fugitive frequency on CoLaboRadio in 2021.

Fugitive Radio: Fugitive Frequency will be broadcasting on the first Tuesday every month at 17.00 CET on CoLaboRadio, Freie Radios – Berlin Brandenburg: 88,4 MHz in Berlin, 90,7 MHz in Potsdam and streaming on https://fr-bb.org/

Episode 01, ‘Born to be Wireless’ is an audio essay of sorts, sketching out some of the issues and themes that will be explored in the coming year, such as: feminist and anticolonial network infrastructures, politics of remix, antiracist media activism. It features the voices of Fernanda Monteira, Gilberto Gil, Amoc, Ailu Valle, Jenni Laiti and Suohpanterror! amongst others.

School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement I on Movement Radio

Onassis AiR, The School of Infinite Rehearsals

Over September and October 2020 I was privileged to participate in Onassis AiR ‘School of Infinite Rehearsals, Movement I’, convened by Hypatia Vourloumis in Athens. Alongside Federica Bueti, Anastasia Diavasti, Moriah Evans, Daniel Hui and Kostas Tsioukas we produced three podcasts for Movement Radio.

Episode I: Refusal (aired 5 November 2020)

Episode II: Refusal Against (aired 12 November 2020)

Episode III: Sound Is Migrant (aired 26 November 2020)

Nepantlas #04 »Fugitive Radio: Radiowalk Helsinki«

»Nepantlas« is an online program curated by Daphne Dragona. It focuses on projects that introduce social and technological infrastructures based on relationships of care, respect, and interdependence.

For Nepantlas #4 Irina Mutt and I will be performing an ‘audio fanzine’ live online for Akademie Schloss Solitude. Our performance will be followed by a Q&A. Attendance is limited and prior registration is required to participate. Please register until November 17, 2020 with signup@akademie-solitude.de

Our performative zine will also be ‘published’ / broadcast on {openradio} via Fugitive Radio’s stream: https://play.openradio.in/public/fugitive-radio

Nepantlas #04 »Fugitive Radio: Radiowalk Helsinki«
Sumugan Sivanesan & Irina Mutt

Curated by Daphne Dragona
November 19, 2020, 2–3:30 pm (CET)

Guests of the fourth online edition of »Nepantlas« are Sumugan Sivanesan and Irina Mutt. Both run »Fugitive Radio« : an urban artistic research project on radio as a social practice, which is designed as a platform for migrant voices and experiences. »Radiowalk Helsinki« is a live radio fanzine developed as part of »Fugitive Radio«.

»Fugitive Radio« is an urban artistic-research project about radio as a social practice. It proposes to be a platform for migrant voices and experiences and is aligned with anticolonial trajectories. »Radiowalk Helsinki« is a live radio-fanzine that is developed as part of »Fugitive Radio«. As with Gloria Anzaldúa’s ideas about »mestiza«, it is an inclusive, accumulative and elastic structure, operating between thresholds as a way to embrace contradictions and ambiguity. It approaches the means and infrastructures of online radio as instruments of dispersal and play. Drawing on the ephemeral qualities of micropublishing and (online) performance, it employs strategies of replication, disruption and distribution.

»Radiowalk Helsinki« listens into urban environments and network processes, weaving through fragments of texture, text, voice and music. It links listening to haptic experiences of scrolling, browsing and clicking to accentuate experiences of migration, fugitivity, surveillance, precariousness and interdependence. For this special »Nepantlas« session, the audience will experience a »radio-fanzine« and explore how performance can become a means of publishing. Shifting across platforms and navigating collectively, »Radiowalk Helsinki« will examine the possibilities and impact of performative distribution when it comes to addressing urgent topics of our times.

»Fugitive Radio« is a project by Sumugan Sivanesan. In collaboration with Irina Mutt, the project will evolve over the coming year across a series of workshops, productions, podcasts and events in Helsinki. »Fugitive Radio« is being developed in collaboration with Pixelache and is supported by the Kone Foundation. It will culminate as a series of live broadcasts/interventions at Pixelache Festival #Burn____, June 2021.

‘If a radio broadcasts in the forest…’

…is something Sophea Lerner from {openradio} said in a recent production meeting. It just so happens that I trialed a hybrid outside-online ‘forest broadcast’ at the end of summer in a clearing behind Sophea’s apartment block; amongst woodpeckers, wind, moss, a light drizzle and chainsaws.

The broadcast took place on a regular ‘Forest Chatter’ meeting organised by Sepideh Ardalani at MASSIA, 31 August 2020. I took the opportunity to test a set-up that took a live microphone feed of environmental sounds, an audio stream from Jasmine Guffond’s Listening Back browser extension which sonifies cookie activity, and a feed from our Jitsi meeting, that was fed through WIDI Audio To MIDI convertor and mixed and processed in Ableton Live. The ‘music’ was broadcast into my forest surrounds and also looped back into our meeting. WIDI’s software takes in sounds, converts them on-the-fly into MIDI notation which is then played out through it’s range of soft-synth instruments. In trial mode, the plug-in would go silent intermittently, thus the performance brought a number of chance operations into play; forest sounds including broadcast audio, (surveillance) data sonification and audio from Jitsi.

Alice, who was in the meeting, imagined an orchestra hiding behind the trees, which I thought was a lovely visualisation. As something of a new experience for us all, I am interested to experiment more with how participants might listen and interact across multiple locations in such networked/situated events.