Black Brain Radio is an independent radio station/artwork created by Garrett Phelan that will be broadcast over a 30-day period from 19 January 2006. The transmission will be available to the entire county of Dublin on 89.9FM and to a wider public with a dedicated on-line presence. The project is further extended with two gallery installations at IMMA and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios. Phelan’s Black Brain Radio will transmit a disjointed disparate collection of voice-based reprocessed information sound works (programmes) with an ambient background, providing the listener with an opportunity to access, through the use of their own radios, the core of Phelan’s current practice, an exploration into the ‘formation of opinion’. The project will have intermittent live interventions that will take place throughout the 30-day period.

Based in Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Phelan’s studio will provide a centre point (the Black Brain) for broadcast. In information centres based in both Temple Bar Gallery & Studios and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Phelan will also provide further context for this project challenging viewers in their understanding of thought formation. Black Brain Radio is a free art experience available to people in their own homes at their convenience.

Phelan is based in Dublin and has exhibited both nationally and internationally a series of work concerned with the processes through which ideas or beliefs enter into society.  NOW:HERE 2003, LUNGLOVE 2004 and GOD ONLY KNOWS 2005 were recent large scale drawing installations presented through site-specific drawing projects in non-gallery spaces such as the Dublin Civic Offices as well as being included in Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian. The drawings are part of an extensive exploration into ‘the formation of opinion’, the first phase of which focuses directly on ‘reception of information’. Black Brain Radio is a continuation of these earlier projects.

Black Brain Radio is available on 89.9FM until 18 February 2006.

This project is the first partnership between the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios and is co-curated by Noel Kelly, Deputy Director Temple Bar Gallery & Studios and Seán Kissane, Curator: Exhibitions, IMMA.

Related Links

Further information is available from Garrett Phelan’s website www.garrettphelan.com