SI28-Radio-Worm/Week1

Radio-Show/Week1

This years very first XPUB radio episode! All four of the hosts brought one thing of interest on the topic of writing machines. Important takeaway: One hour is not a lot of time...

Hosts

Luca, Robin, Valentin, Lea

Recap of the Show

Introduction

We started with a short word mash warm-up game to help loosen our tongues for the show. Lea then read out a short introduction to the episode, explaining what XPUB and the radio show are about. We also asked the audience to collect and share sound samples whenever one of us says the word "protocol". These can be used to make jingles for upcoming shows.

Session 1 | Valentin

Valentin hosted/mediated a conversation about an introduction into writing machines borrowing terms from linguistic philosophy semantics, pragmatics, and syntax. In the 1960's Paul Grice put down the basics for understanding our communication other than the classic "sender/coder --> language/code --> receiver/decoder" model. For Grice, the logic of communication has more of an investigatory attitude in which we look for relevancies in each other's messages. Relevancy that comes from recognizing the situation in which the conversation/investigation happens, and understanding broader contexts such as having knowledge about reality (how things works in reality). He also puts an emphasis on a so called mind reading ability which could be understood as having a sense of each person has their own unique way/system of seeing/interpreting the world (has a unique inner world). Grice called these (looking for relevancy, recognising context, knowing reality, mind reading) processes pragmatics to make a difference between purely grammatical language as code which is very limiting.

Session 2 | Luca

Luca shared the song Construção by brazilian singer-songwriter Chico Buarque with us, which uses a writing machine as the base for the lyrics. The structure is composed by verses ending in the same tonic syllable, making it possible to freely exchange every last word keeping its melodic rhythm. A break down as well as a translation of the lyrics can be found on Luca's wiki page.

Construção - Song structure example

Fixed Verse	1st Iteration	2nd Iteration	3rd Iteration
E flutuou no ar como se fosse (And he floated through the air as if he were)	um pássaro (a bird)	sábado (Saturday)	um príncipe (a prince)
1.Every verse is a Dodecasyllable 2. The last word of each verse is a Proparoxytone 3. In the following iteration, exchange the last word of each verse forming new meanings.

Session 3 | Lea

Lea brought a cut-up text to perform together with the group. The concept follows the surrealist idea of latent news, but can also be traced to Tristan Tzaras text To Make A Dadaist Poem or the cut-up technique used by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin.

Input

The input consisted of the principles of permacomputing and Sunjoo Lee's descriptions of her artistic research project Electric Garden, as well as the articles How to Mount a Balcony Awning by Dmitriy Kurochkin and Building a slow web by Greg Sarjeant.

As I did not have enough time to cut up everything I brought, not every input text made it in to the final output. Each of us took a few snippets of text (single words or phrases) and rearranged them into longer phrases or sentences. We then went around in a circle and read them out loud.

Output

All hardware especially the internet as chips to be fed
Flexible electricity built on radio signal are the principles of permacomputing
Never stops pushing. Is an ongoing electric garden
Artistic research powered by the early internet consider carefully insects
The best I remember showing the electric garden
The worst relational process explores the garden
Flowing and it is still making control the feed integrate coming to bathe never stops
Interaction between hope for but the feed is flourishing
Living you don't
Simplicity, complexity and almost biological and renewable one year old
A place solid ground electricity that algae now


And your role is the garden, composting computers, and everything

Session 4 | Robin

Robin presented a project from the early 2000's: Neonio - an interactive artwork by Jim Andrews, that was later translated into a website. He was a media artist working mainly with code, to create interactive poems. Seeing computers as 'language machines', who's language can describe words, sound, images, etc.

In the radio show, Robin read out the intro on the landing page of the NeoNio website and then did a live 'jam' with the interactive poem. It works as a collage of sound snippets that are off when loading the page, and the user can turn off and on to play with the layering of the sound. Each symbol represents a sound and is also visualized as a web animation in the center of the page. In Verse 2, the composition is a little different. It uses the same sound snippets, represented by symbols, but in this verse, they can be sequenced to play with different composition possibilities.

The intro on the NeoNio website, read out during the radio show:

The concept: an interactive form of art / music/poetry
I dream of an interactive, combinatory form of visual music for the web.
A heap is a bunch of sound icons.
Each icon has a sound and animation. Verse 1: layer sound + visuals.
Verse 2: sequence and layer them.
You explore the possibilities that feel good.
I sang, programmed and made the visuals for Nio in 2000 with Director.
NeoNio is a 2021 HTML 5 version that uses the Web Audio API.
Dedicated to my late mom and dad.

Screencapture of Verse 1 of NeoNio

Screencapture of Verse 2 of NeoNio