Every sound alarms

Garrett Phelan will penetrate our radio waves for the next 30 days with his experimental soundbytes. Donald Mahoney meets the man who wants to turn radio into art, and art into radio

Irish Radioland is a place of polite sameness, predictable as the Angelus. With the pirates long disbanded and the expensive cost of a broadcasting license, the long silences in-between stations left of the dial hints at a failure to imagine radio as anything more than an outlet for our obsession with quizzes and writing text messages. But for the next 30 days, the dead air beside Radio 1 will be transformed by Dublin-based artist Garrett Phelan. His Black Brain Radio project will be broadcasting from 89.9fm throughout the greater Dublin area and streaming globally on the internet – and it's safe to say, there won't be any Harvey Norman ads.

A work of intensive labour and maddening ambition, Black Brain Radio was conceived as an effort to "represent a tiny, tiny, tiny, nano-fragment of the information we experience in a day". The sound of Phelan regurgitating hours of information will become as common to the Dublin airwaves as dreary weather bulletins, and the result is radio as sound art, and art as terrestrial radio.

Phelan began Black Brain Radio by doing a sociologist's job – dividing society into topics – in order to arrive at the subjects that frame human knowledge. He arrived at 90 subjects, and then spent months gathering as much information as he could about each one, before collating it all down to a digestible point. A daily installment of Black Brain Radio consists of a two-hour-and-fifty-minute sound piece looping continuously for 24 hours. Each piece is divided into two-minute segments of information from each of the subjects. Their order has been decided by the omnipotence of his MP3 player's shuffle function. "I might be talking about, say, the girth of a man's penis for two minutes, and then I'll go right into metaphysics," Phelan says. The Tubridy Show, it isn't.

As radio, Black Brain Radio is something utterly novel in Ireland: legal, experimental broadcasting. With the Temple Bar Gallery and IMMA behind him, Phelan applied for a 30-day licence by the BCI. A punk spirit informs all of Phelan's work, and he was clearly giddy the authorities had sanctioned his piece. "It's middle-class anarchy," he admits, but the BCI license provides his piece with legitimacy and purpose unattainable if he was broadcasting as a pirate. During his 30 days, Phelan will be as entitled to his place on the radio as Pat Kenny.

Yet, as art, it is something unbridled, beginning in the Temple Bar Gallery and penetrating our most fortified places. Phelan is an artist clearly concerned with reaching beyond the walls the art world has erected around itself, though he hasn't left the gallery entirely behind. The Temple Bar Gallery has been converted into a stark recording studio, and acts as a launching pad for his recordings. Two MP3 players and a recording microphone sit on a black desk, while 30 small drawings hang around the room, each one done during a day's recording. From the gallery, a temporary transmitter placed on the roof carries Phelan's voice to a large transmitter on Three Rock Mountain, and from there, Black Brain Radio is beamed out in mono over greater Dublin.

Phelan has obviously geared Black Brain Radio towards an "accidental" dimension – the driver stuck in traffic searching for something interesting to listen to, the housewife in her kitchen whose tuning for Radio 1 is slightly off-kilter. Phelan mistrusts the hegemony of the gallery, and radio is a natural extension for his often text-based work.

Despite backing from two of the bigger players in Irish art, Black Brain Radio was imagined as a means of getting past the numbers game that governs the domain of visual art. "Artists should be re-employed," Phelan says. For him, the failure of contemporary art to fully engage with the issues of "real world" mirrors the erosion of art as society's conscience. Phelan downplays his own political courage, but the presence of his voice on the radio over the next month will most certainly call into question the "news/sport/weather" cycle of information that bombards us on the hour.

A year in the making, Black Brain Radio is a work of gargantuan effort, not only by Phelan, but by Noel Kelly, curator of the Temple Bar Gallery, and his team, as well as the staff at IMMA. The bureaucratic feat of receiving a radio license and the task of fitting the Temple Bar Gallery for radio demanded prolonged patience and large funds. All for an edgy piece where nothing is for sale and the number of people who experience it is impossible to quantify. While Black Brain Radio is testament to mad reaches of genius, the Temple Bar Gallery and IMMA should be thoroughly lauded for facilitating art that aims far beyond the gallery.

?More Black Brain Radio will be broadcast to the County of Dublin on 89.9fm from 19 January until 17 February. To listen online, go to www.garrettphelan.com/now.htm. There will be a panel discussion on alternative ways to consider radio and art in the Lecture Room of IMMA on 17 February – admission is free but booking is essential. www.imma.ie, www.templebargallery.com, www.garrettphelan.com