Radio Future. Festival of Audio Art

One hundred years after the first field-radio tests and 90 years after the first radio play broadcast, the Radio Future festival explored the future of acoustic story-telling in the age of ubiquitous broadband connections.

The four-day Radio Future festival offered visitors a breather from the rapidly changing world of media, a chance to take inventory of the changes which acoustic narrative forms are currently undergoing. Not only was the festival a forum for demonstrating the latest technology and productions, but also a scientific symposium and artist workshop with live performances and an audio lounge. Numerous artists, theorists, technicians, writers, composers, producers, cultural scholars, editors and philosophers were invited to present their “vision of radio” in the future.

The festival began on 7 March 2013 with a cultural political forum on the auditory art forms of radio plays, features and ars acustica. Among the questions addressed at the festival were how radio, which had originally been a non-commercial art form, could survive in the face of new profitmaking formats used by the media industry? What was to come of cultural radio in the future and how secure was the cultural legacy of eight decades of radio history? Experts from the national and international media sector defined the political, economic and social context, in which audio arts operated, and identified the lines of conflict of digital transformation.

On the following two days, the events focused on the processes of conversion, which producers and audiences are subject to. The participants examined how artists, directors, writers and composers were responding to the latest technologies and narrative formats – smart phone apps, SoundCloud, tri-media material development, multichannel technology, wave-field synthesis, etc. Addressing the fact that the act of listening was occurring in completely new constellations, the participants discussed what kinds of new acoustic methods of story-telling were being created and how the global transformation of media was affecting human perception.

The final day, titled Patterns of Reality, examined the technology of world perception in the arts and sciences, and was curated and organised by the Hans-Flesch-Gesellschaft.

The evening programme, featuring the series Nostalghia and Sound Stage, presented past and current productions and offered audiences sufficient opportunity for pure listening. Artists also had the chance to present their acoustic art on stage in the form of concerts, live acts and performances.

Artistic director: Oliver Sturm with Mareike Maage
Artists: Atelier de Création Sonore Radiophonique (Belgien), Hermann Bohlen, Alessandro Bosetti (Italien), Arturas Bumšteinas (Litauen), Mila Burghardt, Dietmar Dath, Joe Davis (USA), Friendly Fire, Rafael Jové, Schorsch Kamerun, Karl-Nikolaus Peifer, Nathalie Singer and Robert Wilson (USA)

An event by the Akademie der Künste (external link, opens in a new window) and the Kulturstiftung des Bundes in cooperation with the Hans-Flesch-Gesellschaft (external link, opens in a new window) – Forum for Acoustic Arts, supported by the Association for the Usage of Ancillary Rights (GVL).