9000 Minutes

Field Theory, 2016

An artwork, a strategy, a platform - for 6.25 days straight, or 9000 uninterrupted minutes, Melbourne artist collective Field Theory embedded themselves inside the Queen Victoria Market and didn’t leave. Living, sleeping, eating, and broadcasting from a radio hut clad in cardboard speaker boxes made from market waste, they staged a non-stop live radio transmission drawn entirely from the people, sounds, stories, smells, and rhythms of the market itself.

With no pre-written script and no outside content, 9000 Minutes became a hyperlocal sound system. Part improvised durational performance, part pirate radio, part archaeological dig into the sonic and social layers of one of Melbourne’s most iconic and contested public spaces.

As the broadcast unfolded, the hosts got increasingly delirious from lack sleep. Traders, shoppers, forklifts, food scraps, ghosts and gossip all found their way into the mic. The stories got increasingly wilder and weirder, oscillating between the serious, the silly, the heartfelt and the surreal.