Eran Schaerf: fm-scenario – broadcasting language – undercover operation – station announcement – error

“fm-scenario – The Listener’s Voice” is an intermedial project by Eran Schaerf which uses the internet as a place of production in order to generate content for further media—concretely: radio broadcast, exhibition, and publication. Eran Schaerf’s newscast radio plays, particularly The Listener’s Voice (2002), a fictive radio station that receives calls from listeners, constitute the intermedial project’s starting point.

On February 15, 2013, the second of the project’s five currently planned exhibitions will open at Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund. Each exhibition has its own structure and its own narrative. Drawing from the archive that is accessable at the online studio at fm-scenario.net, a curator compiles a montage which serves Schaerf as a script for a performance for the camera. This performance takes place in the exhibition space. Analogous to production in news agencies, the exhibition space is coded as a place of image production.

The montage for the exhibition at Hartware MedienKunstVerein was compiled by the curator Inke Arns. This montage tells how new technologies and platforms led to a crisis in the news media and paved the way for new forms of news production. fm-scenario – The Listener’s Voice goes further, however, offering medial and architectural formats to civic journalism, whose forums incessantly challenge the authority of the news media.

Inke Arns’ montage “fm-scenario – Sendesprache – verdeckte Operation – Ansage – Fehler” will be broadcast by the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation on February 22, 2013 at 9:03 pm on Bayern2. Following its broadcast, the program will be available for download as a podcast at www.hoerspielpool.de.

Project curator: Joerg Franzbecker

Eran Schaerf, born 1962 in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, has lived in Berlin since 1985. After his studies in architecture in Israel, and at the Hochschule der Künste (today the UdK) in Berlin, he was named director of the Department of Fine Arts at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, and he now teaches at the Zurich University of the Arts. His works have been shown worldwide, including at the 54th Biennale di Venezia (2011), at Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007), Manifesta 2 in Luxemburg (1998), and at Documenta 9 in Kassel (1992). In 2013 Schaerf will be awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. His radio plays, produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk, include Wie gesagt. Theater- oder Taxistück (1997), Die Stimme des Hörers (The Listener´s Voice) (2002), Sie hörten Nachrichten (2005), Nichts wie Jetzt (2009), and Die ungeladene Zeugin (2011), among others.

Free admission.

fm-scenario – The Listener’s Voice (2012–2014) is a production of Bayerischer Rundfunk, Dept. of Radio Plays and Media Arts, and a production e. V., Berlin, in cooperation with Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Les Complices, Zurich; the Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt; and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe.

Funded by Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation).

Major sponsors of the HMKV are the Cultural Office of the City of Dortmund and the Ministry of Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.