IO/TA 001

The Joy Channel is the first release of the IO/TA sublabel dedicated to the Transmission Arts (TA). Exploring the obscure yet omnipresent airwaves of radio, broadcast, and transmission arts, IO/TA seeks to release works that blur the lines between music and abstraction, narrative and the imaginary. The transmission arts combine aspects of broadcast aesthetics, storytelling, and recording and distribution technologies into integral elements of the aural object, reminding us that sound is not a transparent thing but that it comes from somewhere to the inner (h)ear.

— tobias c. van Veen

The Joy Channel
created and produced by Anna Friz and Emmanuel Madan

Over a century from now, business as usual has rendered the nation states of Canada, the United States and Mexico extinct. Approximately 40 million people remain in New North America who are mainly concentrated on the west and east coasts in city-states such as Van and Turnpike, or in the walled-in corporate state strongholds of Fortress Alaska and the Protectorate of Utah. Inland, sparse but emergent communities persist.

In this future, the radio ecology still includes community radio, CB and ham radio as technologies which have survived the social and environmental cataclysms by being relatively easy to salvage, fix, and modify, and therefore remain useful to improvised new societies that tend towards local systems, nomadism and scavenging. But radio in the future is not only a sonic medium: it also becomes a means of transmitting neural information in the form of standardized human emotions (corporate ’emo-casting’), or for tele-empathic communion without devices practiced by dispersed nomadic communities.

We tune across the territories of the future radio to learn of the transforming geopolitics and the emerging EM (empathy modulation) band, from the transmissions of a lone ham radio operator or ‘wavefinder’ to the ongoing conversations of a group of hams radioing across the continent, to corporate shills, pundits, religious figures, the seductive sounds of emocast channels, and among them, something new being felt across the spectrum.

This speculative radio art piece explores tensions between the neurological manipulation of emotions and empathic realization, the interaction between the listeners as active or passive subjects, and the renewed struggle over access to the airwaves.

The Joy Channel was originally commissioned by Radio Tesla, Berlin for RadioVisionen: 250 Jahre Radio in 2007. This release is a completely new version of the work with a new script, characters, and scenario, and was chosen as a finalist for the Phonurgia Nova Awards in 2017.