12 Feb 2013

fm-scenario – The Listener´s Voice by Eran Schaerf

Online studio
www.fm-scenario.net

Things must be recyclable to be relevant. Welcome to fm-scenario.net, the online studio of Listener's Voice. This is where you can create your own personal Listener's Voice mix, which you can share with other users and possibly get on the air. You'll be creating your mix from fragments of broadcasts by Listener's Voice, a radio station where listeners' calls are taken by an aic moderator. The calls are everyday stories that listeners have staged in the station's reenactment studio, conferences organized by listeners on-air, blog entries by characters that have forsaken their fictional environments, commentary by the aic moderator and, last but not least, broadcasts from other stations; because if nobody phones in to Listener's Voice, the aic moderator switches to Station Search, where it borrows programs it finds in its reception area and re-broadcasts them. So make your selections, mix a minimum of two fragments, and your own personal compilation might get on the air! And once you have saved your own compilation under a user name of your choice, it too will be available for other fm-scenario users to listen to. fm-scenario.net is a publicly accessible online studio at the edge of democracy. By definition, it has no target audience.



Exhibition
fm-scenario – broadcasting language – undercover operation – station announcement – error

February 16 to April 1, 2013
Opening: February 15, 2013, 7 pm
Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund

fm-scenario – The Listener's Voice is an intermedial project by Eran Schaerf which uses the internet as a place of production in order to generate content for further media—concretely: radio broadcast, exhibition, and publication. Eran Schaerf's newscast radio plays, particularly The Listener's Voice (2002), a fictive radio station that receives calls from listeners, constitute the intermedial project's starting point.

On February 15, 2013, the second of the project's five currently planned exhibitions will open at Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund. Each exhibition has its own structure and its own narrative. Drawing from the archive that is accessable at the online studio at fm-scenario.net, a curator compiles a montage which serves Schaerf as a script for a performance for the camera. This performance takes place in the exhibition space. Analogous to production in news agencies, the exhibition space is coded as a place of image production.

The montage for the exhibition at Hartware MedienKunstVerein was compiled by the curator Inke Arns. This montage tells how new technologies and platforms led to a crisis in the news media and paved the way for new forms of news production. fm-scenario – The Listener's Voice goes further, however, offering medial and architectural formats to civic journalism, whose forums incessantly challenge the authority of the news media.
Inke Arns' montage 'fm-scenario – Sendesprache – verdeckte Operation – Ansage – Fehler' will be broadcasted by Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation on February 22, 2013 at 9:03 pm on Bayern2. Following its broadcast, the program will be available for download as a podcast at www.hoerspielpool.de.

fm-scenario – The Listener's Voice (2012–2014) is a production of a production e. V., Berlin, and Bayerischer Rundfunk, Dept. of Radio Plays and Media Arts, in cooperation with Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Les Complices, Zurich; the Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt; and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe.

Performance and image production in collaboration with Kerstin Honeit, Karolin Meunier, Stefan Pente and William Wheeler.

Video Mastering: Imri Kahn.
Sound Mastering: Jochen Jezussek.
Set Production: David Polzin.

Project curator: Joerg Franzbecker.
Curator: Inke Arns.
Project coordinator: Herbert Kapfer and Joerg Franzbecker.

Funded by Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation).

Eran Schaerf´s works have been shown worldwide, including at the 54th Biennale di Venezia (2011), at Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007), Manifesta 2 in Luxemburg (1998), and at Documenta 9 in Kassel (1992). In 2013 Schaerf will be awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
His radio plays, produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk, include Wie gesagt. Theater- oder Taxistück (1997), Die Stimme des Hörers (The Listener´s Voice) (2002), Sie hörten Nachrichten (2005), Nichts wie Jetzt (2009), and Die ungeladene Zeugin (2011), among others.