audiograft festival Oxford 12-23 March 2014

 I've been at the audiograft festival in Oxford, continuing with my experiments on localized radio, performative broadcasting and affective geographies. During the festival days, i've performed walks, attended meetings and approached situations. This happened more or less spontaneously, so people could tune in to radio aporee at any time to follow the audiograft activities. Many of these sessions have been documented on archive.org, see audiograft live session recordings

broadcast from an audioHEARth event at an Oxford pub

broadcast from an audioHEARth event at an Oxford pub


The following two are from the nice Oxford City Market at early afternoon, which i've visited together with Patrick McGinley. Felicity Ford joined us later.






Oxford City market part 1


Oxford City market part 2

radio aporee ::: Marrakesh broadcasts

Marrakesh Souk

Today I've made a series of soundwalks through the Souks (markets) in the Medina of Marrakesh. Some of theses places and encounters I've shared live with listeners on radio aporee while walking, or resting in the shadow. Here are some sonic logs of today's promenades radiophonique (beware, there are glitches and dropouts of all sort in the recorded audio. That's because of the instable media I'm using, live streaming over more or less reliable mobile networks and the like. To expect and not  problem at all. Also, these recordings are made with the radio aporee stream recorder directly to archive.org, without any editing etc.):



Cafe Laksour, noisy street ambience


at the edge of Jemaa El Fna square


walk over Jemaa El Fna square


Medina, somewhere lost in the Souks


Medina, in the Souks, Qu'ran radio

trading urban stories - سوق حكايات المدينة

radio aporee is invited by Berlin based artists Berit Schuck and Julia Tieke, to collaborate on a 12h experimental radio program during the Marrakesh Biennale.


"Trading Urban Stories" reloads and combines "A Sonic Map of Alexandria containing twenty audio pieces about the Egyptian metropolis by the sea with"Here an Now. Voices of Marrakech", a radio happening inside and around the Old City of Marrakech.

Curators: Berit Schuck and Julia Tieke

Artists: Anna Raimondo, Burak Arikan, C-drík, Doudy Brocolis Widdy, Ennajraoui Noureddine, Greta Tiedje, Lisa Tiedje, Ghassan Waïl, Hassan Hajjaj, Kamal Laftimi, Jalal El Allouli, Radio Papesse, Udo Noll, residents of  the Medina of Marrakech and special guests

Tune in to nessradio tomorrow, Feb.27, at noon

mobile live audio streaming with a Raspberry PI

From time to time i get obsessed with non-stationary audio streaming, esp. in the context of the radio aporee continuous stream. As you may know, this station plays random selections of the 20000+ recordings from the aporee soundmap, but also reacts and interferes with listeners, activities in the field and a couple of live microphones from the locusonus project.

The broadcast box is one of the experimental tools to engage with sound in public space, it directly hooks onto the current broadcast and allows to play inbetween places, situations and archive recordings, right where you are at the moment. However, it's quite a bulky bunch of gear to carry around.

This setup is he latest of my experiments in that field. The unit left is a Raspberry PI, a little 40€ pocket size computer running Linux, connected to a USB battery which lasts for a day, and an Olympus LS5 recorder connected to the PI via USB. The stick attached to the PI is an UMTS/3G modem for mobile Internet access.

In short, this assembly is a complete mobile radio broadcast unit, which allows to send live sound in crispy stereo to radio aporee (or elsewhere), on-the-go. Of course, without a network the whole thing is pretty useless...

I still have to do some elaborated tests, and have to improve reliability, but the concept already seems very promising. If you are interested in tech details, let me know. tbc.

edit Sat. Nov. 2nd :

today i did a short test while washing my stuff in the laundry at Ohlauer Str, Berlin Kreuzberg. it worked pretty well it seems, got some feedback from listeners. with the stream2archive recorder on aporee.org i made two 15min. snapshots of "the show":

laundry, Berlin Kreuzberg, part 1:

laundry, Berlin Kreuzberg, part 2:

A100 - construction work progress

see also this previous post, and the sound map of the A100 area

The construction work for the A100 motorway in Berlin continues. A few month ago, in the area around Kiefholzstr., Berlin, many of the abandoned allotment garden houses have been squatted by homeless Sinti and Roma families, not totally sure about this though. They made a sort of living from collecting and selling metal scrap found in this area, kids were playing in the waste lands between the train tracks and the remaining allotments.

Here's a recording of that area, from this summer. A woman is washing, kids are playing in the green. see also radio aporee ::: maps - allotment, Mergenthalerring, Neukölln, Berlin


6 weeks later, August 17, 2013, the houses have been demolished

only the sound of the mobile concrete factory can he heard


October 11, 2013, construction work continues

the sound of the excavator, echoing in the landscape

Tuned City Brussels 2013 - bx in action

fmwalks/bx was the title of a series of sonic interventions in the city of Brussels, during the Tuned City festival. It was also a proof of concept, of how the system can be applied to places, what forms and formats would be possible and challenging. It turned out to be useful to have a wireless microfone available. People picked up the wireless for browsing around, into the nearby area, so I could mix the soundscape around the bx with the details and findings of their walking performance, along with other intersections with the radio aporee ::: maps etc. All walks and interventions were live broadcasted on the radio aporee ::: stream and occasionally into the FM space. By using a sort of virtual recorder on aporee, i could record and archive some of these sessions by simply touching a button on my mobile phone. Listen to some of the sonic traces on archive.org

preparing the bx at QO2. photo by Carsten Stabenow

 

Brussels, Botanique, spontaneous interferences with Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walks

Botanique, airwaves

Parvais de Saint Gilles, Saturday market walks

city places - radio spaces ::: Chausée de Waterloo, Galerie Rivoli

Haren, finally some sun, charging the box (photo by C.Stabenow)

radio aporee ::: Tuned City Brussels 2013

Over recent years, and thanks to a broad community of artists, phonographers and individuals working with sound and field recording, the radio aporee ecosystem has collected and developed both an extensive body of sound as well as tools for artistic practices and research in the field.
In addition to aspects of collecting, archiving and sound-mapping, the radio aporee platform also invokes experiments at the boundaries of different media, and public space. Within this notion, radio is both a technology in transition and a narrative. It constitutes a field whose qualities are connectivity, contiguity and exchange. Within this, concepts of transmitter/receiver and performer/listener may become transparent and reversible.

During Tuned City Brussels, I will accompany the course of the festival with the experimental radio device bx (bROADCAST BOx), a hybrid assembly of tools and techniques for entering and exploring different media spaces more or less simultaneously. The bx is an advancement of the previous concept of fmwalks, a setup combining performative city walks and mobile FM transmitting. It creates a link between the radio aporee soundmap of Brussels, recent recordings from actual city surroundings and live activities at various festival venues. It delivers a daily sound stream in between documentation and artistic radio practice, embedded into the city’s urban atmospheres.

According to its notion of an interface, fmwalks/bx is open for participation. It encourages engagement and collaboration with the other Tuned City projects and artists. During festival hours, transmissions can be received on http://radio.aporee.org.

If you are interested in collaboration during the festival (26-30 June) – please register!