FMemory workshop at Oberlin
Pull-quotes are from the Oberlin students’ blog: Margin Release
In February, Michael Trigilio went to Oberlin College to work with a fabulous group of students enrolled in Julia Christensen’s “Transmission” class. Mirroring the work done in the State of Mind Stations project, Michael worked with students to experiment with radio as a medium for investigating psychological material.
Michael and Julia instructed the students to build their own little radio transmitters. Students then used recording equipment to record their memories and prepare these memories to be broadcast with their portable transmitters.
Arden says, “What I found to be the most poignant part of the piece was that we were not only forced to collectively record our memories, but also to publicly share them. It compelled me to reconsider how people’s thoughts or memories can be presented to an audience and how this may affect a reaction. Many people paid closer attention to what they were listening to, because they could not view the speaker or were excited about hearing their peers’ voices transmitted through the airwaves.”
Noah says, “I think FMemory served as a very nice model for a sort of ideal artistic interaction - one in which all participants are equal parts artistic contributors, practical facilitators, and spectators, and individual credit is largely absent.”
Transmitters were placed around the arts complex and on Sunday, February 24th, nearly 100 students showed up with radios to listen to the transmissions of memories set around the space.
A truly experimental project, the FMemory workshop shifted and twisted during the course of the Sunday afternoon event. Students had first transmitted their individual memories on a single frequency (88.5 FM). As the afternoon progressed, a handful of students altered their transmission frequencies and encouraged visitors to randomly scan through their radios to “find” their memories.
Cubby says “When I was successful at frequency hunting, listening to the memories felt somewhat like eavesdropping—particularly when it seemed I was the only one around accessing a particular transmission.”
The students in the Margin Release classes have produced a great blog, and they wrote extensively about their experiences with the FMemory broadcast. You can read that blog here.
Logan says, “Does anyone agree with me that one of the most intriguing aspects of this event was just the honest sense of experimentation and amount of basic fun that people drew from this? I think the fact that FMemory had never been realized before, and that no one quite knew exactly what to expect the experience to be like, (including Michael Trigilio), helped put everybody’s role in interacting with the project on the same level. There was something very inclusive and (for lack of a better description), DIY about seeing everybody navigating the hallway with their own portable radios listening to transmissions of their peers’ memories through transmitters they made themselves.”
