A geographic note

KCHUNG Radio's residency at the Hammer Museum officially kicks off tonight with the inaugural Whisper Report. During the residency, members of KCHUNG Radio will blogging here on the Hammer Blog, sharing their insights, interests, and anything else that strikes their fancy.

I am following the station's preparations for the residency through Skype and email from a somewhat remote location. I am in Polotsk, Belarus, near Russia. It is fascinating to be privy to the U.S. discourse while simultaneously immersed in the Russian media space; Belarus and Russia have an open border, and Russian TV channels are broadcast alongside the Belarusian ones. This is a fairly serious international situation we are finding ourselves in, and it seems prescient that the first event of the residency will be a Whisper Report by Gabie Strong, wherein Gabie will be broadcasting from the projection booth during the free screening of the Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer.

As a woman artist who works both in the USA and Russia, I am very excited about the complexity of cultural and political remediation that is bound to occur in this event:  a report conducted in a museum whisper from a site of projection of a film in a Los Angeles artistic institution, a film that documents the implications of a Moscow work of Russian activist artists, itself a documented act.

Tuning in from the East (and hoping you will too) this Tuesday night, September 17, on 1610AM Westwood and live on the web at hammer.kchungradio.org

- Yelena Zhelezov, the host of Tractor: The Spoken Film Archive, PR cat, proposer of Whisper Reports!

Established in 2011, KCHUNG is a creative hub of artists, musicians, philosophers, and tinkerers broadcasting live on 1630AM from a studio above a pho restaurant in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. The radio station currently airs 74 live, original shows each month, including reports on wildlife conservation, on-air meditation, gestures of an economic and performative nature, as well as music. While in residence at the Hammer through the end of the year, KCHUNG presents the station’s regular programing on-site as well as new programs developed for the museum. Visitors can look forward to projects such as audio tours composed by KCHUNG and remixes of past Hammer programs.