AndreCastro,Radio Liberte Egalite Beyonce,2011

Andre Castro, Thematic Project 'Radio Liberté Equalité Beyoncé', 2011, Trimester: 2, Year:1

Description

Liberté, Equalité, Beyoncé constitutes a prototype of online radio station, created from audio material continuously picked up from archive.org. The station streams an hourly schedule of programs. Each program is formed by combining two factors: a specific sound universe and a topic; this combination is actualized in two steps:

1) collecting (daily) online texts on the topic in question (eg: weather forecast; cookery; poems) from rss-feeds;

2) querying the archive.org for sounds tagged under each of the words which constitutes the collected text, without a specific archive's collection (eg: classical music, old 78rpm records, hiphop, spoken-word );

The project's front-end http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/~acastro/radio/ contains an embedded player currently play file metadata display (when present), including a link to archive.org's file location.

Technology employed

• python script: to collect the rss-feeds, query archive.org API, and generate playlists from the archive's sub-collections;

• liquidsoap: to manage the stream scheduling by: alternating playlists, introducing jingles, and reading the files' metadata; Sending the sound output to icecast2

• icecast2: to broadcast the sound stream to online listeners

• html5/javascript: to embed the sound stream into the website

Aims

• explore and understand the specificities of the archive.org, using some of the possibilities offered by its API to query its contents.

• experiment with online sound streaming and scheduling

• create a serendipitous system within the archive, which aims to allow for unexpected audio items to emergence

• create an alternative interface to the database, with a more narrative format

• encourage the emergence discourses within the archive.

• promote archive.org - a open, communitarian archive, without a direct relation to power structures and, for the most part,a product of its users' contributions.

• reflect on the (im)possibility of online archives not scripted by the ideologies behind them

• reflect on the differences between a repository(database) and an archive

• question the two employed media: internet and radio, by engaging them into a dialogue.

• ultimately, create a fictional radio station, that, although being run by algorithms, could appear to be run by humans

Media

Photos

radio_ELB.png

Audio

LBE-recording.ogg

URLS

front-end: http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/~acastro/radio/ stream: http://pzwart1.wdka.hro.nl:8000/liberte_egalite_beyonce

Essay

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