User:Riviera/Caretaker meeting for week 3 broadcast

On Monday 25th September I, along with Senka and Lorenzo, volunteered to be a caretakers for week three's radio broadcast. We met on Wednesday 27th to discuss ideas and structure the broadcast. There were three of us and 120 minutes of airtime to fill. Therefore we divided our broadcast into three 40 minute segments. We detailed what we would do in each segment on an Etherpad (https://pad.xpub.nl/p/plan-broadcast3). The pad became a record of our conversation. A trace of where our ideas came from.

Discussing Texts

Discussing The Death of the Author

We began by discussing Barthes' text The Death of the Author. I commented that I first encountered this text several years ago. At that time, I considered that the death of the Author entailed the death of the intention inherent in the author. In the Laurence Rassel Show the relationship between authorship and copyright is briefly discussed. The discussion in the radioplay, which critiques anti-copyright licenses for not abolishing the concept of authorship, resonates with Constant's Collective Conditions for Reuse (CC4r). Particularly the statement that '[t]he CC4r considers authorship to be part of a collective cultural effort and rejects authorship as ownership derived from individual genius'(Constant 2023). Barthes' concludes that the birth of the reader is on the flip side of the death of the author. Like Jacques Rancière's emancipated spectator the reader becomes an active participant, shaping the meaning of the text. In the context of anti-copyright licensing this has several implications. Taking software as an example, the reader can become a programmer, study the code comprising the software and make contributions to developing the software. In a cultural context the reader may be engaged in alternative ways. Consider, for example, a publication appropriately licensed and hosted on a git repository. Here arises the possibility for the reader to edit or add to the publication. The death of the author shifts the focus away from authorship towards readership.

Discussing The Ontology of Performance

The crux of Phelan's argument is her opening statement that 'Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.' (Phelan 1993, p.146). Phelan's argument proceeds through an analysis of several artworks including Angelika Festa's 1987 performance Untitled Dance (with fish and others). Phelan holds that '[t]o the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology' (Phelan 1993, p.146). During the discussion I aimed to articulate, and provide arguments which supported, Phelan's position. Senka disagreed with Phelan arguing that performance is something which can be reproduced. Senka stated that they were reading Phelan's text adjacent to Boris Groys' Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction (2009). Groys argues 'a digital image that can be seen cannot be merely exhibited or copied (as an analogue image can) but always only staged or performed'. In this sense, Senka argued, performance is reproducible. The digital image can be replayed and thus performed again. In response to this, I turned to the meontological writings of Nishida Kitarō who writes that in the physical world time is reversible and in the biological world time is irreversible (1987). I suggested that reproducibility and reversibility are analogous. Performance in the biological world is therefore non-reproducible whilst performance in the physical world is reproducible. Lorenzo suggested that the text was biased towards the medium of performance. I agree that Phelan may be biased, though not towards the medium of performance. I suggest that Phelan's biases are towards performance in the biological world.

Synthesising Ideas

This was a key section of our Etherpad in which we developed a structure for the broadcast.

Time	Content
0-10	Introduction
10-40	Sound boards / Ursula Franklin
40-80	Imaginary Future protocols and live coding archive remix
80-120	Phelan reading

For the second section of the broadcast we developed two protocols.

...

Preparation for the Broadcast

Full Listing

 $ ll ~/Music/SI22/broadcast3/enzo/

-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera  24M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-01.wav 
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera  21M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-02.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera  23M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-03.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera  22M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-04.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera  43M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-05.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera  16M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-06.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera  53M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-07.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera  26M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-08.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 5.5M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-09.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera  11M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-10.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 1.1M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-11.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 6.1M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-12.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 1.2M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-13.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 6.0M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-14.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 6.6M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-15.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 429K Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-16.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 7.6M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-17.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera  16M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-18.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 2.8M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-19.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 154K Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-20.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 2.9M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-21.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 5.8M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-22.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 8.5M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-23.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 3.3M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-24.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 5.2M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-25.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 8.4M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-26.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 3.8M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-27.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 2.5M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-28.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 5.9M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-29.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 7.4M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-30.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 4.0M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-31.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 4.5M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-32.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera  16M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-33.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 3.2M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-34.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera  14M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-35.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 7.4M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-36.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 7.7M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-37.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera  12M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-38.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 9.7M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-39.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera  15M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-40.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 6.6M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-41.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 8.2M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-42.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 704K Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-43.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 6.9M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-44.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 7.7M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-45.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 7.8M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-46.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 riviera riviera 4.9M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-47.wav

Sorting by file size

154K Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-20.wav 
429K Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-16.wav 
...
 53M Sep 29 15:35 export-wormrecording-2cut-07.wav

Renaming the files so that they are in order of file size

export-wormrecording-2cut-20.wav -> enzo-1.wav
export-wormrecording-2cut-16.wav -> enzo-2.wav
...
export-wormrecording-2cut-07.wav -> enzo-47.wav

enzo.fish

for n in 20 16 43 11 13 28 19 21 34 24 27 31 32 47 25 09 22 29 14 12 15 41 44 30 36 17 37 45 46 42 26 23 39 10 38 35 40 06 18 33 02 04 03 01 08 05 07;
set i (math $i + 1);
mv (printf "export-wormrecording-2cut-%s.wav" $n) (printf "enzo-%d.wav" $i);
end

Bibliography

Constant. 2023. “CC4r * COLLECTIVE CONDITIONS FOR RE-USE.” https://constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html.

Grojs, Boris. 2009. “Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” E-Flux, no. 4.

Phelan, Peggy. 1993. “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction.” In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, 146–66. London ; New York: Routledge.

Nishida, Kitarō. 1987. Last writings: nothingness and the religious worldview. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.