Category: Year 3

The W401 is booked for a pilot of the radio show, next Thursday 7th, 5-6/7pm.

So far we don’t have a title or a clear structure of the first show. The time pressure is good so we can focus on quantity over quality. Quantity means more collaboration, and this process is more valuable to me than the product of a “high quality” listening experience.

The pilot will consist of me presenting and playing an interview. I hope this interview will be in relation to the cleaners strike which is starting tomorrow. Pedro will also be curating a submissions slot, for artists to send sound work to be played on the show. We are hoping that other groups will get involved to fill in more time.

Ben is hoping to explore streaming options so that we can create a website link and not rely on a large streaming service. We are seeing if we can use the uni’s IP address to livestream with, in a way “squatting the network”.

Beginning sketches of my second creative project, a music project, working title “Idiot Prayer”. Main compositional element: melody. Melody writing is a sonic practice as sound is a medium for sharing melody. One of my EPs uses melody to represent ecological entanglement. https://soundcloud.com/wesurf/boy-lucid-dreams-on-foothill

La la la

prayer: “an earnest hope or wish.”

prayer as repetition, the simple limited idiot mind forgets it’s values. needs a practice. music can function as a prayer, an acoustic latching into a nuanced set of values, inexplicable through text.

being an idiot, being “authentic”, meaning communicating in one’s own way, slowing down the rapid communication networks or simply avoiding them ;).

“Only the idiot has access to the wholly Other. Idiotism discloses a field of immanence of events and singularities for thought; this field eludes
subjectivation and psychologisation altogether.” Byung-Chul Han

theories and research: idiotism by Byung-Chul Han, Deleuzian concepts of “being animal” & a body without organs, queer existential psychotherapy (fear, becoming, trauma), non-linear time, indigenous knowledge production, decolonising academia.

holes: prayer is often seen as a religious practice. how have I been forced into a prayer practice? in primary school we sounded prayer every morning, and went to mass on special occasions, but my parents never forced me to engage with religous beliefs. what is my agency to use this word? perhaps the dangers of idiotism is a lack of self-reflection.

my personal experiences of religion: growing up in rural (post-)catholic ireland, living in a western tibetan buddhist centre in 2018. and personal interests: agnostic buddhism (stephen bachelor), zen poetry as a spiritual & musical practice (japanese poets issa, basho). reconstruction of celtic folklore? as in my last project using Gaelic songs for electronic composition. deconstruction of catholic songs I had to sing outside of tesco to make money for our school. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCN1W_Re34s&ab_channel=Alive-OSongMemories put a beat on it! DJ oatcore. but mostly, imagining the possibility of prayer outside of institutionalised belief systems and even collective beliefs, as singular expression, music.

lala la with beats. Also inspired by transition of draingang members Bladee and Ecco2K”s musicking towards promotion of spiritual values, love etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FewUrsr9XaQ&ab_channel=Bladee-Topic and Arthur Russel’s engagement with popular music, bringing together the experimental values of avant garde culture of 70s downtown New York, and the potency of rhythym, melody and the general accessibility of popular music forms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O92UBBaiI4&ab_channel=AshleyPaul

reasons: feeling limited by critical theory, I need a magical fun outlet. My younger self found electronic composition as a therapeutic outlet which has become a fundamental practice in my life. I’ve been releasing music alongside my studies, creating worlds and spreading ideas with melody. I have not been able to engage this practice within the culture of sound art.

Recently a lecturer said in class that Sound Art is more “cerebral” than music, because it “takes more research to create” and “anyone can put their fingers on a keyboard and make it sound ‘nice'”. Perhaps they had an intention to aggravate rather than make a point, but no one responded. Can we expand research beyond linguistic keyboard tapping and militant academic reading to walking, sensuality, friendships, listening, freaking out, falling over, farting, the whole spiritual voyage of being a concious flesh balloon etc. Perhaps music also takes an incredible amount of research! I know in my compositional practice I translate my life experiences into music. We deserve to validate our way of telling stories. Does sound Art culture reflects avant garde music’s distaste towards popular music composition?

What I could do with my second creative project is to analyse and problematise the distain towards melody and popular music forms in the ‘Sound Arts’ culture (western SA, or beyond?). But also I want to diverge from rational critical theory toward other ways of telling stories, and protect my music lalaing from having to contextualise it to prove its “cerebreality”. Academia says, Yes! Critique me, but you must use my tools to make a critique. It’s a trap! Whats the hack?

First notes on “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paolo Freire. Freire leans heavily on a binary of opressed/oppressor to explain his theories of domination. I do appreciate his usage of terms like “humanism” and love. However, in doing so is Freire relying on an essentialism to promote political action? To preserve or create more humanity, we must fight domination. The increasing of humanity is the ontological vocation of the human. This is almost Christian, I’m sure it’s ripe with problems? But also lovingly radical.

Friere interestingly brings in the concept of the oppressed’s attraction to the oppressor. He says there exists a necrophiliac attraction to death (the deadness of property and objects) in the oppressor conciousness. The oppressed somehow adopt this mindset in their own desires, since the oppressor’s lifestyle falsely symbolises the exit to their own oppression. Freire reveals the OTHER way, outside of wheels of domination: a restoration of humanity for those involved in a situation. He does suggest that violence may be a way to get there, since an act of rebellion can initiate love. While Freire promotes the resoration of humanity for both the opressed and the opressor (who lose their humanity intheir acts of domination), he makes it clear that the violence of the former is very different to the latter: the violence of the oppressed cannot be deemed as a reduction of humanity, since it is in reaction to and to liberate from an act of violence already in place in a situation. Freire is lit!

For radio project: ontological liberation, through reclaiming our spaces we inhabit, to recognise our capacities to act and change a situation, to become involved! restoration of humanity/love: something to remember if modes of spreading awareness need to become more loud/vi0l3nt. The radio project could manifest a sort of self-learning pedagogy through action, with a delicate soft promotion of horizontal learning to tackle inevitable dynamics of domination in a group.

Notes on the first Radio Project meeting, which happened on November 16th. Informal discussions with students have happened before this.

My friend Sofia brought up the idea of a student run radio station. It made sense to me as a way of harnessing any excess energy we have as students to learn to work/play collaboratively and reclaim our sense of power on campus.

tiny autotheory moment (WHY radio project?): I imagine collaborative creative projects outside of our curriculum to subvert the mechanisms of privatisation that occur on campus. There seems to be a tendency towards individual learning and working, towards individual scholarship, which may benefit the transformation of power that has been happening in universities over the last few decades. Neoliberal education, the kind of education institution that runs as a profiting enterprise, seems to benefit from a seperation of individuals, and between staff and students.

I imagined any collaboration outside of the “professionalising” marking criteria to be an achievement. Collaboration can be understood as a practice to reorient our value systems beyond building our individual career paths and towards connection with others, play and curisoty, and also solidarity and care. These are my personal goals of the radio station as a learning process for all participants involved. I also imagine the privatisation tactics of management having increased a sense of alienation on campus: students have less class time, tutors are overburdened with bureaucracy, and projects are not collaborative. I imagine the radio project could help us rebuild our sense of engagement with our university, to go beyond submitting digital assessments as part of our learning, but to work in the thickness of social relations, without this work constricted by enterprise ideology.

For this meeting, I decided to take more control in the discussion, leading the group towards building a structure of the radio show. This was a position which I previously resisted, imagining a more non-hierarchical way of organising, and feeling cautious of imposing my own ideas on a group. Given the vaporousness of previous meetings, and our collective silences, I felt the need to take leadership so that we can gain momentum in a certain direction. This fascillitation went well and I felt confident to try to gather the voices in a room and also build a clear direction.

Students were excited to share a space together outside of the dynamics of a lecture, or course workshop, since there were potentially less hierarchies between bodies in the room, and more of a chance to speak casually. Students were also very critical of our university’s policies and agendas, and keen to promote solidarity for the staff and eachother.

Notes:

Radio Project First Meeting Notes

November 16th, 2023

How can we make academic knowledge more accessible and more communal through discussion?

A LONG FORM CONVERSATIONAL PODCAST could have an ACADEMIC PERSPECTIVE but be ACCESSIBLE

We want to learn about the university process of privatisation, and get involved with other groups

Giving people voices, amplifying voices: interviews based on ethics of solidarity.

Episode ideas:

• Interviews on solidarity
• Submissions of audio
• Performances
• Discussions about Sound Art and Noise
• Women’s Sound

Do we want to DOCUMENT? Like having an archive, and using platforms like MIXCLOUD, or is that consumeristic. Do we want to promote impermanence instead? (LIVENESS)

Streaming options:

• Resonance FM
• Mixxx and MixCloud
• DIY Streaming, on our own website!

Notes on a website: with a website we can also publish articles etc.

FIRST SHOW: FIVE EPISODES, 30-60 minutes, 3-4 hours in total.

PILOT EPISODE, trying it out, experimenting.

Editors:

• SOLIDARITY HOUR: Tom, Jeremy, Jack
• SUBMISSION HOUR: Pedro
• PERFORMANCE HOUR: Mouse, Tal
• NOISE HOUR: Alicja, Jack
• WOMEN’S SOUND HOUR: Mouse Tal, Alicja
• Production: Tom and Jeremy

DEADLINE to submit a show: 7th of December.

NEXT MEETING: 5-7PM 7th of December

TO DO:

• Check Mixxx and RTM
• Check possibilities of making a website (Ben)
• Email Elephant Documentary maker (Rose)
• Check out Rupture Radio (based in LCC, from Journalist students?)
• Produce an episode for the deadline. Individual groups can meet together.
• Make a name proposal document. (Tom)

Further notes from Tom: I had a meeting with my project tutor today about the radio project, they are very excited about our ideas! We discussed how broadcasting live could add a lot of elements to the project, like making our sense of place on campus, adding spontaneity to the episodes etc. We thought W401 would be a good place to do this, Lou’s room, and maybe to try this out for the first show (pilot), and see what happens. People could still send in episodes recorded earlier, but the whole show could be broadcasted live and presented. I’d be happy to host the show with anyone else who would like to come along.

LaBelle on utilising the network for collectivising people. Sonic Agency, chpt 3.

LaBelle explores the tensions between our digital networks and political agency. He points out the intensity of the digital condition is due to a constant exposure to otherness. Digital media connects us to a chain of other bodies, cultures, identities and ideas, therefore extending ourselves into the network. The forces of this extension are both “internal” and “external”: as LaBelle points out, we have an innate curiousity for the “other”, in it’s disturbing nature, for the potential of connection or even love, while at the same moment we are pulled by algorithms to take part in cognitive labour and data production for the production of capital.

The algorithms used by digital mass media companies harness our desires for connection to take part in an endless stream of communications. LaBelle points out the “restless activeness” of this condition; the digital condition requires a “sheltering” and “commonality” that can protect us from exhaustion and instability. Yet at the same moment, we must expand our reach to the “other”, towards diversity, in a time of intense precarity and domination, where more and more humans are in need of care and resources.

LaBelle’s conclusions of this chapter propose questions about these tensions: that the network may decrease our prejudice, particularly if we disrupt regular patterns of consumption, and at the same time increase our need for sheltering and commonality, which can mean an isolation from that network. He asks how can we utilise the power of the network, to bring political democracies into global power structures? By structuring grassroots movements in the way our economies have been globalised, may we have a chance of resisting global capitalism?

LaBelle’s nuance in relation to the digital condition, that it is neither wholly bad or wholly good, inspires my ideas for the radio project. We want to use internet streaming for its accesibility and reachability. We also want to use UAL’s resources to fascillitate this streaming, so they can be burdened with any costs and euipment it may require. In alignment with LaBelle’s readings of “pirate politics”, we are looking for alternative streaming methods that do not rely on large streaming services. How can this theory of “squatting the network” by imagined in the form of the radio project at UAL?

Thoughts on my relationship to critical theory and the acadamic way of applying linguistic context to ? (existence?). These feelings relate to my second creative project, which is my music project. I believe in the potency of melody, as a nonlinguistic and magical storytelling.

obsession with something bad
grappling a waterfall with names
to tame and we say
philosophy is a coping mechanism, is inevitable
as we obsess over darkness

so the bright fantastic smiling flowers
go past in our naming
what about a heeding to the sweet bushes
hearing the laughing children
always blessing our earth
what about to practice a noticing
of love to drink it up to expand with it

there is a bad thing a bad feeling
sending us running into sadness
so let ourselves be sad
it’s not a problem. it doesn’t fail the other feelings.
a torch hovers over turning sides, let it turn!

There is much suffering and exploitation in our world. What does it mean to isolate suffering into the academic way?

a goal to decolonise the mind: dissolving a linguistic framework between our minds and the chaotic realms of other beings. I’m so excited to expand (away?) from the critical theory lens, an important method (it’s own dissolving practice), yet perhaps it’s limits are in the negative, the critique. The criticising tool is not enough to feel the chaotic realms of other beings. Along with terrible systems and evil energies there are fantastic beings and joyous energies, and caring systems. Opening.

I am not only “colonised”, I am also “coloniser”, depending on a situation. Not proudly but not always inevitably, which therefore requires learning critically. Standing crosswise in the circle of domination/dominated, as an active actor. solution: critical theory? or perhaps practices of loving kindness. both? like the radical theologists? agnostic spiritualities rooted in eco-social materialisms, light enough to shift and mould with other agendas and belief systems, hard enough to fight domination and ignite solidarity, a soft passivity that’s able to say “no” and act. honest love that acts with the full wavelength of our emotive capacities! shlove like a push and a shove.

the quest is to find a spiritual approach to being that is capable of critiquing and resisting colonialism, feudalism, privatisation (something major religions not only fail to do but also fascillitate and manage) while practicing love, and avoiding over-contextualisation. 🙂 :p

If we trust the human, then we can trust a capacity to understand and act without the methodologies of critical theory? not for the sake of comfort (“lazyness”), but for the softness of methods that loosen the linguistic projections. words are limited?

Sketch for a part of the radio project, which promotes solidarity in the form of interviews and discussion.

Live list of ideas of who to invite

Palestine society from SOAS
LatinElephant ~ local struggles on urban transformation in Elephant and Castle
Cleaners from the cleaner’s union ~ worker’s struggles on campus
Researchers from the Anti-university organisation ~ alternative models for education
lecturers from UCU ~ lecturer’s struggles on campus
Indira ~ started anti-racist group in Goldsmiths, was censored
Neoliberal Education 101 ~ Jonathan S. Davies & Adam Standring?