Curated by Kenneth Goldsmith

In MACBA's exhibition, "Are You Ready for TV?", a visitor can see what happens when the aesthetic of visual artists collides with the world of television. The results are anything but what you'd expect to see on TV. Likewise, when television collides with audio arts, a new and disconcerting soundtrack emerges, one that can only have been a product of artists swiping, sampling, détourning, recycling, remixing, and mashing-up sources emanating from the television. There's a great history of audio works mashed up, inspired by and taken from TV and we'll be listening to ten of them here. Unlike the works in the exhibition, these more ephemeral gestures travel in different ways, often reinserting themselves back into mass culture by means of mechanical reproduction, spread widely and thinly across culture. In many cases, this type of distribution has impacted back upon popular culture itself, creating an historical echo chamber. With no museum needed to reframe these works as art, the mere displacement from one medium into another creates an ecosystem unique to the recorded artifact, distinctly different than that of the visual. These works live on, perpetuating themselves in popular culture via the internet, as well as in the form of LPs, cassette tapes, CDs and MP3s.

Link: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/specials?id_capsula=782
MP3: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/specials/TVontheradio.mp3
Related information: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/20101130/TVontheradio_eng.pdf

Playlist:
Ken Nordine "The Vidiot" (excerpt, 1957) from Word Jazz (Ken Nordine, featuring The Fred Katz Group, Dot Records, 1957)
John Cage appears on the TV show I've Got a Secret and performs his composition "Water Walk," 1960
Charlotte Moorman plays the TV Cello on Nam June Paik's television show, Good Morning Mr. Orwell, interviewed by George Pimpton, 1984
Ferdinand Kriwet "Apollo Vision" (realisation: Ferdinand Kriwet; production: Studio Akustische Kunst, WDR, Köln/SWF/BR; script: Klaus Schöning, 1969)
Donald Swearingen "Salvation at 1 AM" (1990) from Radius #2: Transmissions from Broadcast Artists (¿What Next? Recordings, 1993)
Robert Watts "Interview" (1963) from Fluxus Anthology (Anthology Records, 1995)
Brian Joseph Davis "Voiceover" (MP3 from http://brianjosephdavis.com, 2006)
Robert Ashley Perfect Lives: An Opera for Television from "The Bar (Differences)" (Lovely Music, 1983)
William S. Burroughs, "Present Time Exercises" from Break Through In Grey Room (Sub Rosa Records, 1971)
The Evolution Control Committee "Rocked by Rape" (MP3 from ECC website http://evolution-control.com, 2002)