“Radio TNC live at ISEA!” by Bruno Beusch, Tina Cassani
Title:
- Radio TNC live at ISEA!
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Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
Artist Statement:
Paris-based Radio TNC, produced by TNC Network, was launched in September 1995 as the Net’s first offbeat cyber radio. Since February 1996, a truly international and high profile crew of guest hosts has taken turns at TNC’s legendary on-line microphone. For a long time, Radio TNC was one of the very few platforms on which radio – with its techno-aesthetic possibilities, its historically relative nature, its material constraints and limitations — was linked up to the Internet in a consistent fashion and in all conceivable combinations. Radio TNC integrated several European public broadcasting stations into network events and introduced them to the concepts of network-linked production processes. The latest project to come out of TNC networking is the Clone Party, a refinement of and an expansion upon the production pattern developed in the Crash Party. The setting of the Clone Party proceeds from a cognitive model which, during the course of its design for the purpose of exploration of (genetic engineering) possibilities, generates its own form of practice: Ian Wilmuts epoch-making success with Dolly… When partygoers around the world squeeze into their blue-genes and link up in a global cyber party between the laughter and the tears to dance the Body Sampling Step in celebration of the upcoming cloning of human beings, the interpenetrating of fiction and reality will have already brewed up such a high-proof cocktail that we random-generated beings will have our heads spinning long before the hangover sets in… Between February 1996 and June 1997, Radio INC web cast the interactive cyber fiction The Great Web Crash, that culminated into the Crash Party, a global network-radio event between Osaka, San Francisco, New York, Paris, Berlin,Vienna, Linz and Amsterdam. The setting for the Crash Party was a mix of carefully measured dosages of cybercliches and techno-catastrophism. The storyline of the Great Web Crash and its victims disappearing into virtual oblivion had tremendous appeal both to an 11-year-old nerd as well as to a media activist of a more mature age, triggered inputs and turned the Crash Party into an immersive-participatory network event.
