Live broadcast Under A Fooled Moon

SonoBus interface

A recording of the live broadcast of our radiophonic ‘closing ceremony’ for Suva’s exhibition, ‘Untitled’ at Myymälä2, Helsinki.

Participants gathered ‘Under a Fooled Moon’ in the gallery and on SonoBus, a multi-user audio streaming platform, for a live improv session that was streamed on openradio.in Using our voices, Suva guided us through a collective experiment in performing networked radio infrastructure as one would play a musical instrument.

The event was devised in collaboration with Sophea Lerner and Timo Tuhkanen.

‘Under A Fooled Moon’ a Radiophonic Closing Ceremony for Suva ‘Untitled’.

Suva Closing Ceremony

9 May 2021 from 17.00
Myymälä2, Helsinki
SonoBus Private Group: underafooledmoon
openradio.in

fugitive radio is convening a collective radiophonic ritual, gathering ‘Under A Fooled Moon’ for a live improv session led by Suva. Guests are asked to bring FM radio receivers, earbuds, smartphones and bluetooth speakers to open a portal between parallel (sonic) universes; you can join onsite at Myymälä2 gallery and online at the SonoBus Private Group: underafooledmoon. The situation is being devised in collaboration with Sophea Lerner and Timo Tuhkanen.

If you are curious to join online or in the gallery with your smartphone, SonoBus is a multi-user platform for streaming audio. It’s great for jammin’. The app is free to download and is available for a range of operating systems, devices and as an audio plug-in: https://sonobus.net/

The event will be streamed live to https://openradio.in/live

From 30 April until 9 May 2021, the Helsinki-based artist Suva exhibits a large series of watercolour portraits of ‘protagonists’ and instrument-sculptures that will be brought to life during impro-performances at Myymälä2. ‘Untitled’ is supported by Artists at Risk. See the Facebook event for dates and times.

fugitive radio is an artistic-research project initiated by Sumugan Sivanesan to research migrant/anticolonial perspectives and music in the North and pursue radio-as-method. fugitive radio is funded by the Kone Foundation and is being made in collaboration with Pixelache. Live broadcasts are supported by {openradio}.

Radio Wok Helsinki

Samba Carnival Helsinki

Fugitive Radio presented its first live ‘radio fanzine’, Radio Wok Helsinki (initially title Radiowalk Helsinki) for Nepantlas#4, Akademie Schloss Solitude curated by Daphne Dragona. Produced by myself, Sumugan Sivanesan, and Irina Mutt with the support of Sophea Lerner, the fanzine featured the multimedia artist Suva.

Notions of the ‘audio fanzine’ and of ‘performance as publishing’ were initially raised by Irina, which we developed as an experimental processes, circling around the themes of displacement, vulnerability, solidarity and self-defence. We arrived at narrative formats that referenced the printed zine, such as comics, recipes, interviews and a centrefold.

The performance occurred on Schloss Solitude’s video conferencing platform from which an audio stream was broadcast on {openradio}. Those who registered and attended the event online, were privy to extra visual and text elements and were also invited to participate or intervene. (Noone took up the offer, but we understand it could take a while to get familiar with the process!). There was also a discussion afterwards, which was also not part of the radio fanzine.

‘If a radio broadcasts in the forest…’

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.