Virginia Madsen
Currently I am also co Deputy Director of the Centre for Media History, Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University. I am also Convenor of Radio, teaching, designing and developing radio, podcasting and audio media courses at undergraduate and post graduate level. I also teach in media studies and media history more broadly, with recent specializations in the fields of documentary, and media representations. I am a Supervisor for Higher Degree students (PhD and MRes) across a range of media subfields, including with creative practice components, and have examined many PhD projects/theses.
I am also a writer-producer of documentary and performance audio works for electronic and broadcast public media, working also as sound designer, director and writer.
My research interests span the history of public media and broadcasting in radio/audio internationally to radio’s documentary and audio feature traditions. I have written on sound and radio culture and history in all aspects. I was formerly a features and arts producer with the Australian national public broadcaster, the ABC and one of the founding producers for the ABC's audio arts program, The Listening Room.
I have two major research projects in progress: I lead the ARC funded Discovery project: 'Cultural Conversations: A History of ABC Radio National', a history of the Australian public broadcaster's ‘ideas network’, Radio National, over 90 years of broadcasting.
I am also writing an international account of the 'documentary imagination' in radio from the 1920s to the present. This project charts transnational documentary and 'feature' traditions and the varied forms which have evolved in radio across a number of sites and broadcasters from the UK to France, Germany, Italy, Denmark/Scandinavia, the USA, Canada and Australia. This project draws on research conducted in archives around the world and interviews with significant features and documentary informants for this project in progress, which I hope will deliver a new transnational history of the documentary in its audio form/s. The project has been supported by various small grants from Macquarie University and a Fellowship based at the British Library, London, working with Curator Radio, Paul Wilson. Archival Research has been conducted at the ABC and Australian National Archives; BBC's Written Archives at Caversham; Archives of Radio France; RAI Italy archives; RBB (formerly SFB) radio archives, Berlin, Centre for Media History, University of Hamburg, Hamburg and NDR; Danmarks Radio, Denmark, and various collections on radio and archives in the USA and Canada.
I am also a writer-producer of documentary and performance audio works for electronic and broadcast public media, working also as sound designer, director and writer.
My research interests span the history of public media and broadcasting in radio/audio internationally to radio’s documentary and audio feature traditions. I have written on sound and radio culture and history in all aspects. I was formerly a features and arts producer with the Australian national public broadcaster, the ABC and one of the founding producers for the ABC's audio arts program, The Listening Room.
I have two major research projects in progress: I lead the ARC funded Discovery project: 'Cultural Conversations: A History of ABC Radio National', a history of the Australian public broadcaster's ‘ideas network’, Radio National, over 90 years of broadcasting.
I am also writing an international account of the 'documentary imagination' in radio from the 1920s to the present. This project charts transnational documentary and 'feature' traditions and the varied forms which have evolved in radio across a number of sites and broadcasters from the UK to France, Germany, Italy, Denmark/Scandinavia, the USA, Canada and Australia. This project draws on research conducted in archives around the world and interviews with significant features and documentary informants for this project in progress, which I hope will deliver a new transnational history of the documentary in its audio form/s. The project has been supported by various small grants from Macquarie University and a Fellowship based at the British Library, London, working with Curator Radio, Paul Wilson. Archival Research has been conducted at the ABC and Australian National Archives; BBC's Written Archives at Caversham; Archives of Radio France; RAI Italy archives; RBB (formerly SFB) radio archives, Berlin, Centre for Media History, University of Hamburg, Hamburg and NDR; Danmarks Radio, Denmark, and various collections on radio and archives in the USA and Canada.
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Books by Virginia Madsen
L’écriture radiophonique accomplit, fausse et manipule deux séparations essentielles – le fait d’isoler l’événement acoustique du temps et de l’espace dans lesquels il s’est produit, et le fait d’isoler un énoncé de l’immédiateté physique de celui qui énonce. Le plaisir d’un texte radio réside dans une sorte d’interruption merveilleuse ; « interruption » qui introduit quelque chose qui n’arrive jamais vraiment, « merveilleuse » parce qu’il n’y a en elle rien de nécessaire.
Gregory WHITEHEAD a créé plus d’une centaine de pièces radiophoniques, d’essais et d’aventures acoustiques pour la BBC, Radio France, Deutschlandradio, ABC Australie, NPR et autres. Entrelaçant les matériaux documentaires et fictionnels dans des récits malicieusement irrésolus, l’esthétique de Whitehead se distingue par son engagement envers la radio comme médium de navigation poétique et d’association libre. Dans ses œuvres vocales et texto-sonores, il explore la tension entre une forme de pulsion continue et l’irruption de discontinuités soudaines, ou encore entre l’entropie et la décomposition linguistique. 978-237466-003-5 • 144 pages.
Papers by Virginia Madsen
L’écriture radiophonique accomplit, fausse et manipule deux séparations essentielles – le fait d’isoler l’événement acoustique du temps et de l’espace dans lesquels il s’est produit, et le fait d’isoler un énoncé de l’immédiateté physique de celui qui énonce. Le plaisir d’un texte radio réside dans une sorte d’interruption merveilleuse ; « interruption » qui introduit quelque chose qui n’arrive jamais vraiment, « merveilleuse » parce qu’il n’y a en elle rien de nécessaire.
Gregory WHITEHEAD a créé plus d’une centaine de pièces radiophoniques, d’essais et d’aventures acoustiques pour la BBC, Radio France, Deutschlandradio, ABC Australie, NPR et autres. Entrelaçant les matériaux documentaires et fictionnels dans des récits malicieusement irrésolus, l’esthétique de Whitehead se distingue par son engagement envers la radio comme médium de navigation poétique et d’association libre. Dans ses œuvres vocales et texto-sonores, il explore la tension entre une forme de pulsion continue et l’irruption de discontinuités soudaines, ou encore entre l’entropie et la décomposition linguistique. 978-237466-003-5 • 144 pages.
The New York Times recently described Phnom Penh as 'the next Prague', rising from the ashes of 30 years of war and conflict. But such descriptions gloss the everyday reality and it's easy to forget the terrible Khmer Rouge years when one in four Cambodians died and a rich culture was almost extinguished forever.
Robert works in one of the many shelters for the abandoned and 'trafficked' children of Cambodia. Virginia was soon swept up in stories of lost childhood and terrible poverty, as well as stories of survival and hope.
Produced and written by: Virginia Madsen
Sound engineer : Mark Don
Additional narration: Lina MacGregor
Recordings Virginia Madsen and Tony MacGregor
Translation: Neary Rath
Location assistance: Robert Madsen
Assistance: Director of Komar Rikreay, Madam Prom Kim Chheng.
In 1994 she travelled to Denmark to find the old manor house Hesselmed, and traces of her great-grandfather, Hans Madsen. Against this immigrant history Virginia shares more recent memories and experiences of the land north of Sydney where her father grew up, and where she frequently returns.
In this series of three linked stories for radio, writer critic and radio producer Virginia Madsen invites us to reflect upon on the place of 'the dark' in our collective imagination, and the mysteries and revelations that come with the dark. These stories also form a meditation on a very particular space – the radio, a space of reveries, memory, dreaming, creativity, a quality of space (and time) which is under threat from the spreading of industrial light.
And at the centre of this triptych - a room in the Desert Inn motel in Las Vegas, inhabited by a man who may (or may not) resemble the late, reclusive American billionaire, Howard Hughes.
The Menagerie of the Jardins des Plants in the heart of Paris is the oldest zoo in Europe. The contemporary zoo seeks to create the illusion of a national environment, in which the spectator might imagine the captive animals somehow "at home". Yet the Paris Menagerie still retains the self-conscious artifice of an earlier era. The animals are framed by their enclosures much as paintings in a gallery, framed specimens of ‘the wild’.
At first the Menagerie seems archaic, a kind of prison. But perhaps the sadness of the animals is more a projection of a sense of loss felt by the spectator - the loss of our own wildness, our own sense of being part of the natural world.
In this meditative feature, we meet the people and the animals who inhabit this strange zoo in the middle of Paris.
Performances by Susan Lyons reading from Aline Reyes story of a love affair with a bear, Lucie's Long Voyage, and from Animal Nature by Collette. Other performances were by Peter Kowitz, Ivanka Sokol and Julie Weaver. Recordings at the Paris Menagerie by Virginia Madsen and Tony MacGregor.