Albany Utility Room

Artist: Richard Crow

Title: Imaginary hospital radio

Location: Utility Room at The Albany

Deptford X 2006

Description: Utilising recordings made in situ, 'treated' environmental, ambient and 'medical noise', poetic narratives, archive recordings and audio contributions from invited collaborators and guests, IHR subtly mimics and 'subverts' (through ironic appropriation) conventional Hospital radio and its supposed aim to pacify its patients. IHR creates experimental radio broadcasts, in which the hospital, its "unwanted" sounds and noises become the sound source par excellence. IHR both inhabits the psychological and physical space (of the hospital), rather than offering an alternative space outside of itself.

Biography: Richard Crow is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses sound and noise in a performative way, for its spatial and subjective qualities and above all for its psychological implications for the listener. Over the past decade his solo and collaborative site-specific installations and performances have consisted of highly conceptualized interventions into base materiality, investigations of alternative systems of organization and research into a certain material decadence, most notably with the project The Institution of Rot. Recent works like Ancolie (South London Gallery), Speaker, stain, silence (for AGM 05, Prefix Gallery, Toronto), Aurélia (Sound Art Museum, RAM, Rome) consist of dense and unsettling soundscapes that oscillate around loss and displacement through disembodied voices and experimental transmissions.