« Single Event » Site & Signal with Kate Donovan & Gabi Schaffner
How can ecological thinking be experienced and understood within the fields of radio (art), environment and locality? What are the sites and ecologies of radio art? And what is the place of the listener?
Linking garden and radio as (more than) human-cultivated spaces which collaborate across scales and species, Kate Donovan and Gabi Schaffner present a live lecture-transmission to discuss, collage, interweave and interrupt the various themes, methods and sonic aesthetics of their research and practice within the field of ecological radio art. In particular, they will reference Nightcall Radio (Donovan 2020), and Datscha Radio (Schaffner et al 2012-ongoing).
In both of these examples, the radio studio is removed from its usual exclusive sphere and becomes instead a specifically collaborative embodiment of a ‘radio ecology’. Sending sounds on radio waves means to extend beyond location to off-site listeners, while still allowing for simultaneous collective listening experiences. With Site and Signal Donovan and Schaffner propose a self-reflexive way to share the theoretical and artistic concerns of their work within this emerging field.
Nightgardening I by Datscha Radio was dedicated to “The Night of the Nightingales”, and happened on the 30th of April 2019. It formed part of a three-part radio stream series with “the sphere of the night” as a pool for sensing experiences, fictional and non-fiction (radio) art works and talks. We listen to a passage in the early morning of the 1st of May: Dawn was breaking, the temperature was low, and it was the time for telling stories.