collected and brought back to show the others. It was duly returned to its High St home.

So there is another week to explore before we need to discuss ideas. So in the meantime, and to help me think through my ideas from this position of stranger/visitor, I've decided to continue with my route of documenting. I don't know where this will lead me, but it is a way of generating work and research can sometimes just continue in doing until it becomes something bigger - or it comes to a natural end and makes space for something else.

If you were to explore like a tiny snail

 

If you were to listen to the rhythms of the street

 

If you were to follow the flow of water

 

If you allowed splashes of pink paint

 

If you let keg tops become ponds

 

If abandoned corners became forests

 

If you straightened up like drainpipes

If your art deco bricks became museums

 

If you let drain covers became your television

 

If you used puddles to look up

 

…

If you were to listen like the High Street.

If you explored like a tiny snail

and followed the flow of water

If you allowed splashes of pink paint

let keg tops be ponds

and abandoned corners be forests

If you straightened up like drainpipes

Let your art deco bricks became museums

and drain covers became your television

If you let trickles of rainwater become necklaces

and used puddles to look up.

If your skin was brick and your feet sprayed with piss

and your eyes glowed yellow at night.

If you let in the ancient creature above your brow

and combed the moss between your teeth.