A speculation on the residual static charges which hold real audio in space. The internet has decimated the logic of coherence, complicating orthodox notions of broadcasting. Out of this complexification has emerged the accidental synergy of 'net.radio' and a new kind of listening.

Although the disparate streams of online audio have been christened 'net.radio', most practitioners of internet audio blush at the deficiency of this term. In truth there may be more contrast than resemblance between participants within umbrella forums like Xchang ö, speculative definitions do however serve to expand the dimensions for conversation. What many of these projects perhaps share is a cognisance of a common genealogy, edifed by the 'communication art' of the 60s - 70s, Fluxus, the radio.art movement of the early 90s and other networked threads. A conspicuously Deleuzian tendency toward the obliteration of hegemony, and the simultaneous deference for chaos and Înoiseâ, is also developing as a common element between these discrete projects.

The audio feedback loops of r a d i o q u a l i a probe the continous accident of these fusions. r a d i o q u a l i a are cohesion resonators, integrating the frailties of the format (error messages, disk buffering, dial prefixes, crashing, busy signals) into speculative art discourses. r a d i o q u a l i a, like many net.mediaddicts, are attempting a synthesis of the grit of activism, the zigzag and abstraction of art, and the capabalities of cheap and accessible technology.

r a d i o q u a l i a creates the latitude for musicians and artists to explore the superficial distance between understandings. Tools, such as live performance, audio streams of ebbs and skews, regular netcasts, and g emm a (an online pattern of distributed chaos), are vehicles which survey this region, re-mapping prescribed media territory. But our art is an inexact cartography. While the rupture of intention and outcome can at first seem impeding, these accidental stopovers have allowed a deciphering of the code of netcasting. Real Audio is fragile software. We call it a stream, but in reality our flows are often more glacial. These format vacillations have lead r a d i o q u a l i a to analyse Real Audio's limitations, rather than seek the specificity of culmination. We have come to desire the unstable. We have come to fetishise our mistakes. We celebrate the hidden spaces where the alchemic transference of intent and error happens. This irregular drift has then, paradoxically, proved to be a viable way of reaching an end.

In the oscillation between fetish and cynicism, sincerity and vitriol, paroxysm and equilibrium, some of the richest experiences of online media are articulated. Sheltering in the blind spot of an indefinite phase transition in online media, r a d i o q u a l i a will continue to experiment with shifting audio seepages in physical and virtual space, musing on the ambience and deformities of sound construction, and the feasibility of a collective net.radio aesthetic.

[http://www.va.com.au/radioqualia]

r a d i o q u a l i a ((o)) f r e q u e n c y s h i f t i n g p a r a d i g m s i n s t r e a m i n g a u d i o / radioqualia is Honor Harger and Adam Hyde

radioqualia [radioqualia@va.com.au]