Speaks: with Dr Anna Friz
On the air and in the ground
Free to attend, register via this online form. After 10am on the day of the event, please email Danny at events@music.ox.ac.uk for the Zoom link.
Abstract
As a radio and transmission artist, Anna creates works for broadcast, performance, and installation which utilize the radio spectrum (AM, FM, shortwave, VHF/UHF), transmission systems and/or instruments; she also works with the VLF portion of the electro-magnetic spectrum to receive and transduce electrical fields created by the sun's activity on the Earth's atmosphere or fields generated by human-built objects, infrastructures and environments. As a sound and media artist, her projects involve practices of listening and noticing, intensive field work and field(s) recording in places as diverse as the industrialized desert of northern Chile or the gopher-mined barrens behind her tiny backyard. In this talk, Anna will discuss recent projects blending observation with fiction, and acoustic spaces with transmission ecologies.
Biography
Anna Friz is a Canadian radio, sound and media artist, and media studies scholar. Her work reflects upon media ecologies, infrastructure and environment, time perception, radio and transmission art histories, and critical fictions, with a focus on listening, improvisation, durational performance, site-specificity, and repurposing technologies. Anna is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and won the Karl Sczuka Prize in 2024, among other awards. She has presented work internationally since 1998; recent venues include The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Sonandes Bienal Internacional de Arte Sonoro (La Paz, Bolivia), Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro (Valparaíso and Santiago, Chile), Bienal Sur (Argentina), Heroines of Sound Festival, Berlin Germany), esc Medien Kunst Labor (Graz, Austria), Donaueschinger Musiktage 2024 (Donaueschingen, Germany), Radio Art Zone (Esch-Zur-Alzette, Luxembourg), Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, Austria), RE:SOUND Festival (Aalborg, Denmark) and more. Her radio artworks have been commissioned by national public radio in Canada, Australia, Austria, Finland, Germany, Denmark, and Spain, and heard on public and independent airwaves all over the world. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from York University Tkaronto/Toronto in 2011, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the department of Sound. Anna is currently Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz