Hank Bull on Boredom, the HP Dinner Show and radio art
Deleted scenes
‘The HP Dinner Show’ was a weekly radio show broadcast on Vancouver Cooperative Radio from 1975 to 1983. A mix of experimental radio, a platform for sarcasm, and a hangout for the local scene, the project by Hank Bull and Patrick Ready operated under the premise that the radio medium could and should fall within our notion of art. With a personal style packed with humour and a far cry from the mannerisms of European radio art, the show earned its place as a small underground phenomenon in the Vancouver area.
In this programme, Hank Bull takes the idea of boredom as a springboard to fire off some interesting ideas about entertainment and archives.
related episodes
Reni Hofmüller
In the 1990s, twenty minutes was all it took for local authorities in the Austrian city of Graz to detect and neutralise any illegal radio transmitter. Back then, Reni Hofmüller was part of a group of activists who took over the airwaves with pirate broadcasts every Sunday from the mountains surrounding the city. After short 18-minute sessions, the Radio Dauerwelle team would pack up its equipment and clear out, moments before the authorities arrived. In this podcast, Hofmüller shares her early commitment with radio, as well as her obsession with dismantling the invisible in order to understand and question it. A trip through time that takes us from the 1980s to the present, through her personal involvement in feminist discussions from the perspective of new media. Our conversation is riddled with references to her commitment to open source, to doing things together, to the uninhibited mixing of disciplines, and to her passion for the electromagnetic sphere and bicycles.
Maia Urstad
Norwegian artist Maia Urstad talks about nostalgia, radio pips, AM, FM and DAB, about the importance of ska, about arches and obelisks, sounds in the fjord, and time capsules, about program 81, freq_out, and foghorns, and about local radio stations and lost tapes.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Maia Urstad that we were unable to include the first time around.
Deleted scenes
In these outtakes, Anton Kats talks about the transition from MAKU to MÆKUR, about slowing down and opening up listening spaces, and about contextual and emotional infrastructure in art practice.
Anton Kats
Process, liminality, mediation, transmission, radio, resonance, orality, archive, and abundance. In our coinciding and crossing of paths with Ukrainian artist, mediator, educator, and musician Anton Kats, “the stars aligned” to put prior learning and formats to the test. Three remote encounters, six hours of recording, and several red-hot scissors have produced this exquisite corpse in which we explore a discourse and practice that tend to spill over and exceed boundaries in both nuance and detail. In this podcast, we talk about the Europe of integration, about memory, dementia, and different ways of not knowing, about artistic research and art that defies representation, about site-specific projects and mobile, ephemeral devices, about narrowcasts and radio as a means of creating common public spaces.