Organization
Turbulence.org is a project of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. a 501(c)3 nonprofit established by Helen Thorington in 1981 in New York City.
New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA) was founded in 1981 to foster the development of new and experimental work for radio and the sound arts under the umbrella of New American Radio. In 1996, it extended its mandate to Net Art (aka Internet Art) and launched its pioneering website, Turbulence.org. Turbulence.org commissions, exhibits, and archives works that creatively explore the Internet as both a site of production and transmission. NRPA is the only organization in the United States that has as its core mission the commissioning of Net Art by both emerging and established artists.
Overview
NRPA’s first project, New American Radio (1986-1998), was a weekly, national Radio Art series that ranked with ABC Australia’s The Listening Room, and Austria’s Kunstradio. Its 300 commissioned works – which won numerous international awards – were aired in North America, Europe and Australia, and are now archived at Wesleyan University; 140 full-length works are available for listening at http://somewhere.org and http://newamericanradio.org (where it is permanently archived at Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen). New American Radio will be featured in the upcoming book, Listen Up: Radio Art in the USA, to be published by Research Association Artist’s Publications, Bremen, Germany in 2022. Recently, New American Radio partnered with Wave Farm and the Library of Congress to ensure its existence in perpetuity.
Known as one of the “premiere web sites for net art,” Turbulence.org (1996-2016) commissioned over 220 original Net | Web | Hybrid Art works and hosted over 20 real-time, multi-location performances. As networking technologies acquired wireless capabilities and became mobile, Turbulence.org remained at the forefront of the field by supporting artworks created for ‘mixed realities’, such as Locative Media and Augmented Reality (AR). Turbulence.org is now preserved online – by the Electronic Literature Organization and Extremadura and Iberoamerican Museum of Contemporary Art (MEIAC) Badajoz, Spain – and offline at the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
Motivation
For all of its 35 years, NRPA has supported artists who innovate with mass media or the networked information environment. The appeal is both the uncharted territory that is a “new” artistic medium and the potential for reaching vast audiences who are often not consumers of gallery/museum art. Further, just as radio allowed artists to reach a large local and/or national audience, so the Internet allows people from all over the world to communicate and co-create in real-time, encouraging transcultural process and transborder community, especially in virtual worlds like Second Life. NRPA has harnessed this potential in its many commissions, exhibitions, performances, publications and symposiums, dissolving barriers between disciplines and languages, and informing and educating audiences in the process.
Institutional Support (2017-)
Electronic Literature Organization (Contact: Dene Grigar)
Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (Contact: Ray Siemens)
Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art (Contact: Timothy Murray)
Extremadura and Iberoamerican Museum of Contemporary Art (Contact: Gustavo Romano)
Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen
Private Foundation Support (1981-2016)
Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Heathcote Foundation
Jerome Foundation
LEF Foundation
mediaThe foundation inc.
Meet the Composer
Murray G. and Beatrice H. Sherman Charitable Trust
Pew Charitable Trusts
Rockefeller Foundation
The Greenwall Foundation
Trust for Mutual Understanding
Government Foundation Support (1981-2016)
Massachusetts Cultural Council, a State agency
National Endowment for the Arts
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs
New York State Music Fund
New York State Council on the Arts