User:Zuhui//T2 Assessment

SI25

Radio Shows

SI25 Broadcast 5: Protocols For Bad Customer Service

Roles: Claudio(producer) / Charlie(interface) / Wyn, Fred + Zuhui & Eleni(host)

Stillcut from film I Daniel Blake, 2016

Hold Music

Elevator music, also known as on hold music or background music, was originally created with the specific purpose of being played in elevators, lobbies, and other public spaces. Companies like Muzak Holdings (founded in the early 20th century) were pioneers in producing music tailored for these environments. The goal was to create calming, non-intrusive soundtracks that could ease anxiety in confined spaces or during long waits.

Script and Protocols, feat."Utopia of Rules", "CAPS LOCK"

“Secrecy is another by-product of administrative power.

‘Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret’, wrote sociologist Max Weber.

Visual representations of ‘official secrets’—as Max Weber calls them—can be found in the form of redacted documents, both for legal, financial, or security purposes. A request for government documents can produce pages full of blacked-out lines, as if it was abstract art. The stupidity and irra- tionality of bureaucratic reasoning as someone within the adminis- tration painstakingly has to go over the text line by line, rendering information useless.” - CAPS LOCK, Ruben Pater

Materials

Redaction Protocol - this really annoyed the listeners

Redaction protocol sheet 1

Redaction protocol sheet 2

Redaction protocol sheet 3

Redaction protocol sheet 4

Pre-recorded operator messages that are self-aware

7. "Did you know, that we only hire one or two telephone operators at a time? We want to make sure you listen to our hold music, cuz we paid a lot of money to license them. Hope you enjoy and thanks."

8. "We’re still here, making sure that you’re waiting. It’s what we do best. Hold on tight and enjoy our pleasant music. Our hold music was scientifically engineered to relax you. If you feel like it’s not, please give it another 10 minutes or so. Thank you for holding."

11. "You’re in line to speak with a representative. But what does it really mean to be 'in line'? Is it a straight path? Or a loop? Either way, we’ll get to you eventually. Please hold."

14."Did you know, that time is an illusion? Much like our customer service.
…
“So then.. If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death — or shall I say, death implies life — you can feel yourself not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.”"

SI25 Broadcast 6: Protocol to Free Britney

Roles: Tessa(producer) / Feline(interface) / Charlie, Imre, Zuhui(host)

Laurence Rassel’s perspective: connection between copyright and patriarchal structures

...With this program's emphasis on issues of authorship, and particularly a kind of feminist approach toward the way in which authorship relates to a kind of patriarchal authoring of our bodies, Laurence and I have been struggling with how to really bring a notion of the body into this program. In particular, Laurence as a woman, and myself as a transgendered person - how do we invoke our bodies in a kind of physical but non-essentialist way?
-The Laurence Rassel Show

Materials

• Script: Ownership of Identity
  

↳ referencing what I've read on K-pop industry forum, also inspired by the video clip from a Netflix show: when life gives you a lemon, capitalize the hell out of it.

• stretching, reversing, messing with the tempo of original Britney Spears songs to weave into our narrative (sometimes I still listen to the reversed versions)

SI25 Broadcast 9: Event ReMix'd

Roles: Lexie(producer) / Zuhui(interface) / Kim, Wyn(host)

thermal print poem

writers' log

SI25 Broadcast 10: The Final Broadcast

Roles: Zuhui(producer) / Fred(interface) / Lexie, Sevgi, Tessa(host)

Materials

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 5

Week 8

Week 9

Week 10

Week 11

• Editing our two-hour radio shows down to 7–9 minute clips was a way to revisit and reflect on all the narratives throughout SI25 (unfortunately, missed on week 4)

Public Moment

Sounds of Making, ‘Lost in Narration’

with Lexie, Claudio, Kiara, Chrissy, Eleni

performance setup

the screen

Programme statement - writteen together with Claudio

"Weaving misinterpretations and distortions into the narrative is part of experiencing the language."

Structure

1. Live writing

- the writers in the room observe and document what's happening and type it out in real time\

- the text is projected onto a screen so everyone can see the room through writers' words.

2. Narrators read-aloud

- the spectators sit down in the chairs in front of the screen, become the narrators themselves, and read the live text aloud into the microphones.

- narrators' voice is immedieately run through a soundscape that adds effects, outputs through speakers.

3. Back to text

- after going through sound, the text read by the narrators comes back as thermal print.

Core ideas

• Language never stays still. It changes a bit each time it moves through different mediums -- through the writer’s subjectivity, the narrator’s tone and intention, or the technologpes that carry it, like machines and software.
  • Every time the medium changes, it doesn’t only affects the language --it changes how we understand it. Each version creates a different reading.
    • Distortions and mistakes aren’t failures, they’re part of the meaning.

Writers' Protocol

risoprinted protocol flyer, forgot to cut off the margines

Live scripting was the first step in the chain of the performance, and it also helped shaping the tone for everything that followed in the whole process. The text created during the live scripting became the material that would be read, transformed and returned.

I created the Writers' Protocol to give that process a shape. the idea was to encourage a writing attitude that is fragmented, layered and sometimes even contradictory where multiple perspectives would coexist side by side on the screen. the writing would move between observation, speculation, and fiction rather than producing linear and consistent narrative of the event.

the design of the protocol was inspired by the non-linear narrative structures that I've seen in films. such as Stranger Than Fiction, Lola Rennt or even Ruby Sparks. these films don’t abide by the idea of a single, fixed narrative, which inspired me to treat narrative not as something we construct in advance, but something that slowly takes shape --through fragments, overlaps, misunderstandings, speculation, and even a bit of mischievf.

SI25 Post-mortem / Reflection

"see if you're being seen"--signage photographed in Ede

"...Perhaps, at its core, radio is more than a platform for performance - it's a celebration of liveness. Every broadcast we created reaffirmed that it's a space where unpredictability becomes a tool, errors and mistakes foster intimacy, and the connection between maker and listener becomes unique with each context presented."

↑ from the SI25 introductory text written together with Claudio

Of the event

On performativity
this phrase I came across by chance became a central motif that helped shaping the Writers' Protocol as part of the performance:

"Kijk of je gezien wordt"

in connection to performativity, this phrase implies the liveness of the gaze, it asks:

"who is watching me right now? Am I being watched -right now, in this moment?”

and this question mattered because each part of the performance relied on someone being percieved in real time, whether they are watching, reading aloud, or listening. And the performance operated in such loop:

writers see → turns what they see into a live script → a spectator reads the script out loud → others(audience) also see and hear it(in a form of soundscape) → the whole process flows back into the space →

The scripts that were produced in this performance never stood alone, they needed a reader, listener, a voice, a body as a vehicle to carry them into existence:

- they could only become an event when someone is reading

- they could only become sound when read aloud

- they could only take shape through someone's voice

in this sense, the audience could subtly shift from being just spectators to becoming performers - simply by becoming aware that they’re being seen, and by participating in the loop through voice, hovering around the writers, or just giving attention. Therefore the act of being seen becomes the condition of the script (and for the narrative) to exist at all. and this process resonated deeply with how I first came to understand the concept of performativity.

On power dynamic
One of the most unexpected things I learned through this performance was how power circulated through roles, bias and visibility.

- the performance wasn;t as neutral as I might've anticipated

- who got to do what --observing/writing, narrating, or just being a spectator actually shaped how much influence each person had

- roles were part of the (subtle)power structure

Methods

Important Keywords

---

• Performativity
• Constraint
• Protocol
• Clinamen
• Side Narrative
• Non-Linear Narrative
• Joke
• Nonsense
• Reflexivity
• Author

Personal Reader

Glossary

Writings/Ideas

Texts that inspired me in SI25

- Georges Perec's Thinking Machines, David Bellos

- The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula Le Guin

- Looking back and not behind. On the concept of Performativity, Melanie Sehgal

- Misplaced Concretism and Concrete Situations: Feminism, Method, and Information Technology, Susan Leigh Star

- The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling, Ted Chiang

- The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes

- What Is an Author?, Michel Foucault

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SI26

Declaration

Generative Storybook

Inspired by The House of Dust by Alison Knowles.

Combine with the way CSS properties like display:flex dynamically re-arranges text on the browser.

Basic Structure

do tigers melt like butter in the forest?

do tigers melt like in the forest?

do tigers melt in the forest?

do tigers melt the forest?

tigers melt the forest?

tigers melt the forest

melt the forest

melt forest

melt

Do Tigers Melt Like Butter in the Forest?

/ Permutational variables / Code to work - HTML, Javascript / CSS / CSS trouble shooting

CSS Drawings

Tigers in a field

Tigers in the forest

In butter

Butter made of tigers

In forest of butter

Mysterious forest is melting

Enigmatic tigers

In non-specific forest

In forest tigers

Others

How to talk to computers

learn as you go

Can a machine perform a curse?

what would that look like?
can I make a short film out of it?

folk curse ritual, footage from film--Wailing, 2016

• Writing in process

• Somebody believes in curses

headline-Independant

headline-The Guardian

headline-Chosun biz

• First Attempt

- I like the idea of performing a curse on the photo --rituals are all about symbolism

- I tried using the recurring flower motif from the rituals on my first attempt but it didn't work

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