Signal Lost: Archive Unzipped - Script
Section 1: Regular Radio
Introductions
🎵 Play Connecting to the ether track Connecting_to_the_ether.mp3
🎵 Play show 1 introduction track [show_1_introduction.mp3
Anita: Huh? This is not what's in my script at all... Thijs: Is it not? Mania: I think it is. Wasn't the whole idea of today's show to reuse material from previous shows, and delve deeper into our archive. Anita: Yeah, but this audio fragment doesn't mention the themes of today right? Community, repurposing material, the gift economy... Thijs: Do you have another proposal? Mania: Ohh, play the one from the second show! Anita: Okay! I'll tell you what my introduction is like.
🎵 Play show 2 introduction track [show_1_introduction.mp3
Anita: Well, that was my introduction. What do you think? Mania: I think it was spectacular!!! Anita: Yeah, the music is to die for!!! Thijs: I knot right! Let's not get ahead of ourselves, this was not the order we agreed on, right? The music section will only be played 10 minutes from now. Mania: Yes, now we should .. I remember this was the moment we really started to challenge ourselves with the possibilities of interactivity of radio. It is not directed in only one way, but the audience was able to participate in the form of a phone call. Thijs: There was a quizzzz too! Anita: ... and they were promised a juicy American Breakfast. Thijs: What I remember most is that no one got breakfast :'( Mania: It didn't work, because we figured out there's a delay in broadcasting. Anita: But then, during the sixth show (The Hitchhiker's Guide to an Active Archive), we tried a different form of audience interaction: Etherpads. Thijs: True! But we're going on a tangent here. I'll tell you what my introduction is like.
🎵 Play Connecting to the ether track Connecting_to_the_ether.mp3
Thijs: Good Morning! You're tuned into Protocols for an Active Archive, the 22nd XPUB Special Issue, where students from the Piet Zwart Art Institute Experimental Publishing Master explore and create technosocial protocols for potential active archives of Radio Worm, while making radio themselves.
This will, sadly, be our last broadcast. In 12 shows over the past 3 months, we have accumulated our own archive of work. This show will be dedicated to celebrating the Worm archive, celebrating the communities surrounding Radio Worm and think about ways to extrapolate the discourse surrounding archiving.
Today's show -- titled THE LAST BROADCAST -- will be structured as follows:
Cycle through spreakers: Thijs -> Anita -> Mania
1 Introduce the show and establishing a theme of reusing material by playing snippets from previous shows.
There is confusion about what intro is the proper intro.
2 Establish the theme of community by playing the breakfast protocol.
Reflect on our process of doing this project.
3 Make a connection to the concept of the gift economy.
Play the generated snippet.
4 Interviews with famous radiomakers.
The radiocommunity is broad and far-reaching.
These interviews will shine some light an the personal and intimate aspects of radiomaking.
5 WHEEEEEL OF FORTUNEEEEEE
This segment was never played during the Hitchhiker's broadcast, so we wanted to give it some extra attention today!
6 Ending of a radioshow Protocol
Ending a broadcast is difficult. Wrapping up a whole show is even more difficult.
We will follow the Ending of a Radioshow Protocol and end on a call to action that will encourage the community to come together.
Thijs: Woah, nice summary of things we've explored throughout the process of making radio these past 3 months!
Anita: Agreed! Let's move on then to the next section: the breakfast protocol.
Breakfast Protocol
Mania: We have been making the Protocols for an Active Archive radio show as a group. Every week, 3 people were selected as caretakers who would give extra care to the preparations of the show, and who would be present in the studio. Typically, the rest of the group would listen together -- in a space called The Aquarium, a place where our minds can collaboratively explore the archival oceans. Protocols for and Active Archive is a morning show, airing between 10 and 12 a.m. We took this opportunity to have a shared potluck breakfast. The segment we are about to listen to was part of the show of that day.
🎵 Play breakfast_protocol.mp3
Thijs: That was The Breakfast Protocol, from our 4th broadcast. We didn't know each other before starting this program, the Special Issue is the first project we're doing together. The shared breakfast was a pivotal moment for us as a group: taking the initiative to experience it together, enhancing the broadcast from an individual event to a shared one. It provided a feeling of community that continued to fuel the subsequent weeks of the project.
Gift Economy
Anita: Today, we want to focus on a specific type of community: the gift economy. Mania: We've also been able to experience this ourselves. Halfway through the project, we attended zinecamp. This was a moment where we could not only share our findings thus far, but only get to know other people passionate about sharing printed matter. And exchange ideas. This is when we first started conducting interviews, something that we would use frequently in later broadcasts. Thijs: The next fragment is a text on gift economies, read aloud by a machine voice.
🎵 Play description of gift economy
Scratch Orchestra
Thijs: acts of giving and receiving can be literal, but also figurative. A gift economy can be as much more than a rigid, sterotypical concept of economy. It can be seen as a basis for exchange. Any exchange. Exchange that transcends the idea of economy. Exchange of language, ideas and understanding. It creates a mindset, and safe space. Giving each other freedom, and opportunity to experiment. In that sense, the act of shared improvisation can be seen as a gift economy. With this in mind, we will now revisit the Scratch Orchestra. Mania: The Scratch Orchestra is an experimental musical group, a collaboration of creative minds with an emphasis on improvisation. We too, have been collaborating extensively. And together we are so much stronger.
Section 2: Soundscape to slowly scarper this sphere of existence and introduce The End
🎵 Play the soundscape that introduces the end?
Section 3: Revelation Improvisation
In this section, we will do collaborative improvisation like we did during the show on November 28. The setting is similar: an apocalyptic event has just occured.
We have selected snippets from the interviews and placed them in a soundboard. We can use these during our improvisation, to suggest these people being part of our conversation.
Panic and exposition
A30. I'm SO glad our tap water is up to par.
A13. So obviously there is this fear that something is destroyed or lost.
A12. Someone came to an event at WORM and broke into the room at Pirate Bay and slept there.
A23. F*** this get this out of the archive!
Transition from panic to community
A26. There are always things that are lost and things that get added. So I mean it's a natural cycle of information or independence or whatever you're gaining, there's some loss that comes with that.
I9. It makes things a lot easier for yourself when you know that people are just as overwhelmed, just as stressed, just as confused and just as all over the place as you are.
I15. Worm taught me, All you really need to build a community is people who are interested in doing so
Starting a community
A6. This media being shared is in itself a payment.
A21. As soon as this archive stops being a community archive, it loses it's value.
I8. It really feels like I belong to Rotterdam, and I think part of what allows me to feel this way is obviously my friends, and my community, and my people but also having spaces like Worm.
A1. Oh I often feel like poeple see archiving as this process of gathering and keeping safe, I guess. But, I mean, if you take archiving out of this institutional and Western context, archiving has been a way of creating and building community and art for, like, years, within thousands of indiginous cultures. I mean, oral history is a form of archival practise, and that in itself is like, as we've seen, an artistic way of providing information.
Creating an EMERGENCY MESSAGE
I3. I really like the idea of getting to know people, chatting with people, and figuring out how we can all collaborate with our individual skills and strenghts and make a project.
A2. So I really like the idea of an archive being anything but the structure we've already got. So, like, there's so much space for the process to become the end goal.
EMERGENCY MESSAGES
For the final ~5 minutes, we play emergence messages on repeat: