label
audio
Linked to 43 items
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from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
00:43 When we started this research project, one of the starting points was my research on liveness. Esther Hammelburg’s PhD thesis was published as a book titled Being There Live!, which you can find on her website: https://www.estherhammelburg.nl At the time, I had just finished my PhD research into what ‘liveness’ means in a cultural setting. When we discuss livenesss, people tend to focus on the present, the ‘now’, and how everything is evolving at this moment. But when you look a bit more closely, it’s not only about the ‘now’. Liveness in fact bridges both temporalities and spaces. For intance, in live experiences we often experience a ‘now’ which was anticipated beforehand. what about non-real time and non-real space? Our minds thrive in those We look forward to an experience of liveness, we think about this live event that’s coming up. Also, we tend to make videovideos and still imagephotos of performancelive events, because we want to actively create future memories in the ‘now’. In other words, we’re creating a future past in the present. A habit researched by Hammelburg is how visitors post pictures and videos of concerts and festival on Instagram to fulfil the ‘liveness’ of being here, now. Continuing to exist online, these photos and videos extend the liveness in both spatial and temporal senses. The experience of liveness is also profoundly tied to issues of memory and remembering. How do we keep our memories? How do we share our memories? How do we archive them, and what do we do with these archives? These are some elements for the discussion in this chapter. This brings me to my first question: How do you look at hybridity as a phenomenon in the here and now, and how does it relate to the ‘afterlife’? The hybrid happens ‘now’, but does it need to be recorded? Also, I am curious about the connection between time and audioaudio. Who would like to comment?
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from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
05:50 But I do think we can reflect on the double notion of ‘time and space’. Space was a prominent element in our research. In a hybrid event, as we saw it, you have spacethe physical space, and many online spaces or people joining online from their own house. In the livecasting group, we built ‘Emoji Proxies & Ghost Messengers’, a tool that could make the online audience more present on-site during an event. Using commands in the livestream chat, online audiences can influence something in the space, like triggering an on-site objectlight or scenta scent diffuser in a spacespace. We aimed to make the relationship between offline and on-site audiences a bit more equal. This is difficult to achieve, especially when there is a main stage, which is the objectphysical stage. As long as we think of on-site programming as primary, it’s very difficult to give online audiences a more equal type of agency. So we tried to decenter the main stage. the virtual space is merging in the background, can it be considered non-real space? For instance, we tested the scent diffuser during an event that was focused on audioaudio. alexa this is not FaceTime app how did I get here So there was a main stage, but there were no visuals on a beamer. It was a listening event. Ultra hyper-focus on the present moment, years of preparation and research leading up to the current moment, with weeks of post-production dealing with the now. How authentic is this now then? This worked well. I think you’re in the right place, welcome!
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from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
09:55 I want to continue with the topic of audioaudio. Maybe, to make audiences online and on site more equal, we also need to change the affordances and the space in which the on-site event is taking place. We cannot continue doing the same kind of offline events if we really want to change access and agency, right? And I feel there’s something about privileging hearing over vision, that challenges how we do events now. Carolina, can you tell us more about the importance of listening and how to work with the audience and audio, from the experience of the MUMORIES experiment?
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from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
10:48 MUORIES is a website and it was also presented as an interactive installation at MU during the exhibition time this summer, in which we were celebrating their 25th anniversary. Even though it was about this specific institutional history, we wanted to open it up to people who had never been there before and therefore didn’t have memories of MU. This led us to play with the idea of speculative memories. What do you think it’s going to be like? What do you think it’s going to smell like? Speculative memories were a bridge to connect practices of audiooral history to these institutional memories.
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from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
11:37 With everything that’s going on, like the war in Gaza, I think it’s important to reflect on the act of listening. Who is listening to whom? In that sense, MUMORIES which was developed in the context of an art exhibition space, opened up wider possibilities of archiving different types of records (other types of knowledge beond textfacts or numbers) in a way that’s less procedural. the camera on the left is being moved to make a better focus in the physical space Fun fact 2: this chat is not just a live chat, but also the annotation tool of Going Hybrid’s final publication. It will be included in the margins of the print book Screentime Airtime Facetime. Chatting today is co-authoring the book! As you can maybe tell, in our group, we shared a feminist understanding of memory and archiving with oral histories. We have included in this publication a part of the audioradio show ‘Talkshop’ that our group did last month in Screentime Airtime Facetime. See the intermission ‘Talkshop Mumories: Living Archives’. The program reflects on MUMORIES and the memories, on listening to each other, on the privilege that comes with speaking and listening.
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from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
13:58 Watching implies a power structure. Some people can watch something and some people can take the stage and be watched. Is this different when giving more attention to audiolistening?
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from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
16:16 As an organizer, you have the power to make people visible or invisible, and you need to be aware of this. I’m also interested in the archives part. Did you focus only audioaudio-related or did you also play with the layering of physical and virtual spaces?
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from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
16:42 Already early on we had the idea of making a website, which is accessible at home, and an exhibition intallation with a tablet. It’s still possible to browse MUMORIES and even to contribute. Go to: https://mumories.hackersanddesigners.nl/Interaction But it wasn’t easy to integrate our multimedia experiment into an exhibition. During the opening of the exhibition, we tried to create a comfortable setting, like a spaceliving room. a living archive obviously needs a living room We had a sofa with 25 years of MU catalogs on it, inviting memories to be triggered. We also created a layered audioscape. People on-site could audiolisten to what was happening around them live, but at the same time, recorded memories were being played on the speakers. front camera is being moved too, we want some good close-ups for our hosts :)
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from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
18:18 For some years already, seeing a rise of the audiopodcast: a medium that is focused solely on audio. But, lately, we’ve come to realize that the podcast is a perfect hybrid medium because you’re always listening to podcasts while doing something else.
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from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
18:49 I was thinking exactly the same. This automatically decenters the main stage. When you have a audiopodcast or maybe a videoYouTube video that you don’t necessarily need to watch, you’re able to do a bunch of other things and suddenly spaceyour house becomes your own stage. It’s funny because, in the physical space of MU, you wanted to recreate a living room, right? Fellow audience, how are you feeling? Are we blasting into your living rooms? Do you want/have agency? But for me, since I’ve never been to MU, the experience of MUMORIES was the other way around. I was in my living room listening to memories that were created in this space I’ve never been to, and I don’t know what it looks like. It was like a dream or something from the distant past, suddenly acquiring a presence in my living room. The point of decentering the stage, of course, is to give agency to the audience, wherever they are. My next question is about this. I am enjoying sitting but being there at the same time we live in the future darlings full stop no i meant . Do you have any other examples, comments, reflections, or thoughts about audience agency?
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from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
25:36 We tend to think of events as limited in time and certain. But in living archives and growing publications, we’re continuing to develop storylines or stories. The event is not the end point of a story, it’s one of the elements within a story development that could continue further with a audiopodcast or with online comments afterward… At INC, we’re experimenting with an audio-visual podcast & pop-up event format called The Void. I think it’s very interesting to explore these hybridities: https://networkcultures.org/void. Indeed, people can engage more on their own terms - whether that’s on the bike, while cooking, or in high concentration
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from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
26:15 Two months ago we organized a data center tour with The Hmm. You can find the program of the Data Center Tour here: https://thehmm.nl/event/the-hmms-data-centre-tour This one was a five-hour trip, and we didn’t like the idea of such a long livestream. We instead invited podcast makers to be there and record all the speakers They also spoke with some visitors and recorded audiosounds of the data center and combined it all into a podcast episode. This different format really added value, that could not have been created if it was just a videolivestream, because it was also adding the layer of the participation of the visitors and the space with the sounds of the spacedata center. We have to remember that a livestream recording is not really recording the event… This audio report, because it also included the audience and also included the space, was a way better translation of the event. Listen back to the Data Center Tour here: https://live.thehmm.nl/the-hmm-s-data-centre-tour
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from: Thresholds of Access (chapter)
05:05 Thanks for the question and it’s really nice to be here. As was mentioned, I’m here to represent two people. I’m Ren and my collaborator Iz is joining us on the livestream. We work together as MELT, and in our practice, access functions as a creative motor for the way we work through practices and problems. We work with a disability justice and trans-feminist-oriented practice. We’re primarily concerned with making access for disabled people and thinking about the multiplicity of formats that that might require. We also think about multimodal design quite a lot. An example of that is a recent project we have called ‘Counting Feelings’. ‘Counting Feelings’ was a two-day workshop collectively by MELT, exploring how we can use data otherwise. It took place online on 18 and 19 April 2023. See: https://www.extraintra.nl/initiatives/crip-the-curriculum/counting-feelings In that work, we are looking at what would data mean for trans and disabled people, if ableism and anti-queer sentiment were not the organizing factors of our everyday lives. We’re developing other ways of thinking with data practices. We have, for example, a work that’s a objectweighted blanket. And with that weighted blanket, we have it both as something that you can feel, textsomething that you can read like a booklet with all of the information of the data bits inside of it, and also audiosomething you can listen to. We are thinking through multiple layers of access-making through something very much coming out of our community as well. Did someone say mushrooms? and unicorns?
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from: Thresholds of Access (chapter)
07:31 One example was discussed by Lilian Stolk in the first chapter. See ‘1: Sound and Temporarlity’. The Hmm was trying to organize an event around non-visual culture. But for a year or two, they had this websitelivestream platform in which, it turned out, a lot of assumptions were embedded. For now they’re just in the digital background, technology hasn’t progressed enough for now unfortunately For this event, they reached out to me and said: ‘Hey, can we update the livestream so that this one event is presented as audioaudio-first, instead of a videovideo?’ The axes of access, thanks for that Karl, very important videoThe video would be accessible but as a secondary option. Then I was confronted with all of my assumptions of how the audio-visual aspect of a stream was at the forefront and embedded as a default everywhere. From the front-end to the back-end code, to the connection with the streaming service. If nothing is declared about the streaming preference, video is default. This begs the question, why is this visual culture so central? The simple fix was to create an option to pick for each event; what would be the automatic default streaming mode? You can listen back to this event in The Hmm livestreaming and recordings sections, on their livestream platform: https://live.thehmm.nl/n0n-visu4l-1nt3rnet-cultur3
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from: Interaction and Activation (chapter)
14:25 Yeah, I think playfulness is something that is very common in gaming. It’s something you mentioned, when you step into a game you know what is expected of you, or you know your way around because of the concepts or storylines or whatever. so sad we cannot report also that :/ Turning towards archives… Archives are institutions in which a lot of people don’t know their way around or can’t figure out how to access or add to them. Could you tell us a bit about how you worked on archives to make them more interactive? Because audioyou used testimonies and other forms to let people add to archives and make them more interactive, or activate their audiences. also what?
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from: Interaction and Activation (chapter)
15:12 Yes. This was a project that we did together with MU, Varia, Willem de Kooning, and Hackers & Designers… I’m trying to remember all of the partners. The project was linked with the MU archive and it was thinking about how you remember, and spacehow you create a living and a dying archive of an exhibition space. We built this platform where audiopeople could leave their memories or even ‘false’ memories of MU. that :/ We created different paths that people could follow on the platform. During the Living Archives group’s expert session for the In-Between Media Conference, the emphasis on oral testimonies, audio and video recordings as a mediums to challange hierarcies within archives was brought to the table. To read the event report of this day, check out: https://networkcultures.org/goinghybrid/2023/03/31/expert-session-a-living-archive-is-also-a-dying-archive-conference-report-day-2 If they’ve never been there before, they could just leave a memory of what they imagined the space to be like. You didn’t need the experience of being there physically. It disrupts this idea of the institution controlling the narrative of what the archive looks like and tries to play with that. anything is possible, kendal And there’s also the fact that we always misremember and that our memories are fluid, changing things. i hope so We really tried to take that into account in a playful way by having this space where people can think back or even speculate about what kinds of things might happen within this exhibition space. 🙏 hope is the only way 🙏 To leave a real of fictioned memory of Mu Hybrid Art House, visit the Living Archive’s MUmories website: https://mumories.hackersanddesigners.nl/Welcome.
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from: Interaction and Activation (chapter)
28:31 That’s a good question. I don’t know if I could answer the larger question of whether we can change this in hybrid times. I’m not an archive scholar, but I think what you’re saying is that some things just don’t get archived. We were working on another research project with The Hmm in which we were mapping hybrid events and also looking at different case studies. Red threads: dependency and agency. Spot on We were looking at it as ‘Is it something that lives forever (forever being a really relative term)?’ /camera:20 and ‘Is it something that you have to be there to experience and then it’s just gone?’. And I think all those things fit on this spectrum of hybridity. /camera:40 Probably not everything has to be preserved. Also because we work inside of these funding structures, textwe always have to document and prove we did things in order for them to be valid. /camera:60 This point was also brought up in the Hybrid Publication’s group: ‘It seems that most cultural institutions are so busy organizing events, that their archives become an institutional obligation to justify received funding.’ This quote was taken from the ‘Introducting the EtherPort’ blog post, to read it fully, visit: https://networkcultures.org/goinghybrid/2023/11/16/introducing-the-etherport . With the Hmm, we would document through our livestream and websitethe livestream would automatically go online. /camera:80 And recently we did a data center tour in which we took a bus and spacemoved around the periphery of the data center. /camera:90 We thought it would be really boring for people to have to watch this back. So instead we created an audio tour. People were audiorecording each other's experiences and the sounds of the data center. I think archiving doesn’t have to be this 1:1 digital twin version of what happened because that’s probably impossible. It’s interesting to rethink the archival format in ways that are different from what the experience was for people who were participating in it. Listen back to the Data Center Tour here: https://live.thehmm.nl/the-hmm-s-data-centre-tour
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from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
01:07 What is the red thread in this conversation? There are many points of connection. Both Michael’s and Sepp’s groups work with the ‘afterlife of liveness’. Thinking about how the public engages with (post-)live content of, for instance, performancecultural events and audioradio programs, both groups have asked: How to create an afterlife of liveness that also engages with collective practices of sense-making? In their experiments, both groups engaged with different forms and mediums within hybridity, seeking out different narrative structures and forms of non-linearity. Moreover, they’ve experimented with the form of databases, repositories, and protocols. For this work, both groups try to make use of existing open-source tools, such as etherpads and wikis. They also think about hybridity as a way to create publics through the use of different interactions it enables. So hybridity is a way of making things public, but also a way of creating publics. These many points of connection lead me to my first question.
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from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
03:40 Now, within the context of Going Hybrid, we’ve been looking at expanding or exploding the old methods of hybrid publishing into different media, into audioaudio, into spaceonsite interventions. green book gets keyed We had multiple people in our group that were doing experiments like this. For instance, Maria van der Togt created the work Hard Copy, Soft Copy: a websitelittle local server hosting a ton of pirated textbooks, combined with an objectonsite book printing station. Read more about Hard Copy Soft Copy here: https://sandberg.nl/alumni/maria-van-der-togt/work/hard-copy-soft-copy–impermeable-domains. Another example is Victor Chaix, who developed the concept of digital social text. Victor Chaix, ‘Hypothes.is: Playing with Digital Texts’ Expandable Confines’, Institute of Network Cultures, 2023, https://networkcultures.org/longform/2023/07/13/hypothes-is-a-story-of-playing-with-digital-texts-expandable-confines. He’s looking at the afterlives of online text and how people can create social relationships and meaningful conversations with each other using tools like the websitebrowser plug-in Hypothes.is. Hypothes.is is a browser plug-in that allows the user to (collaboratively) annotate any website. Read more: https://web.hypothes.is. These are different forms of hybridity that we try to explore in different directions from this point. Read more about the Hybrid Publishing group and the backgrounds of the members here: https://networkcultures.org/goinghybrid/2022/07/06/the-crowbar-of-cultural-publishing-introducing-the-hybrid-publications-research-group.
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from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
04:47 If you’ll permit, I’m going to respond with an anecdote. Last Wednesday, while I was preparing for this conversation, I heard a audiobeeping noise. It was one of these notification that you don’t know where it comes from. So I ignored it, but it and kept beeping. Finally, I switched back to my computer’s Terminal, which I had open and I was logged in to a server at the school and I saw on my screen:
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from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
12:42 I’ll start by giving some context. Since September 2023, XPUB has taken part in Going Hybrid, so we came a bit late into the process. Going Hybrid started in January 2022. Since then, we have been running audioa weekly radio program at Radio Worm, which is an online radio stream. Each week, Tuesdays from 10 to 12, we’re producing a radio program ‘Protocols for an Active Archive’. A texttranscribed excerpt of that program is included in this book as one of the intermissions. In that snippet, Leslie, our course coordinator, describes pushing back on protocols. performanceIt's a very personal story of a friend who resists the conformity imposed by an outdated dress code.
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from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
14:08 An important text that we read in the XPUB program is textSimon Yuill's 'All Problems of Notation Will Be Solved by the Masses'. Simon Yuill, ‘All Problems of Notation Will Be Solved by the Masses’, Mute, 23 May 2008, https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/all-problems-notation-will-be-solved-masses. In it, Yuill described how musicians in the sixties and seventies devised various forms of protocols, as well as different systems of textnotation, to break out of the esthetic and social conventions. Think of examples like audioCornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra. student-at-the-back is brought to the front without anticipation I feel disturbed in my distanced identity For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnN5bAkd6jw&ab_channel=INVIGORATION. These protocols would often have the form of games that played around with leadership roles. The point is that, just like a children’s game of tag, you’re playing out different possibilities and it’s disrupting the established order. There is not some informal, implicit leader, but by defining a protocol together, these people speak about who’s the leader now, and how and why to give the leadership over to someone else. /camera:75 performanceAfter this conversation, performers are more 'awake' and responsive to each other. I think it’s really exciting. /camera:70
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from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
21:27 Each Tuesday, we would have an interview. textWe had an Etherpad, where we would write some possible as we started to think, and in the process, we would allow our focus to shift. Etherpad is an open-source web tool for collaborative writing. I think this resonates with the earlier discussion about the archive. Michael refers to Chapter 1 Radio Worm’s archive shouldn’t be just about collecting all the audioMP3s and dumping them somewhere, as, by the way, they’re already doing on websiteMixcloud. Maybe we should focus more on the community, on how this radio is made, and who the makers are. And so we’ve shifted to interviewing the makers. Tuesday morning we started for the first time at the studio with no set ‘caretakers’, as we call them (in the past we had prearranged a caretaker role). ‘Caretakers’ are the students in the radio studio during the broadcast, who take care of that weeks radio show plan. We started by playing a recording of something we presented on Sunday at the spaceZine Camp in Worm. To find more about Zine Camp 2023 check: https://zinecamp2023.hotglue.me/?home. While that was happening, the class was voting on questions to ask the makers. Then, performancewe had a rotating shift, of different question askers and engineers to do the mixing. unfortunately we need to keep a low volume here :( Ash, Lucas Simonis, and Lieuwe Zelle, the main makers of Radio Worm, got asked these questions. It was in the space of 48 hours, so much had been happening. We were textconnected on the pad but also spacevisible through the studio window. I think that was an amazing experience.
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from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
23:02 I’d like to bring up another experiment that XPUB students have done. In the choose-your-own-adventure game audioradio broadcast, the audience could textwrite in an Etherpad and guide the people who are audioon the radio where they’re going next, and which part of a narrative they’re performancepresenting. This game was based on David Maroto’s research into the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ gamebook, which was very popular in the 1990s, just before the advent of the internet. See: https://www.davidmaroto.info/The-Wheel-of-Fortune. Radio was no longer one-directional, but the audience had agency and even guided the people who were supposed to be the presenters. They were changing the medium and allowing it to be more than what it was conceived to be. The choose-your-own-adventure radio broadcast was called ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to an Active Archive’
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from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
26:04 I would also like to connect back to Clara’s intermission. does anyone have questions for the live hosts? feettiverse ? 👀 Clara mentioned how people in the Philippines were ready for catastrophe implicitly, because they those institutions or industries haven’t traditionally been there for them. As a result, the Philippines is a society that’s much more prepared to work locally and to care about the community. Another inspiration is, again, audioRadio Worm. They don't broadcast on FM, because they don’t need to have a huge audience. They work much more in a tradition of audioavant-garde music, where people were working in small-scale, connected alternative scenes. My point is: we’re not trying to recreate Meta. It’s about creating counterpoints by cultivating spacenonstandard spaces that can function differently. The Fediverse can bring mass to these counterpoints, so that networked initiatives can nourish each other, rather than then having to always fend for themselves and eventually disappearing.
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from: Online Critical Reflection, a Fable from the Past? (chapter)
In Publishing Experiments for All, which combined a presentation and a workshop, we aimed to bring the experiences from the first two sessions together with the publisher’s perspective on the possibilities of introducing such new forms of reading and writing to the industry. The views about the future of digital publishing shared by the participants ranged from exploring the possibilities of radical change and breaking the current patterns, through imagining inter-media hybrids or cross-connections, to concerns regarding sustainability of experiments and ensuring broad spectrum of participation. New experimental forms of publishing envisioned in that session included inviting critical reflection through engaging with still imagevisual argument maps; introducing formats that would allow the readers to add their own ‘audiovoice’ or to read through the eyes of another person; and the use of good old modular publishing. At the same time, a general conclusion emerging from this and other discussions we had throughout the project seems to be that the publishing sector is and will be rather unwilling to change.
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from: Hybrid Trains of Thought (chapter)
Trains are great.
You start from point A,
then you arrive at point B,
and in between you can read,
write,
sleep,
chat,
eat,
drink,
play,
even work.
But anyway,
I’m on public transport in the Netherlands,
on a spaceNederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) Intercity Direct train now,
on my way to deliver a talk with Clara at a hybrid
cultural event in Rotterdam.
The event is described as hybrid because some
people can attend on location and some can follow
online.
It sounds fancy,
but in many cases,
it just
means websiteZoom,
a videovideo projector,
objectchairs,
one or several cameras,
and a video mixer (in the best of cases.)
In these events,
awkward interactions and audioaudio/videovideo glitches Oh no :( We cannot hear the sound on-site
come for free, the green is clear now
but (at least for some of us) it also means that we
get to sit together again,
just not too close.
At least for now,
I get to post-pandemically daydream one more time
in the train on the way to point B.
Is it the post-pandemic though?
I like when the water level of the small canals in the
fields is getting so close to the grass that—
Gooooooede morgen, ticket alstublieft. we can hear it well form our decentralized and networked living rooms -
from: Hybrid Trains of Thought (chapter)
I’m on the train. I will be there on time for the
audiosound check. I’m trying to get there early because I
will be using my objectlaptop, and they asked me to send
a PDF a couple of days in advance, but seriously
WTF, like I have time to prepare something for
their workflow. Everyone always works on their
presentation at the last minute anyway… -
from: Hybrid Trains of Thought (chapter)
What? Your audiosound is breaking up. Are you in a spacetunnel?
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from: Talkshop Mumories: Living Archives (chapter)
I think this also touches on Angelique’s memory as well, audiowith Bjork's song. I think this quote is really fitting for our thinking processes and how we were thinking together when we were imagining the different forms that an exhibition space’s archive could take. So bringing the topic back to life spans and collapse, I wanted to bring in one of our guests who’s joining us online, Michael Murtaugh, and he’s directing the Experimental Publishing Masters at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. i need that link He’s also a member and part-time co-system administrator for Constant VZW in Brussels and works in a cross-disciplinary collective modestly named the Institute for Computational Vandalism (which is a really great name). So, Michael, it would be great if you could maybe speak about your own approach to archives in the work that you do, especially in relation to the dying or the collapsing archive.
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from: Talkshop Mumories: Living Archives (chapter)
Thanks for the intro. What I pulled in may connect to some of the people who are also there. Actually, the question of the life spans made me think a bit about something audioI once heard Spider Alex talk about. And Spider Alex is a system administrator for a kind of feminist server network and in particular works at spaceCalafou, in Barcelona. In fact, actually, this was a quote that I found on Varia’s website from audioa radio broadcast that they did on A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers:
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from: Introducing Etherport.org (chapter)
Our main objective was to to find new cultural and digital strategies that expand the room for reflection and collectivity, with the use of alternative ways of online publishing. In this process, we were keen to experiment with making event reports can more open-ended, multi-voiced, and non-linear. Instead of creating FOMO-inducing descriptions, or bureaucratic documents, we wanted to create a structure for event reporting that would give readers an interesting, explorative experience. We looked at textreal-time transcriptions and instant publishing, non-linear and modular formats, objecton-demand printing stations as part of spaceexhibitions, and audioaudio-texttext hybrids. We found inspiration in zines, websiteinteractive digital longforms, wikis, annotated maps, hybrid indexes, chat-to-print tools, objectbook printing machines, and performanceinterventions in spacepublic space. There are so many alternatives to the boring and bureaucratic event report! Among the interesting practices we found, five deserve a special mention:
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from: XPUB Special Issue: Protocols (chapter)
00:00 Since listening to your radio broadcast last week, I was overwhelmed with this old, very old protocol, that luckily… well, I won’t say anything. And so, I started wearing, for the rest of the week the same plaid pants and striped shirt in honor of an old student that I went to school with who was… maybe a little bit like me, an outsider. But he always wore either plaid pants and a striped shirt and or vice versa. And he was picked out in the group as being…well…it just wasn’t done. can we say it is a semi-decentralized network semi-centralized on communities? That was the protocol at the time. You just didn’t wear plaids and stripes, there were certain lengths of your skirt and it couldn’t be higher, and you were sent home if your skirt was too high. Anyway, thankfully, all has changed. But why I thought about him is, because everyone laughed at him. Thanks to wiki He became kind of like a joker. And I don’t know, I don’t think he was always a joker. But I think it was kind of like his niche that the peer pressure paved out for him. He started inhaling PAM, which is a kind of anti-stick aerosol. And one day, it was the end of his life. So after hearing this word protocol, and audiohearing all the stories last Tuesday, I just had to wear this. here’s a small description of what you are listening to: 0:00-3:30: Leslie describing (the fatal consequences of) a cruel bygone protocol. 4:36-8:10: Maria sharing her ambivalent feelings towards protocols; annotation. 8:10 - end: relaxed talk between that week’s radio makers over protocols. You coming in here now is just really weird, because otherwise I would have just carried it… Here. No one else would know. I wouldn’t even tell my partner because it would sound so silly.
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from: XPUB Special Issue: Protocols (chapter)
03:23 Morning! audioYou are listening to a bunch of Experimental Publishing students desperately trying to figure out what archives are, what protocols are, and what all of that means in relationship to Radio Worm.
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from: Introduction: Hybrid Culture in a Changing World (chapter)
We’ve seen videolive streams set up on a spacestage, with performancespeakers giving a lecture and no audience except the viewers at home behind their computer; clunky live events with pre-recorded interviews that pixelate with every hesitation of the WiFi; videoInstagram Lives that nobody watches or that everyone is watching; countless videoZoom live streams with break-out rooms and tens of people on audiomute, fighting the Zoom fatigue or their clingy cat. Already in November 2020, Geert Lovink wrote about the phenomenon of Zoom fatigue: Geert Lovink, ‘The Anatomy of Zoom Fatique’, Eurozine, 21 November 2020, https://networkcultures.org/geert/2020/11/21/anatomy-of-zoom-fatigue. And we’ve also seen marvelous experiments: objecta big screen on a spacelive stage that shows a lively, textonline chat which is actually integrated into the conversation; performancea buddy system where an offline visitor takes their online friend by the hand (meaning, on their phone) and guides them through an spaceexhibition, event, Q&A’s with speakers live on stage.
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from: Introduction: Hybrid Culture in a Changing World (chapter)
The publications group developed Etherport: a tool for cultural organisations to make more experimental and exciting. In Etherport, event reports including texttext, videovideo, still imageimage, and audiosound are connected by a web of tags, drawing non-linear connections between different parts of the event report, and between different reports. The tool helps to standardize the event reporting workflow, reducing production workload and clarifying the role division between authors and editors. But, most importantly, it allows for event-reports to connect different levels of knowledge and observations, to create a web of meaning between reports, and thereby – hopefully – to provide a more exciting, explorative reading experience. You can read more about this tool and how to use it in the intermission ‘Introducing Etherport’.
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from: Introduction: Hybrid Culture in a Changing World (chapter)
The research of the archives group resulted in MUMORIES, an audioaudio spaceinstallation where visitors are invited to share their memories of cultural institution MU Hybrid Art House. These memories are collected and form a websiteliving digital audio archive that can eventually be listened to on site but also online. The growing collection of MUMORIES made possible by this interface literally gives voice to the immaterial impact a cultural practice like MU’s has on visitors. You can explore and interact with MUMORIES online here: https://mumories.hackersanddesigners.nl/Welcome.
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from: Introduction: Hybrid Culture in a Changing World (chapter)
You may hold this objectbook in your hands, read it from your websitescreen, or encounter it as a recorded videolivestream. That’s because we practice what we preach: this book is an experiment in hybrid publishing; the first time the Institute of Network Cultures has produced an event as a book. We started with an event, which took place on the 10th of November 2023 on the websitelivestream platform of The Hmm, and then used the recording to start forking and expanding. You can watch back the full recording of Screentime Airtime Facetime on the website of The Hmm: https://live.thehmm.nl/screentimeairtimefacetime. The recording was made in the audiovisual studio of the Amsterdam University of Applied Science. Rethinking the book as starting from a videolivestream, we composed a program of elements that can exist in both an event and a book: live textchapter-performanceconversations, videopre-recorded intermissions, textchatroom annotation, and a audiospoken colophon.
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from: Introduction: Hybrid Culture in a Changing World (chapter)
The first chapter, titled ‘audioSound and Temporality’, connects the Living Archives group with the Participatory Livecasting group. In both these clusters, the concepts of what it means to be present and hybrid across temporalities of past, present and future were key in developing their research and experiments.
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from: Introduction: Hybrid Culture in a Changing World (chapter)
The title Screentime Airtime Facetime hints at our shifting relation to technology. The notorious term screentime gestures towards the recent tendency to develop extremely intimate one-on-one relationships with objectour screens. Airtime gives a nod to older forms of hybrids events; the times of families gathering to audiolisten to the radio or videowatch TV. Facetime emphasises the immediate connections we foster with one another through, for instance, videothe use of video calls. With the gradual succession of these terms, we want to think through the public’s relation to technology, to collective bodies and to each other (with technology as a mediator). What can we learn from a history of different hybrid interactions and take with us as seeds for the future?