The call is open to artists worldwide and relevant to fields of experimental music, sound art, radio art, new radio drama, and performance. The commissioned works will premiere at CTM 2025 Festival in Berlin (24 January – 2 February  2025), and will be broadcast in Deutschlandfunk Kultur’s Klangkunst programme in Spring 2025 in the form of a 40–55 minute radio piece. The Österreichischer Rundfunk (Austrian Broadcasting Service) will also present the works via one or more of its platforms: the Ö1 Zeit-Ton or Ö1 Kunst zum Hören radio shows, and/or the ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst festival in Graz (Autumn 2025). The Radio Lab call’s focus is on live performance formats rather than installations. 

Theme: Affection

As a counterpoint to the world’s current states of division, war, and pervasive anxiety, we’re seeking artistic proposals that engage with and reflect upon the various potentials of the word »affection.«

Affection, understood as a soft and steady form of love, gives us a sense of security, recognition, and connection. Affection works against agitation. It provides space for healing. It elicits acts of responsibility and care. It is a fundamental need and potential of all people. 

Yet it is a resource that is not available equally to all, both in individual and collective dimensions—not only in the personal sense of family, or relationships, but collectively as a community or society. It can be deprived from us willfully or through conditions that are forced upon us; it can be used with manipulative intent, make us dependent, or be exclusionary when extended only to those with whom we sense an immediate resonance or sameness. To think of affection as a potent personal, artistic, and political force that can serve as an antidote to pain, neglect, fear, and division—and as a source of strength for coexistence, community, and solidarity—therefore requires us to imagine affection in different ways. 

Such variations of affection need to extend beyond the delimitations of uneven power structures and across social scales — to risk new modes of relationality that are at once intimate and social, dismantling conventional divisions of public and private and embracing ideas of interdependence and the richness of multi-perspective experience.

What could such policies of affection look like in sociocultural, artistic, musical, and sonic fields? How can we nurture our collective capacity for affection and grow networks of affection? How do sound and music transmit affection or become a medium of affection themselves? Is listening an act of affection? Or resonance? Can we hold each other through sound? 

Artists might also consider how »affection« in technology might relate to its emancipatory potential in music and sound art, which is the core focus of tekhnē. Narrative, speculative, or investigative approaches might, for example, explore concepts for and imaginaries of affective and sentient technologies, radio and modern broadcasting methodologies as technologies that collapse distance and produce new forms of intimacy, inclusive design and sonic accessibility, or other technologies of care. Live performances should be conceptualised in such a way that a radio piece can be created in the same spirit. 

It is possible to submit your Radio Lab work to further competitions upon its realisation: in previous years, various winners have been independently awarded prestigious opportunities and prizes.

Budget & Conditions

Two selected works will be supported by a fee of 5000€ each. The commission winners are responsible for covering costs relating to the research and creation of the work (eg. collaborator honorariums, specific materials purchase, etc). Technical/staging costs for CTM and for possible presentations at ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst festival will be covered additionally, upon discussion with the respective organisers. 

Winners will be offered a short residency in January 2025 to finalise their live presentation at CTM 2025. Travel expenses to Berlin and lodging during the residency and festival period will be covered by CTM. Please bear in mind that project proposals involving multiple collaborators are possible, but should aim for a modest travel budget to be seriously considered.

Deutschlandfunk Kultur and CTM Festival will provide support, counselling, and general assistance during the production of the work.

Schedule & Deadline

• Deadline for submission: 30 September 2024 at 23:59 local Berlin time (UTC+2)
• Winners notified and announced: second half of October 2024
• Production phase (remote): November 2024 – January 2025
• Final production phase (residency in Berlin): January 2025
• Presentation at CTM 2025 Festival: 24 January – 2 February 2025 
• Deutschlandfunk Kultur – Klangkunst radio broadcast: Spring 2025
• Presentation via ORF: Autumn 2025

Jury

The international jury consists of Jan Rohlf (co-founder CTM Festival), Marcus Gammel (Deutschlandfunk Kultur), Elisabeth Zimmerman (ORF), and two independent artists/curators who will be disclosed together with the results.

Past Winners

Take a look at all CTM Radio Lab works commissioned since the lab's beginnings in 2014.

Questions

Please send an email to radiolab[at]ctm-festival.de with the subject »Radio Lab« should you have any questions about applying.

Before applying, please have the following documents ready for upload in PDF format, maximum size 20Mb:

• project description including rough budget (rough breakdown of the project’s costs, for example collaborator fees, materials purchase, maintenance costs, etc. Maximum 4 pages)
• technical requirements
• your CV (for projects that involve duos or groups, please combine CVs into one pdf document)

IMPORTANT: please label all of your PDF documents with your first + last name so that our application system accurately groups them together.

In the case of duos or group projects, please select one person as the main/contact applicant.

Deutschlandfunk Kultur – Radio Art / Klangkunst

The weekly »Klangkunst« (»Sound Art«) broadcast (formerly »Hörspiel Werkstatt«) was launched in January 1995 by Deutschlandfunk Kultur, German National Radio’s cultural programme. The broadcast was established to extend the formal possibilities of radio play, to experiment with new genres, and to introduce listeners to outstanding examples of international sound art. The programme covers the entire range of new radio art, from experimental sound play to poetry, text-sound collages, soundscapes, multilingual compositions, and electronic and digital radio performances. International networking and exchange among international radio artists are critical dimensions of the programme. Klangkunst is understood as a laboratory for testing the widest possible range of sounds. The programme draws from the varied motifs of diverse sonic environments, creating new amalgams of sound dramaturgy, narrative structures, compositional arcs, and characteristics of radio as a medium. Klangkunst is a member of the Ars Acustica group of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).

Ö1 Soundart: Kunst zum Hören

Kunst zum Hören (until 02.2024 named Kunstradio) is a weekly space for radio-art on Österreich 1 – the cultural channel of the ORF, the Austrian National Radio station. The organisation gives artists a point of access into the unique context of national public radio. Via many innovative projects, artists from very different backgrounds have linked the space and infrastructure of Austian public radio with independent radio stations around the world, with private artist studios, and with all kinds of performance and installation spaces to realise an astonishing array of artistic reflection of radio as a medium and technology.

ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst

ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst is Austria’s festival platform for contemporary and experimental music. Functioning as a kind of laboratory, musikprotokoll invites the audience to embark on an exploratory journey to discover the latest developments and trends in music, with all the artistic risks that this entails. From orchestral music with the ORF Radio Symphonieorchester Wien to chamber music, from live performances to sound installations, musikprotokoll highlights a wide range of intriguingly heterogeneous forms and genres and presents works that are for the most part developed and produced specifically for the festival. Founded by Emil Breisach in 1968, musikprotokoll is organised annually by ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation). It is a co-production of the ORF’s two stations, Radio Österreich 1 (Ö1) and Radio Steiermark, which broadcast presented works in cooperation with the steirischer herbst festival.

tekhnē

tekhnē is a collaborative project in which six European organisations aim to explore the emancipatory potential of technology in music and sound art via residencies, commissions, workshops, publications and more. By engaging critically and creatively with technology, and by putting the focus on the user rather than the developer, technologies and methodologies can be demystified and lead to more autonomous mindsets towards the tools around us. tekhnē is initiated by Q-O2 (BE), CTM Festival (DE), Skaņu Mežs (LV), OUT.RA (PT), GMEA (FR), TRAFO (PL), and is co-funded by the European Union.