AYE TEST on basic.fm

AYE TEST is a paradoxical endeavour to explore the visual world through the medium of radio.

Each episode gently invites the listener down a path of experiment, reverie and discovery through field recordings, sound art, interviews, readings and music. Oscillating within Einstein's creative thought system of 'Hard thinking followed by soft thinking' these two 'modes' encourage both concrete/academic and ineffable/creative approaches to ideas.

Curated by North East artist/writer Iris Priest the programme embodies a 'light touch' approach in exploring themes current in contemporary art through multi-disciplinary perspectives. Rather than presenting resolved concepts or conclusions AYE TEST hovers in the embryonic space of conversation and possibility where the reenchantment of art and life is the ultimate, ongoing pursuit...

AYE TEST – Episode 1.

First Broadcast Tuesday 16/04/13 16.30 (GMT+1)

'AYE'

1. noun In the Yoruba Tribe the visible, tangible world of the living in contrast to the hidden, invisible world of the spirits ("orun")

2. adverb "Aye" North East English colloquialism, affirmation, "yes"

Homonyms of AYE

1. eye - noun sensory organs through which humans and vertebrate animals see

verb to look at or observe closely or with intent

2. I - pronoun - Referring to oneself as subject or author

noun, plural - I's The self; the ego

symbol - The imaginary quantity equal to the square root of minus one

Tracks and excerpts

John Berger – Ways of Seeing

Gold Panda – Same Dream China

Ethel Waters – Jeepers Creepers

Richard Dawkins – Why the Universe seems so strange

Sun Ra – I am trying to find myself

Alan Watts – Sensory Perception

Sleep ∞ Over – Flying Saucers are real

Original Action Group – Okueme '99' Side B

Pat Steir – (from VISION #4 Word of Mouth)

Michael Talbot – Synchronicity and the holographic universe

Dylan Thomas – Light breaks where no sun shines

Dan Dennett – The illusion of consciousness

Timothy Leary – How to operate your brain

Suicide – Dream, Baby, Dream

AYE TEST – Episode 2.

First Broadcast Tuesday 30/04/13 16.30 (GMT+1)

The Philosophy of Language lecture originally delivered by the Newcastle scholar JP Dodd to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle-upon-Tyne on January 13^th, 1851.

The transcript of The Philosophy of Language lecture (discovered by chance in the Lit & Phil archives) explores the idea of language in relation to the development of thought, as an instrument of civilisation and as a root to our past and inherited ideas. Episode 2 of AYE TEST presents an unedited version of this lecture re-recorded, re-appropriated and re-contextualised in 2013.

As an artefact, re-visited from a contemporary perspective, the original lecture illuminates the philosophical approaches of an era when science, religion, myth, poetic expression and human invention could all be employed in developing a single thesis. Whilst this pre-disciplinary approach is vital and interesting to revisit now it is also laced with antiquated (and ethically dubious) ideologies and generalisations, particularly in regards to race and class. What the perspectival lens of time illuminates when turned upon an academic lecture of 1851 (i.e. the innate prejudices and inaccuracies of that period) may just as readily be applied to own times in dissecting received knowledge to critique assumptions, deceptions and omissions which may pervade contemporary paradigms of knowledge. 

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