Attuned to Toronto

What a completely unusual weekend. On Friday we drove to Toronto for a conference: Radio Without Boundaries: Radio & the Transmission Arts. Artist-as-geek, geek-as-artist heaven. A perfect marriage of left- and right-brained activity.

We got there early enough to visit a couple museums (feast for the eyes), then Friday evening started the feast (?) for the ears — live radio performance art. Computers, microphones, speakers everywhere and strange people making strange and wonderful sounds.

Saturday through Monday noon was solid presentations and workshops for the 50 or so attendees. It will take me days to debrief myself on all I learned about doing radio — especially radio that pushes both the art and the technology to the extreme edge.

But it did underscore an important point for me — it's not technology but an artist who makes art. One young man made the most amazing sound collages with pawn shop dictaphones and cassette recorders. The lesser presentations underscored that you could be a genius at your own craft and still do crappy Power Point (reading us their text-packed slides). So... I tell myself... here are regular, flawed people figuring out how to make the technology at hand support their passions — searching for audiences and having a ball.

The trip home was long because we had to wait for two hours at the border crossing. Now my head is so full of ideas and new directions that I hardly know where to start.

5.30.06

 

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