Radio International City - RIS - is an art and cultural project begun in 1996. It offers a dynamic platform for the presentation of audio content for independent artists and other creative people in the cultural environment.

RIS represents a new generation of radio. Unlike the conventional radio systems that only work with transmitter/receiver broadcasting, RIS is an open audio archive system, based on the internet. Users can choose their specific audio content, according to their personal interests, listen to it anytime and add content to the system.

Any musician, DJ, artist, independent radio broadcasters, label, as well as producer of radio plays can become content contributors with RIS. So RIS is not a one-to-many, but a many-to-many medium. The software based infrastructure of RIS corresponds to the open structure and the internationalism of the carrier medium, - the Internet.

To the contributors, RIS provides a free and freely accessible infrastructure for the development, maintenance and organisation of a joint non-commercial audio archive. Besides the possibility to archive audio content, each contributor can use his own live broadcast channel on the server.

Data is maintained and administered by the contributors through an easy to use, password-protected web interface. This supports for example the uploading of audio data, entering dynamic subtitles and assigning them to the files, the specification of how long the data should be stored on RIS, as well as the linking of the basic information to additional descriptive text files.

The subjects offered by RIS is emergently developing through the activities of the contributors. Right now the main genres are music, radio play, lyric performance, cultural and political reportage and news.

RIS is continuously growing with the contributions of an international group of participants. It was developed by Thomax Kaulmann within the former International City Berlin project. RIS was part of Hybrid Workspace at documenta X in Kassel, Germany, Hybrid Exposures, Berlin, XChange (virtual) and will be part of Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria in 1998.

To listen to the RIS audio files, only a common web browser and a free, widely distributed player software from RealAudio is required. Project team:

Concept, System Software & Production: Thomax Kaulmann

Graphic Design: Moniteurs

Text: Sabine Helmers, Frank Vogler, Frank Kunkel

Special thanks: Herbert A. Meyer, Commander MUR, Pit Schultz

Audio: all contributors

Thomax G. [thomax@icf.de]