Real Bad Luck
Fram/Forward
Untitled (History Lessons)
A Chat with the Artist
Collect Call
Frozen Warnings
Room + Board
32 Stories
A Taxonomy…
Talk Soon
A radio broadcast using two 1-Watt FM transmitters, Fram/Forward was created for exhibition in Oslo and Moss, Norway. This work interweaves two narratives on two different frequencies at opposite ends of the FM dial to form a dialogue. The stories involve a fictional recounting of the expedition of real-life 19th century Norwegian arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who reached the farthest point north in his time. Nansen’s method was to wedge his ship on ice floes and let the naturally occurring arctic currents carry his team through the North Pole. The structure between the two frequencies is of correspondence between Nansen, and Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden who was developing radio technologies around the same time as Nansen’s expedition. The first broadcast is taken from Nansen’s journals; I selected passages which make reference to keywords having to do with sound, silence, chaos, calmness and transmission. The second frequency carrying Fessenden’s response, is comprised from a collage of actual fictional narratives discussing the invention of audio technologies in the 19th century. Together, they reveal parallel stories of invention, adding a new level to the story of Nansen’s expedition.
The work intervenes not into architectural public space but into the phantasmic space of the airwaves. Listeners happen upon the broadcast either randomly or by picking up small cards identifying the broadcast times. In the 19th century, “wireless” meant telegraph, then radio, but now the term refers to satellite-driven telecommunications networks. This work grew out of a previous experiment with radio broadcasts, Frozen Warnings.