Lurking somewhere just before Radio One on the dial there's been this utterly bizarre "pirate" broadcast moaning away for the past few days. I picked it up in UCD and someone else I know managed to pick it up in location as far flung as Maynooth.

It consists solely of this bloke in a mild Dublin accent, possibly tinged with the drawl of an upbringing in the environs of the leafy southside talking in a monologue for hours on end. One moment it sounds like he's reading from Wikipedia and following the embedded links within it as he disembarks from one topic to another.

At other times it sounds like he's reading Amnesty International reports. So far he's been going on about Dante's Inferno, Mugabe shutting down opposition radio stations, Aristotle, the levels of radioactive contamination in the general population and the immune system. All day I found myself asking myself "what the hell is this?" Has some lone bloke picked up a radio transmitter off the net for cheap and set himself to work? Its the radioactive equivalent of a street ranter with no given specialty, and the oddest thing of all is you can hear Ray Darcy's show in the background...

There was some comfort in the whimsical thought that this was a lone nut, drowning his thirst with tea, his only company the inanity of Ray D'Arcy's perky morning advice on love, walled in inside his house, a box in the suburbs - lashing out against the infotainment machine and waiting for Babylon to come crashing down around him. Turns out it was just the latest public art series from IMMA and Garrett Phelan, a transmitted sound installation which some how tries to close the gap between the visual arts and audio in an investigation of how ideas spread in society. What toss - since when does the title of "art" justify such a tedious lack of cop on?

If IMMA and the Irish art establishment want to investigate the spreading of ideas in society, and have the capacity to give someone access to a transmitter powerful enough to hog a frequency all over county Dublin, the least they could do is turn it over to an open public access project.

What THEY say: "Black Brain Radio is an unconventional and innovative radio artwork created by Irish artist Garrett Phelan with Temple Bar Gallery and Studios and in partnership with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). The transmission will be broadcast around the clock over a thirty-day period from 19 January 2006 to listeners within the greater County Dublin area on a frequency of 89.9fm. In addition, Black Brain Radio will have the capacity to reach a wide international audience through its dedicated on-line presence."

What The COMMENTARIAT of Indymedia say: "Recognition? What does this mean precisely? Does it mean that he can exhibit meaningless scrawls on the windows of the Civic Offices while other people are prosecuted for painting political slogans on walls, and posters advertising public meetings are torn down? He can set up a "safe" pirate radio station, or do some obscure collaboration with the free state army that amounts to a tape of the same bit of morse code being repeated over and over again in a darkened gallery?"

And now for two tech (no) ical points: there has been an array of problems with blogger lately, which have been preventing me accessing this thing even from a reading point of view, never mind posting. Worst part is no radge seems ta hav nae answers. Meanwhile over on the good ship Old Rottenhat, the good captain Krossphader has delivered a Nietzschean parody of the demise of techno in Dublin after the closue of D1's weekly club.

Related: 1 and 2 (now if only our own techno fiend Cogsy would get his blogging ass in gear a little more often!)

Labels: Art, Black Brain Radio, Media

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