NAR was launched in 1987 as a 13-part pilot edition with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (PBS). It invited established and emerging artists from diverse ethnic backgrounds and with widely varying interests to participate in the radio production process: playwrights who might develop exciting radio equivalents to "Black Cinema" and "New Asian Cinema"; young musicians and audio artists whose work could engage with state-of-the-art sound technology and speak to young audiences with deep roots in popular culture; avant-garde radio artists from abroad who could offer different cultural sensibilities and bring intellectual complexity to radio work; master storytellers whose narratives could break open tired story formulas and speak with a contemporary voice; and performance artists with a natural affinity to fuse voice, sound, and music.

In the process, NAR took on the exciting challenge of developing a vocabulary for emerging radio art genres, and of finding ways to make this as yet undeveloped field accessible to diverse audiences. Its key goals were to: (1) encourage the development of an artistic practice that recognized radio's distinct means, parameters and artistic possibilities; (2) make possible a body of radiophonic work that over time would prove of permanent value; and (3) include new and under-represented voices and works that brought alternative versions of reality to the medium.

With support from the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts and others, NAR became the only nationally distributed, weekly radio art series in the country. The series went off the air in spring 1998. However, NRPA has received 5 consecutive grants from the NEA to archive the series at Wesleyan University and online at somewhere.org.

NRPA continues to be involved in experimental sound projects, most recently "interaXis," a web and real space sonic exploration held at Engine 27 (New York), the California Institute for the Arts (Los Angeles) and online at Turbulence on November 3, 2002. NRPA has hosted and archived over 20 multilocation performance events in which artists from across the country have collaborated to create real-time performances simultaneously for online audiences and audiences gathered in real performance spaces.

Throughout its 27-year history NRPA has made public presentations of artistic work a significant part of its activity. For instance, it co-curated the Whitney Museum of American Arts' 1992 series Performing Bodies and Smart Machines with Jeanette Vuocolo and Toni Dove, organized two series of net art presentations at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, NY (2001, 2002); co-organized and presented Floating Points: Net Art Now (2004), Floating Points 2: Networked Art in Public Spaces (2005), Floating Points 3: Ubiquitous Computing (2006), OurFloatingPoints 4: Participatory Media (2007), Floating Points 5: Mixed Realities (2008) with Emerson College, Boston; and organized and presented Programmable Media: Open Platforms for Creativity and Collaboration (2007) and Programmable Media II: Networked Music (2008) at Pace University. Upgrade! Boston, founded in January 2005, is a monthly gathering of new media artists and curators that fosters dialogue and creates opportunities for collaboration within the media art community. At each meeting one or two artists/curators present work in progress and participate in a discussion. Upgrade! Boston is hosted by the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is a node in the Upgrade! International network. We presented Re:Writing: Writers, Computers and Networks with the Electronic Literature Organzation in Providence RI, and Boston, MA in spring 2005.

Helen Thorington, Co-Director: newradio at turbulence dot org
Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director: jo at turbulence dot org
Jesse Gilbert, System Administrator