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Just back from an ArtsLink Award project in Eastern Europe, Neighborhood Public Radio wishes to propose to broadcast the entire ISEA 2006 event, including their own live events, symposia, and debates in order to represent the neighborhood within and surrounding the San Jose ISEA event in an exercise of hyper-local media production as an exercise in free speech and creativity and as an alternative to exclusionary commercial mass-media practices.
Neighborhood Public Radio proposes to establish itself within the ISEA festival as it frequently installs itself in other communities, by expanding the boundaries of the public space inhabited by “the gallery” while inviting the surrounding neighborhood into the space of “the gallery”. This will take the form of a continually broadcast symposium on the theme of Community practice that will include interactions with local community groups as well as discussion of what community practice means for like minded artists in the U.s. and internationally.
NPR would want to engage current partners such as kuda.org in Novi Sad as well as other community practicioners in the Bay Area, in the greater United States, and in the world. We have already shown our ability to engage local communities in other parts of the Bay Area and in Chicago. Our roots in the Bay Area and our installed local network will allow for extensive engagement with a wide variety of community groups in the San Jose and peninsula area for the week of the ISEA conference. Other organizations that reside in our conceptual neighborhood and that we have an interest in working with and /or an interest in approaching for participation include Red 76 of Portland Oregon, Instant Coffee of Vancouver, B.C., kuda.org, Sarai Center/Raqs Media Collective of Delhi, India, Radio Contrabanda in Barcelona, Spain, bootlab of Berlin, Germany and Radio Ligna of Hamburg, Germany. We have been in touch directly or indirectly with all of the previously mentioned organizations and are in the process of reaching out to other groups locally and internationally.
Neighborhood Public Radio is a nomadic free radio entity focusing on hyper-local production, programming, and broadcast. Comprised of four SF Bay Area artists, activists, engineers, and educators, they actively employ a cooperative spirit and resource sharing. NPR is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and, through a CEC ArtsLink Award, has now worked internationally, one neighborhood at a time, having worked in Oakland, San Francisco, Chicago, Novi Sad, Serbia, and Tarifa, Spain.
Neighborhood Public Radio explores both geographical and theoretical neighborhoods and communities, broadcasts live events, and maintains an evolving archive of these community-based programs, offering these "sonic portraits" through their website - www.conceptualart.org/npr - for an international audience. They have been actively producing community-based radio content since January of 2004 under this name.
NPR has collaborated with creative collectives and community service groups like the SF Asian Women’s Shelter, Kuda.org, Horizons Unlimited, Youth Speaks, Kitchen Sink Magazine, and the Mission Creek Music Festival, among others, to create artistic expressions of community concerns. Currently NPR is pursuing its mission of re-orienting the world’s perspective on what radio broadcasting can be by instigating collaborations between artists and their communities around issues related to free expression in broadcasting.
Prior to forming Neighborhood Public Radio, its members were very active in community radio, media education, working with the public in creation of sound projects, and experimenting with radio hardware, technology, and localized production an broadcast within artistic contexts. Operating under the auspices of "artistic project", NPR often sets up operation within various exhibition and performance galleries and brings in members of the surrounding neighborhood to produce and host shows. Likewise NPR also sets up operation within non-art environments and brings in local artists to work within the local environment. In this way NPR hopes to help develop meaningful and sustainable crossover and engagement between the radio, the arts, and the public at large, often aspiring to encourage those often percieving themselves as "consumers" to break free and become "producers".
In all cases, Neighborhood Public Radio wishes to share with underserved or otherwise marginalized communities their philosophy about media accessibilty, free speech, grassroots radio, and the benefits of hyper-local production, programming, and representation as a means of real sustainable relief from the exclusionary and oppressively commercial and often quite conservative mass media outlets in operation today. Likewise NPR wishes to share the possibilities of using radio as an expressive medium and seeks to make this possible, often presenting or creating workshops based on no- and low-budget production strategies. |
