14 Oct 2024
Radio Implicancies is the name of a series of special issues led by Femke Snelting in three consecutive years with Radio/Streaming as an output format. Participants were encouraged to research and investigate how collective work is shaped by technical systems through collective making and listening within their own (small) networks.
Radio Implicancies is about practicing interdependencies. About how to stay with the complex entanglements between the personal, the economical, the political and the computational. About thinking, using and making technology with mutual relations in mind.
Source: Radio Implicancies (pzi wiki)
Floor van Meeuwen
During second edition of Radio Implicancies, Special Issue 15, Floor van Meeuwen created The Cloud, an audio piece in the form of a self-guided meditation. The piece has a satirical tone, the central refrain: “see it as the cloud, let the cloud pass by”, cleverly makes use of the dual sense of cloud as object of meditative release, and as portal to cloud services. The piece works through a series of everyday examples, starting from checking the time on a smart phone, that lead to a spiral of (unintended) engagments and ultimately anxieties created by the many notifications the author encounters when interacting with her phone.
The piece was (initially) produced as a stand alone HTML page, and was later used as part of the 7th collective broadcast, called the cookbook, which featured a booklet that accompanied the broadcast, and was published online with a “page-turner” code.
Special Issue #15: Radio Implicancies (2021)
from Radio Implicancies 15.7: Cookbook
Also see Floor’s single page version and research notes.
Alvin Lucier
«I Am Sitting in a Room: for voice on tape»
Lucier’s classic «I Am Sitting in a Room» is a poetic exercise in concentration. It focuses on a notoriously suppressed phenomenon: spatial resonance being too self evident to perceive. While Lucier’s spoken text is heard live through the room’s loudspeakers, he repeatedly records the sound that stimulates the room’s resonant frequencies until the text becomes indecipherable. Instead of semantics, the musical qualities of language surface. The spoken text becomes a libretto, score, and performance manual in one.
text source: mediaartnet
Mark van den Heuvel and Tisa Neža Herlec
Made during the first edition (Special Issue 12), during the initial COVID lockdown, the work started with a collective writing exercise on an etherpad, an interleaved conversation in the form of a cadavre exquis, one startins a sentence and the other continuing the thought. The two later came together in a jitsi call to record a re-speaking the lines that each had written, using etherpad’s feature differentiating the writing of each author with color, but with the decision to to flip the script and read each others lines rather than their own. The result is full of both intimacy, as each imagines inhabiting the others thoughts, and awkwardness as they often struggle to synchronize with their collective script.
Like Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room, the piece creates a soundscape that in its own way resonates with the particular affordances of the hybrid combination of virtual spaces created by the writing pad, and by the audio recording.
For the final edition, Special Issue 18, the fourth broadcast took the form of The Jingle Board Parliament, and which was published as a sound board.
The broadcast made use of an etherpad to organize. On the pad they invited their fellow radiomakers to contribute not a single piece, but fragments to be incorporated into a soundboard in the form of a parliament chart (such as the kind that show the relative representation of different political parties in an elected parliament).
Our take on this idea of parliament is rooted in the influence that elements of pop-culture have on politics, and more precisely on shaping the characters and the voices that then inhabit a parliament. While much of the politics happens outside of official institutional buildings, yet the idea of the parliament remains a pure symbol of the place in which democracy is being performed. This is to give you an intentional framework that we propose as caretakers, but of course we invite you to stretch and deconstruct this idea of “The parliament”.
Also we invite you to not overthink about politically engaged and great contributions, after all everything is political! ;)
Note how in this case the sound board was published, rather than (just) a recording of the weeks broadcast. This was a pattern used in many weeks, where different formats and structures were explored for preparing each weeks broadcast, and these systems shaped the webpages that were published for each week. The etherpads however were not published, but is suggestive of some useful liner notes to an eventual publication.