The Confidential Briefing
This episode of The Far Becomes Near is a cassette tape, handed to you, a member of the British diplomatic core, as you board a chartered jumbo jet for the emirate of Sharjah, UAE. Set in 1978, the scenario imagines you settling down in your seat, heeding the permission to smoke announcement, and donning the headphones of your Sony Walkman, by which method you are prepped for the International Telecommunications Expo in Abu Dhabi to which you are destined. The confidential briefing, of declassified documents and expert testimonies brings you up to speed on political aspects of radio history in the United Arab Emirates, ahead of your 'diplomatic' work at the Expo.
RELATED PROGRAMS
HEARwHERE
RADIO SERIES
Sound artists Fari Bradley and Chris Weaver take to the road to explore the manner in which one's sense of identity is sharpened by suspension of place during a voyage. Our sense of community in the world - whether as part of a neighborhood, a workplace, or an interest-based community - is built from familiar cues and interaction with sights, sounds, and other stimuli. On the road these cues are disconnected and one necessarily becomes a citizen of a wider world, the planet itself.
Captured within these audio journeys are varying locales and places of connection and transition: airport lounges, walkways between buildings, and journeys between cities where a sense of place is fractured and re-arranged. Bradley and Weaver's audio collages feature narratives from a collection of cassette audio diaries, soundscapes, overheard music and snippets of conversation, all in service to the larger universal context that quietly envelops us all.
Artists Fari Bradley and Chris Weaver collaborate across a variety of performance, sculpture, and media practices. They work with experimental music, radio, performance, and sculpture, and, in a world dominated by visual culture, investigate sound as a means to establish and question new sets of social relations between subjects and space.
more 
