Wednesday, December 21, 2011
public art Midnight Bill concludes tonight on WREK
Posted by Wyatt Williams @wyatt_williams on Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 2:02 PM
- courtesy of the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center
Tune into WREK 91.1 tonight at midnight and you should experience something quite different than the average airwaves. Midnight Bill, a collaboration between John Q founding member Joey Orr and former WREK chief engineer Chris Campbell, seeks to "construct a memorial narrative that explored connections between archived letters, music, sound, and personal narrative."
Orr's work with the John Q collective explored Atlanta's queer histories with resounding and intimate insights and Midnight Bill continues in this vein, digging deep into the archived correspondence of two men:
The relationship between two men, Jack Strouss and William Deveaux Wilson, in the 1950s is filled with larger cultural potential. Whether recounting being fired from the post office in downtown Atlanta for being a homosexual during the McCarthy era, tracking correspondences with actress Agnes Moorehead, or watching over the artists’ book collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the program maps out a space in which characters from different situations are strangely intertwined. Some original 1950s recordings paired with contemporary writing creates a digital mashup of several technologies that creates varied sound qualities in an overlaying of past and present documents.
The broadcast, which began on December 18 and concludes tonight, will be accompanied by text on the radio receiver or streaming player, a new technique being pioneered by Campbell. "His hacking has allowed us to provide an extra (visual) layer of text to the program. I am new to these technologies and, in fact, we don't believe RDS has ever been used this way before, so the whole thing is an experiment!" Orr wrote in a recent email annoucing the project.
Read more about Orr's work with the Strouss and Wilson correspondence and the technical details of the broadcast before tuning in tonight. You can tune in online here.
Comments (1)
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Thanks Wyatt and CL for this mention last month. We managed to pull off the entire series without a hitch. The fourth night was the best episode (from my technical perspective at least) as I finally had all the technology properly tuned up and working right.
I have updated the WREK.org page (at http://www.wrek.org/2011/12/rbds-projec/ ) with links to some other coverage, in particular some radio industry interest in the technology angle. If anyone reading this is curious about that, be sure to read the two RadioWorld articles:
http://radioworld.com/article/wrek-beefs-up-rds-hd-text-display-for-special-program/154966
http://www.radioworld.com/article/wrek-reports-back-on-custom-rds-project/211157
Joey and I agree that this went so well, we might have to do it again :)
- Chris Campbell, collaborator and former WREK chief engineer
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