Radio WORM: Protocols for Collective Performance

The Network Archives Design and Digital Culture (NADD) invites its partners to develop programmes aimed at reflecting on design and digital culture archives, and making them visible.

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Outline

Partners

Which NADD partners are involved and who will be responsible for developing the programme?

XPUB is the 2 years Master program in Experimental Publishing at the Willem de Kooning Academy, part of the Hogeschool Rotterdam (http://xpub.nl). XPUB focuses on the acts of making things public and creating publics in the age of post-digital networks.

Radio WORM (https://radio.worm.org) is an online radio platform at the heart of WORM Rotterdam. Their studio hosts audio production of all descriptions (sound art, experimental music, interviews, mixes, informal reporting and in-depth talk-based series), with over 80 resident shows as well as a shifting schedule of one-off events, mini-series and special guests.

WORM Pirate Bay (http://thepiratebay.worm.org/) is a physical archive and working facility at WORM comprising DVDs, VHS tapes, zines, books, CDs, board games and other remnants from WORM’s production history. WPB is about unconventional knowledge sharing and artistic production that might not be valued by traditional understandings of high art.

The project will involve the assistance and cooperation of: Ash Kilmartin, Lukas Simonis, Lieuwe Zelle (Radio WORM), Ari Ralph (Worm Pirate Bay), and Florian Cramer, Michael Murtaugh (WDKA/XPUB). This document has been prepared by Michael Murtaugh (m.murtaugh@hr.nl) in consultation with Ash Kilmartin (ash@worm.org)

Context

From September to December 2023, Radio WORM: Protocols for an Active Archive took place. The course, involving 14 first year students from XPUB was a collaboration between XPUB and Radio WORM. Each week, students produced a live 2 hour radio program using the studio facilities of Radio WORM and which was streamed publically via their live stream. In addition to producing 12 radio programs, the project culminated in an in-person launch event (overlapping a 13th broadcast) at WORM’s Wunderbar, adjacent and visible via an internal window to the radio studio. Project participants also participated in zinecamp 2023, presenting a collection of zines and a presentation about the radio show. The project was also supported by and featured in Going Hybrid, a hybrid event held in Amsterdam, which was later published in online+print format. (Partial) results can be seen here: https://issue.xpub.nl/22/

Format(s)

What is the format of the proposed programme?

The project described here is a second iteration of the course with a focus on Protocols for Collective Creation, and will run from September to December 2024. The formats will again be a weekly live 2 hour radio program, and a single in-person event, or “public moment” tentatively planned for late November 2024. The course will be developed and run by tutors of XPUB, supported by WORM staff, and will be followed and activated by the group of 16 incoming first year XPUB students. The idea is to produce and maintain a podcast feed of materials related to the program during the duration of the 3 months. The format of the live event is described further below in the Communication Plan. XPUB will be responsible for documenting activities related to the course, and in working with WORM for possible inclusion within their network (for instance working with Ash on materials that could be part of WORM’s Mixcloud channel).

Design + Digital Culture Archives

How does the programme relate to design and/or digital culture archives?

In terms of thematics, the project aims to focus on the history of sound art, considering specific practices such as tape manipulation, digital desconstruction, with a particular focus on improvisation and collective production. Key reference works such as Nature Study Notes and the work of Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra will be studied, in parallel with work on Free Licenses and Free Software as means for producing what Simon Yuill has termed distributive practices. In addition, the lived experience of Radio WORM’s Ash Kilmartin and Lukas Simonis will serve as key guides and resources in the process. Furthermore, critical questions related to reappropriation, such as those raised in Ari Ralph’s An Introduction to Decolonial Archival Practice zine will be important aspects of the course. For instance, how can audio transcription software be used for more than just producing a strict transcription of what’s been spoken? Are there formats of audio + text that can go beyond “capture” and “translation” of spoken to written forms, and which preserve and value oral culture rather than attempting to fix (in both the sense of repair or freeze) or replace it?

Multivocality

In what way does the programme contribute to innovation and multivocality in the domain?

The project starts from the diversity of Radio WORM’s maker community, speakers of a diversity of languages, cultural backgrounds, and ages reflecting the diversity of Rotterdam’s inhabitants. In addition, XPUB as a program embraces a diversity of practices, from traditional print design to game design and programming, but also including music, product Design, anthropology. The course will focus draw on historical examples of collective production to look at a diversity of ways that collectivity can be facilitated. As a course XPUB is also particularly interested in the interplay between the tools and platforms we use and their impact on the ways collaboration occurs, for instance how roles can be shared and (re)negotiated rather than only being fixed in conventional workflows with designers typically at the end of a process of “giving form”.

For example, in the first iteration of the couse, a podcast was made of the radio programs, alongside a series of diverse zines, including interviews with radio makers. Besires this, a 3D model of the WORM Radio studio was made which them formed the basis of a collaboration to make audio/visual animation that mixed abstract metadata from the archival recordings with the rendered model.

Communication Plan

Please explain which audience you are hoping to reach and how you aim to do so.

The idea is for the public moment/event will be to explicitly address past, present, and future members of the Radio WORM community of listeners and makers. The format of the event would be relatively open, with a variety of activities happening in parallel. Workshops will showcase the richness and variety of materials available via WORM Pirate Bay, and the potential for new collective artistic production using specific techniques explored in the course (for instance involving physical cut-up techniques with reel to reel audio, or digital techniques with automatic transcription and coding). Furthermore, the plan will be to include access to WORM Sound Studio, whose unique situation for collective sound production will be featured. The idea is for the event to be used as a means of gathering further materials from an interested public, and for these materials to be incorporated into the subsequent/final radio broadcasts, creating some space for reflection and closure.

The project aims to primarily address Radio WORM’s community of makers and listeners, past, present, and future. More broadly, the project should address and be of interest to a wide audience of those interested in collective artistic practices and those interested in the interplay between digital tools and networked platforms for distributing and archiving the resulting cultural productions.

NOTES

• Some Assembly Required
• Die Maschine, Radio play (1968) George Perec Radio Aporee * * Janek Schaefer: Custom players, his soundartresources
• Generative Music (players) Throbbing Gristle / Buddha Machine? Pirate Radio History [Media Fragments]* (https://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/ The Deep, Rivers Solomon + Clipping (Hybrid Pub)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deep_(novella)
• Platoniq Burnstation
• [https://webaudio.prototyping.bbc.co.uk/wobbulator/
• BBC Radiophonic workshop + Delia Derbyshire] MOD/S3M/XM Module Player for Web Audio and code chiptune2.js

Licenses

Laurence Rassel Show http://www.ultrared.org/publicrecord/archive/2-01/2-01-014/2-01-014.html

Meditations

• Cloud piece from Floor van Meeuwen
• Charlotte Adigery + Boris Pupils MANTRA https://genius.com/Charlotte-adigery-and-bolis-pupul-mantra-lyrics https://charlotteandbolis.bandcamp.com/album/yin-yang-self-meditation
• Agile Meditation – From the Software Clinic, Anne Laforet

Sox

“Raw” audio

Strange Text to Speech

play -tlpc /dev/urandom

Leads to deep dive into LPC format as a “vocoder”…

Voder Spell and Speak, Antonio Roberts using Silas S. Brown’s lexconvert

Speech synth

• https://dood.al/pinktrombone/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_YUB_S6Gpo

Readings

• Yuill, All problems of Notation…
• R.A.D.I.O. The Media Ecology of Pirate Radio, Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies, 2005
• Pirate Radio History in Amy Spencer’s DIY
• The Future was already here, c. 7: The Scene
• <?> The sound of your prose, Ursula Le Guin, (Space Crone)
• <?> Daniel Punday, Computing as Writing, c. ? … or is this SI26? Maybe the chapter that investigates iTunes…

Schedule

16 Sep 24

Meet at WORM

Tuesday 17 September

Prototyping introduction

28-Oct-24

Fall BREAK