Being Heard: Thinking Through Radio With Palestine (October 2023–)

Soundcamp cooperative

Abstract

We describe Radio With Palestine (RWP), a project that broadcasts live sounds from demonstrations. Reflecting on RWP as ongoing work, we are thinking about rhythms, temporalities and resonant spaces of direct actions as manifestations of political urgencies and injustices. Ecological radio moves live sounds from place to place, colliding timeframes and moments of emergent struggles, creating a live archive that aims to amplify and document ephemeral situations, without turning them into spectacles or specimens.

During RWP, people attend actions in support of Palestine and run live audio streams. Using free streaming apps and DIY audio devices with omni-directional microphones, RWP enacts a form of flat listening against the grain of mainstream media. Events vary from minor acts of resistance at neighbourhood scale to large, conventionally under-reported protests.

By drawing attention to how (different) these situations sound, we can think about the ways direct actions work beyond each site, with its distinct architectures, tempos and acoustics. Being in and broadcasting streets full of dissonant sounds and voices, hearing ourselves back with lag, we sense both the possibilities and the limits of synchrony and solidarity.

Keywords: Radio, Palestine, Sound, Ecologies, Activism, Live

Introduction

The task … [is] to let the infrastructure become part of the new action, even a collaborative actor.

(Judith Butler 2015, 127)

This paper reflects on Radio With Palestine (RWP), an ongoing project that repurposes mobile technologies and urban architectures to broadcast live sounds from actions and demonstrations. Thinking through RWP opens questions about activism, the urgencies and limits of synchrony, solidarities, and the live. We address these questions with reference to key terms from Soundcamp’s work over a decade: ecological activist radio, flat listening, the live archive and lag [1].

Our approach comes out of a transmission arts and activist practice. This paper offers an experiential account of broadcasting from the streets, among sounds, where the direction of an action is uncertain, and a variety of voices and rhythms can be heard interacting with the surroundings and each other. We draw on critical writing to understand and convey these experiences, without pretending to offer a systematic theoretical account. As such we hope to contribute to a conversation that is ongoing and incomplete [2].

Broadcasts/Actions

From 2021, Soundcamp had a monthly show )Listening room( on the Bethlehem-based station Radio al Hara, broadcasting environmental sounds from the Acoustic Commons network [3]. This show came to a halt in October 2023, after twenty-six editions, when the station suspended its regular programming, coinciding with a wave of protests against the Israeli invasion. Radio With Palestine started as an improvised set of responses to this situation.

During RWP, people attend actions and run live audio streams, using free streaming apps and DIY audio devices (see Technical). Interventions vary from minor acts of resistance at neighbourhood scale to large, conventionally under-reported protests. The following notes and reflections are chosen to suggest the range of scales and forms of broadcasts and actions. The listening notes in the margin and gutter give a more detailed sense of them through their sounds.

28 October 2023

Victoria Embankment to Whitehall, London

Live streams by the Soundcamp cooperative

Streambox field transmitter, Locuscast for iPhone

A large national march set off from Embankment, following the river west, and crossed over Westminster bridge, turning east along the south bank to Waterloo Bridge, where it crossed back. The mobile networks were overloaded coming out of Embankment underground station, in a hollow. The broadcast started late as streamers rigged antennas with bamboo and a fishing pole. Others went further along the route, where the signal was more stable. The march stretched across two bridges and both embankments, forming a long loop. A variety of chants reflected different perspectives and responses among sections of the march, with voices converging forcefully from time to time on simple demands:

Stop Bombing Gaza.

Ceasefire Now.

4 December 2023

Camberwell Green to Windrush Square, Brixton, South London

Live stream by the Soundcamp cooperative

Locuscast for iPhone

We came across the march by accident as it passed through Loughborough Junction, and joined the end. Conversation with a veteran protester, part of a duo with Hoot Your Support signs. When we arrive at Windrush Square, we are thinking of previous actions, including the BLM protest in June 2020 (self-noise.net 2020). Police detained a boy and held him in a van. The action changed. People surrounded the van, some sitting in front and behind, while others argued with police officers around it. The police presence became more forceful, with more police arriving, pushing people in the road. The small crowd seemed mainly undecided and unsure, with few experienced activists. Individual voices and sounds of physical presence, the microphones among bodies, with close-up antagonism between the police and demonstrators and bystanders. Somebody spotted when the police brought a second van and moved the boy to it along an open corridor created by pushing people back and staging a diversion. Some of the crowd returned to the Palestine protest, where a PA had been set up under a large tree. Speakers condemned the police actions, pointing to analogies between the situation in Gaza and asymmetries of power in Brixton. For periods, this felt like a situation on the verge of becoming something else, forced by the police actions to interrogate its own motivations, potentials, and limits. The broadcast failed to record.

11 January 2024

Outside the International Court of Justice, The Hague

Live stream by Ivo Blackwood (Soundcamp cooperative)

Izicast for iPhone

[See the IRC log]

A formal, theatrical setting, in which a spokesperson and key actors addressed the crowd, first in person, then via a screen and sound system streaming audio from the hearing to a public area outside. The accusation of genocide was read out. The lawyers bringing and responding to the case were introduced. They made short prepared speeches. Mainstream media were covering the event from a designated area. Listening between RWP and official coverage revealed differences between using a directional microphone to focus on the official speakers, and using omni-directional microphones which convey the entire soundworld. Similarly, coverage from inside the courtroom, where admittance was restricted, contrasted with a gregarious open-air scene, with a back and forth between testimony and evidence on the screen and sounds from the crowd. This was possibly more evident on the broadcast than in person, since the radio dampened the impact of the screen, creating a more level, ambiguous set of exchanges.

9 February 2024

Area C, Upper Jordan Valley

Live stream by Meira Asher (radioart106)

Izicast for Android

To prevent disruption by the authorities, the protest was largely unannounced. The stream began as soon as Meira left the bus on which activists were arriving. It conveyed sounds of the situation and the site, together with interviews where participants were invited to describe their involvement and to address a potential live audience abroad, perhaps in London. Military police arrived, made arrests, and confiscated equipment (instruments, banners). After negotiation, the detainees were released and their belongings returned, on condition that the action ended. Participants dispersed.

17 February 2024

Speakers Corner, Hyde Park to [near] the Israeli embassy, South Kensington, London

Stream by the Soundcamp cooperative

Streambox field transmitter

Joined late by the Albert Memorial, where a workshop with families was making paper birds and chalk drawings on the road. Walking back along the route toward the front of the approaching march, near the former embassy of Iran, chanting mixed with calls for donations and sounds of coins in buckets. Skirting the south side of Kensington Gardens, the march encountered a series of loudspeakers, masking unamplified sounds. We reduced the gain. The march ended in a blockage, with amplified addresses from a large stage further ahead. Unable to continue to the embassy itself, the march halted and eventually dispersed through side streets.

17 February 2024

George Square to OVO Hydro, Glasgow

Live stream by Sasha Baraitser Smith (Soundcamp cooperative)

Streambox field transmitter

I arrived around 1 pm, ate something before starting my stream. People gathered in George Square slowly. It started to rain. Later the march set off. It was organised. We crossed Buchanan Street and walked down towards the river. Passing a McDonalds near Central Station, some people started chanting: Boycott McDonalds. This quickly faded out. The march slowed and stopped at an intersection facing the river. Things got a bit quiet. I hoped we would cross. There had been no marches on the Southside of Glasgow so far. We turned right, walking down under a series of bridges, parallel to the river. The echoes energised people. It had been raining on and off all day. I was reminded of a series of actions that took place during COP26 in Glasgow along this same road. Up ahead was the Ovo Hydro and the Scottish Events Campus (where COP26 was held). There were suddenly police visible and we were stopped from occupying both lanes of the road. People filtered onto the grass and concrete in front of these buildings. Some took shelter underneath. No one really knew what to do in the face of this infrastructure. I peeled off, walking in crowds towards the train station, where the ticket barriers are open, as if after a large concert.

15 May 2024

From SOAS student encampment, Central London

Live stream by the Soundcamp cooperative

Streambox field transmitter

Nakba 76. When the action took place, the SOAS Liberated Zone had been running for a week, growing from a half dozen tents to a sizeable camp on a raised grass quadrangle under a large plane tree. An OSB ramp had been constructed to give access to the campsite, surrounded on three sides by university buildings. On the fourth side, speakers (student activists, organisers, trade union representatives) addressed the crowd, which then moved off on a march through the surrounding streets—stopping traffic along Tottenham Court Road, sitting down at the junction with Oxford Circus—before partially dispersing at Soho Square, with some protesters returning to the camp. Passages of dense energy down narrow streets with thickly leaved planes, a sounding bloc moving through the city, heard from within, ahead or behind, carrying unpredictably. Those who stayed behind at the camp could hear the march returning, before it turned the corner into sight.

Background

Radio With Palestine came out of what we were already calling ecological activist radio (EAR). Soundcamp uses the term ecological with reference to The Three Ecologies of Félix Guattari (1989/2014), who describes ecologies of environments, organisations, and subjects as inseparable. By holding these ecological modes together, we are interested to explore and extend the legacy and practice of the free/libre radio movements—with which Félix Guattari was associated (Guattari and Rolnik 2007)—in collaboration with less-heard human and non-human communities.

Ecological radio was a shorthand for some approaches developed by Hannah Kemp-Welch and Grant Smith as part of Meet Me on the Radio, a community radio project with elders in Lewisham, South London during lockdown (Soundcamp 2024) [4]. It took on a more considered form with As if radio (AIR), a two-week transmission during COP26 (the UN Climate Change Conference) in Glasgow (Soundcamp 2021, As if radio).

As if radio was an attempt to broadcast alternative sounds of COP26 by giving airtime to the demonstrations, conversations, and performances taking place throughout the city [5]. Over the two weeks of the COP we ran a 24-hour, collaborative radio station out of Civic House, Glasgow. Content included live environmental streams; live feeds from streets, actions, and preparations around the city; transmission works; and artist conversations responding to an open call. These networked materials were interspersed with discussions with visitors to the open studio at Civic House (Soundcamp 2021).

Technical

AIR developed a signal chain based on affordable omni-directional microphones, which we make ourselves and in workshops with others, sharing parts lists and guides. Streamers send live sounds from their locations using DIY field transmitters (streamboxes) based on open source hard- and softwares, or with the mobile apps Locuscast or Izicast [6].

Omni-directional microphones tend to convey different elements of places or situations (human voices, other sounds) equally, without hierarchy or a directional subject. Streamers make choices about where to place a streambox or where in a march to be (closer equals louder), but the microphones themselves are not selective. A listener to the stream in situ can hear how this decentres their attention from focal points to which they are habitually drawn (see Flat listening below).

The streams are available live with a few seconds’ delay on a server and public soundmap operated by Locus Sonus at the École supérieure d’art in Aix-Marseille [7]. For each broadcast, members of the Soundcamp cooperative create a mix of streams, which is sent to a server at Wave Farm in Acra, New York [8]. Sometimes the show is relayed by other stations [9]. The mix also appears on a page with a player, where listeners can converse by Internet Relay Chat [10].

The sounds are live. They are always propagating somewhere, heard with varying amounts of delay. The live is not the immediate; nor is it the “real-time” of mainstream reportage, which mainly covers protests by broadcasting pre-recorded audio/video segments, which have been uploaded to a file repository for editing and assembly, and are often re-presented as live.

There are also drops. “Real-time” workflows are designed to avoid dropouts and disruptions arising from variable networks, broken signal chains, and errors. At the same time, they tend to select for content that is eventful, impactful, newsworthy, and consistent with pre-established narratives and perspectives. By contrast, the materials we are working with contain breaks and inconsistencies. If these serve as a paradoxical gauge of liveness, they also inadvertently disrupt the flow of transmission, introducing aporias, creating openings onto listeners’ surroundings, revealing an imperfect overlay of topologies and timeframes.

Ecological Radio

Nick and I consider Guddling, and our practice more broadly, to be an ecological practice. That is, we see it as a practice through which human-environmental interrelations are mobilised, experienced and attended to…

(Minty Donald 2019)

We think about ecological radio through two key terms:

Transmission ecologies describes the wires, networks, sensors, and social settings of expanded radio (Friz 2014). We are interested in the sounds that are coming in, as much as the sounds that are going out, towards non-radial patterns of radio. This implies a commitment to anti-hierarchical organisation, aiming to share creative control among a transmission community (see below), and a sense that promising subjectivities and solidarities can emerge within those spaces. This leads, in turn, to work with sounds of particular environments and points of listening in which streamers are interested and involved.

Ecological radio involves a kind of flat listening. This term derives from Tristan Garcia’s (2014, 30) account of the “n’importe quoi,” the “no matter what”—a moment in perception where identification of the perceived object is uncertain (is that a bird, a frog, a phone?)—and the value ascribed to some object over another is suspended for a time. By remaining unresolved, and acknowledging the ways sounds mix and merge, flat listening is interested to leave openings onto areas of relative parity among human and non-human communities. Listening live to everyday sounds in this way tends to work against the dramatic grain of mainstream media, tuning instead to alternative histories of the mundane, slow, hidden, inconsequential, less-heard, weak (Lavery 2016).

Activist Radio

Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.

(David Graeber 2009, 203)

We think of activist radio as an ongoing experiment. Key points of reference for us are the “expanded radio” practice described by Kate Donovan at Radio Otherwise and Archipel Stations; broadcasts between rivers by Spree~Channelsea Radio Group; work with interference in the FM spectrum at The Radius; and anecdotes of a moving Citizen Broadband (CB) radio network between vehicles on the way to protests at Standing Rock [11].

When we think about activism in our practice, we have in mind an ability, or an aspiration, to respond to changes in the environment that come to our attention or that concern us. This is a partial responsiveness. For each channel that we pick up, there is a literally unlimited number of other channels that are ignored. In some cases, the ecological and the activist come together in obvious ways, as with AIR or War-Torn Ecologies [12]. In others, the link is more limited, referring to the way the work is positioned as part of the action, rather than a broadcast of it. This inseparability (of the transmission from the event) can be thought of in terms of the infrastructure becoming part of the action, as Judith Butler evokes above, and as Lazaros Karaliotas describes in the case of the occupation of Greece’s Public Broadcasting Service (ERT):

In the days and months that followed, ERT’s buildings, computers, cameras, microphones, monitors, cables and transmitters were transformed into infrastructures of dissensus: physical and virtual, embodied and non-human, infrastructures that enabled the staging and circulation of democratic disagreement against the twin logics of austerity and post-democratic closure that scripted the ‘Greek crisis’ and dictated ERT’s closure.

(Lazaros Karaliotas 2023, 2)

We learned about this complicity between actions, infrastructures and live transmission as performance (performance as if) from thinking through Radio With Palestine, as we discuss in the next section.

Radio With Palestine (October 2023–)

When action is formed, noise is produced, and immediately there is something to be listened to. The word is not something to hold onto. It is for hearing.

(Georgia Sagri 2021, 125)

Let’s listen back to this piece of writing from May 2024:

Thinking about the ongoing UCL encampment and the consequent locking down of the UCL block [13] brings to the fore, on one hand, the way forms of privacy / privation and in- / exclusion are already part of our day-to-day urban architectures [around which you can walk in vain trying to sneak in (where all the campus guides have been re-assigned to keeping the gates—the minor internal borders which, seemingly soft, condition our expectations of the possible..)]; on the other: how those architectural forms can be repurposed for reverb, amplification, re-distribution of sounds between spaces, under the canopy, and spill out onto the road. On 6 May (2024) students and activists [who had been] separated from the public, came to the front gate and made noise along the fence, bouncing across the street and creating concentrated sonic activity, with the fox hat guy shuttling between SOAS and UCL camps on a bicycle, recharging megaphones and showing people how to use them [14]. Here we are thinking with Glissant and Despret about permeable boundaries, at the same time as we are hearing frictive tweeting along the boundary—display, noise, amplification, hootback [15].

Let’s also listen now to the recording of this transmission, from the spring of 2024.

How can holding these hearings together help us think through what RWP has been and is trying to do? What can this tell us about the faces listening and writing present to each other, as they articulate the question of pre/post?

The UCL encampment described as ‘ongoing’ came to an end on 12 August 2024. We were not available to broadcast that event and are only sure of the date by checking social media logs now. The spatial disruptions which impressed us then have returned to normal, leaving few if any traces of the occupation. The surprising energy of that day (6 May 2024), as conveyed in the experience of the broadcast can be felt, transposed to text: a sense of heightened expectation; a sense of running around trying to get in, to be part, converted into convoluted punctuation (multiple square and rounded brackets); its attempts to negotiate tenses experienced as the vanishing ground of actions, or presence. Where does that leave us? Perhaps with the fox hat guy (this enigmatic figure)? And what to make of partly cryptic references to theoretical writing by academic heavy hitters on boundaries, bird calls, and performance?

This all feels quite distant. Past.

Performing Protest

We can hear at the gates of UCL that, just as no one live performance is identical to another, actions and demonstrations are also unique and ephemeral. They have many moving parts: protestors, urban infrastructures, police, passing cars/buses, spectators, weather, etc., and these interact in unpredictable ways.

Large “national” protests involving many people in more prominent spaces (e.g. capital cities) are more widely reported, and they tend to have a set route, often announced quite far in advance. They recreate a centralised model in which people move en masse towards an official (often empty) target: Parliament, Home Office, official residences. They are spectacular, and we hear this in the ways thousands of voices can disturb even the most robust urban environments. We also hear the trajectory of these large-scale actions, from gathering, through a moment of solidity when numbers are at their greatest, and towards a final dispersing.

Giving attention to the unpredictable elements suggested above could shift our focus away from the scale and spectacle of these actions, and see them as made up of parts, each part operating as a kind of micro-performance within a wider improvised score. We hear this when there are multiple streams coming from different places in a larger action: the Queer Bloc has its own timbres, music and chants, as does the group “Jews for Palestine,” and so on and so forth. We hear different languages (¡Viva viva Palestina!), different kinds of conversations, occasionally we hear moments of synchrony between and across the march: Stop Bombing Gaza! (see listening notes).

RWP is interested in paying attention to the trans-scalar effects of direct action within large protests, as well as minor acts of resistance and conventionally under-reported actions at smaller scales. Here the tactics are different. Away from spectacle, they prefer to occupy more localised sites, opening up the possibility of integrating direct action into the everyday. Here routes are often improvised and the trajectory of the action becomes unclear, as with the march from Camberwell Green to Windrush square which turned into a stand-off with the police at a very local scale. Here we get hootback.

Radio With Palestine, as a form of ecological activist radio, uses transmission [16] and listening [17] as strategies that could support a re-orientation away from spectacular displays, and towards practicing resistance, resilience, and occupation of our public spaces.

Live/Archive

During actions, public spaces sound different: streets are full of voices, instruments and cries, with patches of quiet, rather than traffic. If those events create distinctive soundworlds and energies, it is partly because they are exceptional and ephemeral.

This liveliness can feel significant, working with and against the possibility that an action will be dispersed, run out of steam, conclude, while raising familiar questions of how activists can resist fatigue. For instance, the upper Jordan Valley demonstration (see Broadcasts/Actions) was not advertised, to avoid being shut down in advance. The stream ran for just twenty minutes, at which point the protest ended. What value is to be accorded to that twenty-minute period, in anticipation and in recollection, as an opening of sorts?

Can thinking through live transmission help articulate a pre/post moment which direct actions seek by necessity to inhabit? Working within historical settings that feel unpromising or impossible, they find ways to keep possibilities open. We always plan to occupy as if to stay forever (“we will never rest” is a recurring chant), while also knowing the summer holidays will come around, when we will leave to reconnect with our families. Over a longer time frame, we will come back.

RWP responds to this situation: working in the live, it commits to being open to the present and towards arriving futures, while also being drawn to log, document, accumulate acts of listening and passing time.

Streams for RWP appear among others as part of a live archive of sounds in transit, available as a collection of streams on a server list. The archive can be conventionally opened, without knowing at any given time what will be in there (Soundcamp 2016). Streams are not usually recorded, but they can be. Paradoxically, recording can create the possibility to hold something open, to expose it to second listening, revealing things you missed the first time (Ultra-red 2016, 187-188).

A tension between hopes of the live action to remain indeterminate or ajar, and the archive as a more scholarly, resolved set of practices, or a more cut-and-dried account, is sometimes quite evident, as in a clip where an interviewer is heard prompting a group of demonstrators for a statement [18]. We hear the reluctance of the protagonists to lend their voices in this way, sensing that, in the place of a pre-configured set of ideas, ideologies or affiliations, they are interested in something less fixed, some version of “formless formations” that might be emerging (Ruiz and Vourloumis 2021).

If a pre/post moment that suspends definitions and conclusions can feel auspicious, it also reflects awareness that the situations the work responds to are themselves ongoing; the level of difficulty does not lessen over time. On the contrary, as we know from Land to Return [19], the severity of the situation can intensify when the media focus has moved on, so the question of how to give extended attention elsewhere is an ongoing problematic (Soundcamp 2022). This links to a reluctance to commit to memory, to paper, to save, to declare a project done.

Inspired by ideas and practices of interference, grassroots and community archiving (Burgum 2022), we are interested in technical and collaborative approaches that can allow minor acts of resistance to be logged without sapping and spectacularising their energies, or bottling their capacities for surprise.

Lag

If “live” suggests a smooth, impactful mediatisation, the RWP signal chain is plagued, in fact, by lag: the time it takes for sound to move from the streamer, to a server, to a mixer, to another server, on to a listener and potentially back to the streamer who is monitoring the feed. The length of each of these links varies with the route taken through the networks. There is also a buffer time defined in the Icecast streaming software which is designed to smooth over these discrepancies [20]. When the buffer runs down or out, this is heard as a variety of minor glitches or drops. So the liveness of the broadcast is experienced differently depending on where and how you listen. Lag is prominent when streaming and listening back “at the same time.”

Being in and broadcasting streets full of dissonant sounds and voices, monitoring the broadcast on leaky headphones or on a splitter with somebody else, hearing yourselves back with lag, you sense both the possibilities and the limits of synchrony. Lag is what reminds you that things are out of kilter: it brings out micro-acousmatic, spectral and uneasy effects, the un-natural quality of the lagged voice, micro-economies of fluxes, (lost) packets, bounce-back off facades [21].

These fissures in the “real-time” associated with live actions and streaming media point to “weak” qualities of actions and affordances (Lavery 2016): suspension, incompletion, the unevenly present participle, resonance, distortion, decay in the space of the -ing (Sackett 1995).

Thinking, as above with performance, about trans-scalar effects and experiences, these micro-effects correspond with larger questions of historical remembrance. For many participants, the protests and encampments broadcast by RWP were occasions to learn about ongoing historical situations of which they were partially or fully unaware. The downtime of protest camping becomes, in this way, a study period. Voices heard on RWP reflect at once an urgency for present and future actions, and a burden of ongoing dispossession (of culture, homes, or territory), that making noise seems partly to point to and to re-impress in collective memory.

On the day of remembrance of Nakba 76, on 15 May 2024, we are inhabiting this paradoxical space of (temporary/lasting) encampment, which then becomes a march, before partially dispersing and returning to the occupation, as a minor figure of resistance, rehearsal or repetition. Staying with the micro-texures of DIY radio, what can be learned from lag as a figure for collective listening and actions?

Communities of Transmission/Study

As of May 2024, nineteen of us had been involved in streaming for Radio With Palestine, with others or the same people mixing or relaying the broadcasts. We think of this as a community of transmission (Anna Friz and Jeff Kolar 2014), a group who come together to make radio. Radio here expands (Donovan 2018) to a wider distributed practice, including research, development and exchanges of skills, adapting other devices and networks in order to move live sounds from place to place and from situation to situation.

This experiment in collaborative transmission and listening can also be taken as a form of collective study, with streets and protests as study places. At pickets, Workers for a Free Palestine (WFFP) organised teach-ins where we learned, for example, about histories of Jewish labour organisation in the first half of the 20th century. But we are also pointing to situated ways of learning independent of content: DIY radio experiments, tinkering, ad hoc discussions in person and by Internet Relay Chat, from particular places in a larger event as it is happening, being out of the classroom, the lecture hall, the theatre, being off the call. As a durational, “eventless” form, ecological radio is interested in what there is to learn in between moments of intensity—in the extended periods when nothing much seems to be going on. The idea of the transmission community reflects a shift of emphasis from widening our audience to widening and sustaining our community of practice.

Being Heard

[T]he flow and force of particular tonalities and musics, silences and noises may transgress certain partitions or borders, expanding the agentive possibilities of the uncounted and the underheard.

(Brandon LaBelle 2018, 2-3)

All this brings us to thinking about how moving sounds between situations can help articulate, support, sustain, flow over into live tactics of media, art and action.

The broadcasts described above reveal the city as a reservoir of sonic architectures that can be activated and repurposed. Here we are moving from terms in sound studies which are static (soundscape, sound field, site, etc.), and wanting to talk about moving sounds from place to place, situations, interferences, overlays, energetic exchanges.

By drawing attention to how different situations sound, RWP insistently reproduces this multiplicity. Such concerns also support Brandon LaBelle’s account of sonic agencies, as forces that can be mobilised towards redistribution of the sensible (LaBelle 2022 and Rancière 2013).

Coda

[All] public assembly is haunted by the police and the prison. And every public square is defined in part by the population that could not possibly arrive there; either detained at the border, or they have no freedom of movement and assembly, or they are detained or imprisoned. In other words, the freedom to gather as a people is always haunted by the imprisonment of those who exercised that freedom and were taken to prison.

(Judith Butler 2016, 77)

RWP attempts to practice and communicate solidarities through the borderless radio space, mixing sounds across multiple locations. It is a signal (and a signal) to others that there are solidarities and empathetic bodies, beyond and within the official statements. By translating these actions, demonstrations, and protests through durational broadcasts, RWP exposes the aspirations and the limits of these solidarities.

What Judith Butler describes helps to disturb any sense of adequate “coverage” or conclusion. Instead, there are urgencies. There are also lulls, periods of exhaustion, inactions, and distractions. During the time of writing, there have been shifts and additions to RWP broadcasts and actions. There are (were) now encampments. So the time of writing is not homogeneous. This publication does not have temporal flatness.

In engaging with the ideas of performance, liveness, and lag, we try to think through patterns of resistance, across temporalities of remembering, and between marches and encampments. How to hold them open to one another? How can they be sustaining and not undercut, remaining in the urgencies of the live?

We invite other streamers, mixers, and stations to join us in an ongoing attempt to give attention as far as we can [22].

Colophon

Full list of broadcasts, locations, and credits with links to audio files in development at:

https://acousticommons.net/listen/rwp/.

We are grateful for detailed thoughts and suggestions from an anonymous reviewer, and editing by Anna-Louise Walton, which have helped clarify the paper.

Thank you.

End Notes

[1] Soundcamp is an arts cooperative based in London. We are interested in DIY infrastructures that can move live sounds between places and situations, and give attention to less-heard human and non-human communities. Our work appears as live transmissions, workshops, sound devices and events.

soundtent.org

@sound_camp

[2] On incompletion, see Harney and Moten (2021). On keeping things open, bringing theoretical materials without explaining everything exhaustively, acknowledging the ongoing nature of the work and how it is changing, see Donald (2019).

[3] The Acoustic Commons network (acousticommons.net) came out of a Creative Europe collaboration project (2020-2022) between Full of Noises (Barrow, Cumbria), Locus Sonus (Aix-Marseille), CONA (Ljubljana), Soundcamp (London), HMU (Crete) and Cyberforest (Tokyo). The network has used live audio streaming to develop environmental art projects and connect locations.

[4] Ecological radio developed from Soundcamp’s work on Reveil (2014–) and environmental streams. An antecedent was “wilderness radio” as proposed in the 1970s by Bruce Davis (Soundcamp 2016).

[5] From 18:00 on 31 October 2021, a Samhain performance by the Delegation of Inverbellow moved through the streets of Glasgow, with a live band and antics engaging members of the public and turning places in the city centre into surprising sites where it was unclear what was happening or might happen. The live stream conveyed a sense of instability and a hard-to-parse mixture of mimicry, skipping, shrieks, sorries and humanimal sounds. Recording available at acousticommons.net.

[6] “Streamboxes” are Raspberry Pi-based transmitters using software by Stéphane Cousot at Locus Sonus (locusonus.org/locustream/#phone) and others, based on the open source streaming software Darkice by Ákos Maróy, Rafael Diniz, and others (darkice.org). They receive sounds around them and send them to an Icecast server operated by Locus Sonus at the at the Ecole supérieure d’Art in Aix-Marseille. Locuscast is a free audio streaming app for iOS and Android by Stéphane Cousot. Izicast is a streaming app for iOS by Daniel Noethen (izicast.de). More information on streaming is available at soundtent.org/stream.

[7] Live soundmap at locusonus.org/soundmap.

[8] Locus Sonus hosts the streams as part of the live soundscape project Locustream (2006–). For RWP, streams are opened in a browser and played one after another, or occasionally together, using an analogue or digital mixer. We use Broadcast Using This Tool (danielnoethen.de) to send the main output to the transmission arts centre, Wave Farm, in Acra, New York (wavefarm.org).

[9] Stations that have hosted RWP include: Wave Farm WGXC-90.7 FM (Acra, NY), Radio Al Hara (Bethlehem, PS), Archipel Community Radio (Berlin, DE), Radio Patapoe (Amsterdam, NL), Radio Granizo 99.9 MHz (Olmue, Limache CL), Fuse Radio (Bradford, UK), Fade Radio (Athens, GR), Chercan Radio (Quilpué CL), CAMP Radio (Pyrenees, FR).

[10] Listen page with IRC chat at acousticommons.net/listen/rwp/.

[11] Kate Donovan: mattersoftransmission.net.

Radio Otherwise: radiootherwise.net.

Archipel Stations: archipel.community.

Spree~Channelsea Radio Group: acousticommons.net/~.

The Radius, Chicago: https://theradius.us/.

We heard about a mobile radio station among a convoy of protest vehicles from a veteran anonymous broadcaster, who visited the AIR open studio at Civic House during COP26.

[12] Soundcamp broadcast the London iteration of War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds, The Mosaic Rooms on 29 June 2024 (mosaicrooms.org/event/war-torn-ecologies-2/).

[13] On 13 March 2024, UCL Action for Palestine declared the Jeremy Bentham Room at University College London an Apartheid Free Zone. Wider student occupation began on the 14 March 2024 at UCL, with an encampment in the main quadrangle. The perimeter was closed off by the university, preventing people from coming and going. The broadcast was from 6 May 2024. The camp ended after one hundred days on 12 August 2024 (@uclactionforpalestine).

On 6 May 2024, students of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, set up a protest camp on a green next to the main university buildings. The tent camp was evicted on 7 August 2024 (@soasliberatedzone). A few days before, on 5 August, it had divided and moved to new locations in Bloomsbury and outside the US Embassy in South London. The SOAS camp continues as a social media presence and through various direct actions and activities, including outdoor flag-sewing workshops on the green outside Birkbeck (Tomochan, personal communication).

[14] The fox hat guy is an enigmatic figure, whom we have not managed to track down. Maybe they and somebody else are the same person. Anonymity is part of activist tactics. Masks are part of the theatre of protest. There is speculation. We are not sure.

[15] On permeable boundaries see Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990) and the film Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation by Manthia Diawara (2010).

On birds who are drawn to display along the edges of territories see Vinciane Despret’s Living As A Bird, translated by Helen Morrison (2021), and "Phonocene: Bird-singing in a multispecies world," presentation for the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA) 2 September 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U90M8rhQI6c. Accessed 23 May 2024. Hootback is when drivers use their car horns to express approval of an action as they pass.

[16] Transmission (from: to send, throw across) refers specifically to acts of sending signals using radio waves. For RWP, this means using a phone or transmitter which receives surrounding sounds, digitizes them, and sends them via mobile networks to a server, where they can be listened to. From the server, they can be relayed by somebody mixing, using analogue or digital equipment, to select streams and pass them on to another server. They can also be played out in a space or on headphones. Once a stream is on a server at a particular URL, whether it is a raw feed or a mix, it can be picked up by another station. Streamers can also listen back to their own feed using headphones (to avoid feedback). Together these linkages form more or less simple signal chains, which impact on the ability of sounds to travel beyond earshot. Transmission for us happens live, with the latency and lossiness we describe. By analogy, these practices are linked to other temporalities of transmission: of ideas, recipes, ways of working, and of contact and contagion (see Soundcamp 2024, Spree~Channelsea Radio Group).

[17] Listening implies a degree of intention. In practice, you can find yourself listening involuntarily to something, which could be a kind of overhearing. Human ears do not rotate, prick up or droop as we listen, but our listening is responsive: some sounds attract and engage it; others we do not become aware of, even though hearing continues. Living under a flightpath or near a tidal sea demonstrates the way listening comes and goes. Listening also refers to practices, cultures and habits associated with particular technologies and situations, from in-ear devices to public auditoria. Our own thinking on this subject is shaped by our work with live audio steaming, and by remote listening to live sounds of environments, both by ourselves and together, and by recurring practices and habits of writing and discussion, by which sounds become legible for ourselves, for and with others.

[18] Maybe this is related to what Fred Moten is saying when he says we don’t need more statements—we need to discuss among ourselves, as part of renewing our anti-colonial practice (Moten 2023).

[19] Land to Return, Land to Care (landtoreturn.com.ua/en/land-to-return-land-to-care.html) was an “artistic research lab on war experiences” with NGO Slushni Rechi and Past / Future / Art. From Autumn 2022, it used live streaming to convey less-heard sounds and histories of occupation. After this project, as official media attention shifted elsewhere, these streamboxes have continued to be moved from place to place and reanimated and repurposed for other projects, from spontaneous pop-up transmissions to major installations. These include “As for now, it is quiet” (2024) at Home of Sound, Lviv (https://42at.org.ua/en/about-the-project/) and “Sounds like home” (2024) with Alisa Oleva (https://compassliveart.org.uk/sounds-like-home-creating-sonic-connections/).

[20] https://icecast.org/.

[21] The way bat echolocation can sometimes be heard coming back off buildings. The speed of the sound waves which bats produce for echolocation is relatively low (although the pitch is high). When they are pitched down with a bat detector (heterodyning), those sounds can be heard to echo off an adjacent surface, in addition to the sound that reaches you directly. Some listeners in urban areas report hearing this echo as extended decay or a separate pulse.

[22] “It’s not… it’s not… it’s not sufficient to pay attention only to what is happening in Gaza, but it is absolutely imperative to pay as close… or possible… as close attention as we possibly can, to what is happening in Gaza” (Moten 2023).

References

Burgum, Samuel. 2011. “This City Is An Archive: Squatting History and Urban Authority.” Journal of Urban History, 48(3):504-522. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0096144220955165.

Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard University Press.

Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. 2016. Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance. Duke University Press.

Donald, Minty. 2019. “Guddling About: An Ecological Performance Practice with Water and Other Nonhuman Collaborators.” GeoHumanities 5(2):591-619. https://guddlingabout.com/portfolio/guddling-about-essay/.

Donovan, Kate. 2018. “Expanding Radio: Ecological Thinking and Trans-Scalar Encounters in Contemporary Radio Art Practice.” Diss., University of Potsdam. https://archive.org/details/DONOVANExpandingRadio/page/n1/mode/2up.

Friz, Anna. 2014. “Someplaces: Radio Art, Transmission Ecology and Chicago’s Radius.” Sounding out! https://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/11/06/someplaces-radio-art-transmission-ecology-and-chicagos-radius/.

García, Tristan. 2011/14. Form and Object – A Treatise on Things. Translated by Mark Allan Ohm and Jon Cogburn. Edinburgh University Press.

Glissant, Édouard. 1990. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. University of Michigan Press. https://monoskop.org/images/2/23/Glissant_Edouard_Poetics_of_Relation.pdf.

Graeber, David. 2009. Direct Action: An Ethnography. AK Press.

Guattari, Félix. 1989/2014. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. Bloomsbury.

https://monoskop.org/images/4/44/Guattari_Felix_The_Three_Ecologies.pdf.

Guattari, Félix, and Suely Rolnik. 2007. Molecular Revolution in Brazil. Translated by Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes, Semiotext(e). https://monoskop.org/images/1/10/Guattari_Felix_Rolnik_Suely_Molecular_Revolution_in_Brazil_2008.pdf.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2021. All Incomplete. Minor Compositions, Autonomedia. https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf.

Karaliotas, Lazaros. 2023. “Infrastructures of dissensus: repartitioning the sensible and articulating the political through the occupation of Greece’s public broadcasting service.” Politics and Space 42(2):1-19.

LaBelle, Brandon. 2018. Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. Goldsmiths Press.

LaBelle, Brandon. 2022. “Toward Acoustic Justice.” In The Listening Biennial. Errant Bodies Press: 129–145.

Lavery, Carl. 2016. “Introduction: Performance and Ecology – What Can Theatre Do?” Green Letters 20(3):229–36. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14688417.2016.1206695.

Locus Sonus Soundmap (2006–). https://locusonus.org/soundmap/.

Moten, Fred. 2023. “Fred Moten on Palestine and the Nation-State of Israel”. In conversation with Jared Ware. Streamed 25 October 2023 by Millennials Are killing Capitalism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWnzkjUAZnQ.

Rancière, Jacques. 2013. The Politics of Aesthetics. Bloomsbury.

Ruiz, Sandra, and Hypatia Vourloumis. 2021. Formless Formation – Vignettes for the End of This World. Minor Compositions.

Sackett, Colin. 1995. Singinging. Axminster.

Sagri, Georgia. 2021. Stage of Recovery. Divided Publishing.

Schafer, R. Murray. 1977. The Tuning Of The World. Knopf.

Self-noise.net. 2020. https://self-noise.net/acoustic%20commons/blm_brixton_3JUN2020/blm_brixton_3JUN2020.html.

Soundcamp. 2016. “The Live Audio Archive.” Leonardo 51(3):308-309. The MIT Press.

https://direct.mit.edu/leon/article-abstract/51/03/308/46504/The-Live-Audio-Archive?redirectedFrom=fulltext.

Soundcamp. 2019. Flat Out. https://soundtent.org/flatout/.

Soundcamp. 2021. As If Radio. https://acousticommons.net/files/air.pdf.

Soundcamp. 2022. Land to Return. https://acousticommons.net/listen/land-to-return/index#.

Soundcamp. 2023–. Radio With Palestine. https://acousticommons.net/listen/rwp/.

Soundcamp. 2024. Spree~Channelsea Radio Group. Soundcamp.

Soundcamp. 2024 (Forthcoming). Notes for Ecological Radio.

Ultra-red. 2016. “How to Hear in Common.” In Spaces of Commoning, edited by Anette Baldauf et al. Sternberg Press.

Audio

Delegation of Inverbellow. As if radio… COP26 Glasgow.

31 October 2021

Radio With Palestine #3

Saturday 11 November 2023

Radio With Palestine #4

Saturday 7th December 2023

Radio With Palestine (no #)

Transmission outside the gates of UCL

Monday 6 May 2024

Radio With Palestine #17

Saturday 18 May 2024

Full audio archive in development at:

https://acousticommons.net/listen/rwp/

Listening Notes

[Radio With Palestine #3] 11 November 2023

Live from demonstrations in Bruxelles and London simultaneously.

Participating Stations: Radio al Hara, Bethlehem; Archipel Stations, Berlin; Wave Farm, Acra, New York; Locus Sonus, Aix-Marseille.

Streamers: Cat Byrne, London; Nele Möller, Bruxelles; Inne Eysermans, Bruxelles; Emily

Moore, London; Maria Papadomanolaki, Chania; Monaï da Paula Antunes, Berlin.

Additional stream: Rue de la Poudrière, Bruxelles by Stéfan Piat.

Mixed in Arnes, Catalunya by Mort Drew and Grant Smith.

Produced by Soundcamp.

Brussels on the right channel, London on the left: they drift in and out of sync with each

other. Across sites people chant together.. in a crowd beyond the space they exist in

physically.

[Radio With Palestine #4] 7 December 2023

Live from a picket line outside the arms manufacturer Eaton Mission Systems, Wimborn, Dorset.

Participating Stations: Radio al Hara, Bethlehem; Archipel Stations, Berlin; Wave Farm, Acra, New York; Locus Sonus, Aix-Marseille.

Produced by Soundcamp.

Clip 1 is an excerpt from a remote recording of the live broadcast, which ran from around 9 a.m. to around noon.

Listening notes while mixing by Mort Drew

[Timestamps from the audio clip linked]

[00:00:00]

The crowd is singing. I can hear the energy drop in the crowd before someone thinks up a

new line and the energy returns. I feels very english. I smile when they laugh, my skin raises

in goosebumps as they sing together. they...we. Are they singing to each other or outwards?

[00:19:30]

nylon waterproof coats rustling as people move to keep warm. chattering, whoops, whistling.

between chants and talks the rain can be heard hitting plastic, plastic coats, plastic

streambox casing. i can hear the rain in the puddles on the road as cars go past bleeping in

support, the crowd cheers back. i can feel the cold in my fingers. i am with them, but i am not

present with them.

...

[1:05:30]

people are calling numbers out, maybe for the coaches, i am anxious again, but not for my

friends, they are together and they are safe. i am anxious about how small my room will be

in comparison to this open street.

[1:08:30]

the box is being picked up, they are saying thanks, they are saying take care. wind or some

other distortion cuts out the signal. a friction between my suspended reality and the quiet in

my room.

...

it is over.

the space is so quiet. my street has two birds calling at one another, someone is on talking

maybe on their phone, someone is downstairs knocking plates about. i am not with the

people anymore. a car goes by and it does not beep, i cannot hear the rain puddles under

it’s tires.

[Radio With Palestine #17] 18 May 2024

National day of action on Nakba 76.

March from Portland Place to Whitehall.

[12:08:09]

mort

the energy is intense, i haven't listened remotely to a demo in a month and it seems the energy has returned to the actions following the latest escalations in the Gaza genocide

[12:12:17]

mort

grant writes "from the top, thinking of this intersection as some kind of analgue [sic] filter/ gate"

"or large scale dpeaker [sic] system"

"taking advantage of irban infrastr [sic] for amification/resonance"

"cp woodpeckers"

[12:14:36]

mort

Grant is streaming, he is listening with his ears, he is attuned to sounds that we might miss

Grant is listening with his ears, we are listening to microphones

[12:16:50]

mort

I am trying to decipher which sounds are amplified and which sounds are acoustic

megaphones, PA systems, music coming from mobile speakers

[12:18:38]

mort

drums, voices chanting in unison, conversations between friends as they look for a third friend, clapping, laughter,

[12:24:31]

mort

a media voice is trying to gather interviews

"where are the trade unions? You'll see the odd banner, but they're not here"

- it's a blokey voice, it seems agitated, it sounds like its looking for a scrap

the blokey voice belongs to the interviewer

"if you don't want to say anything why are you here"

[12:27:14]

mort

grant writes: "from pre constituted ideas and affiliations toward formless formations..?"

DISCONNECTED

[12:28:58]

ⓘ web20 is now known as mort

[12:29:59]

mort

grant writes: "another pre/post maybe"

i think the music played behind the we are the people chant is coming from brass instruments in the space

[12:32:16]

mort

we are the people, we won't we be silenced, stop the bombing, now now now now

[12:35:49]

mort

either my ears are dull (i am sick) or it could be the filter grant referenced earlier, but the sounds do sound not as expected

[12:38:24]

mort

claps, roars, cheers, calls of oh Jeremy corbyn....is this in response to him?

grant writes:"corbyn arrives"

[12:40:00]

mort

helicopters overhead

nearby voices say "wow, this is big no?"

[12:41:54]

mort

grant writes: "yes he jouned at the front" (corbyn joined the march?)

"now moving"

"nope not quitep [sic]"

maybe we hear the energy build as people rally to march

drums crescendo

"guys can we all get back now, we're about to set off"

a countdown

cheers

"free free Palestine"

"from the river to the sea"

"in our thousands in our millions"

"palestine will be free"

the scale of the demo is astounding

[12:45:42]

mort

bodies absorb sound

but we still hear hundreds and thousands of bodies moving

i can't tell if grant is stationary or moving with thme

grant writes: "now a pause before next bloc leaves"

[12:48:35]

mort

a plastic drum moves past

[12:53:18]

mort

the action is commemorating the 76th anniversary of the Nakba

the sound of the movement is swelling

another bloc must be moving

the voices sound angry

hurt

people sound out

[13:08:43]

mort

"isreal, uk, usa, how many kids have you killed today"

[13:10:56]

mort

"viva viva Palestina"

claps, whistles, call and response, shouts over and behind the chants

[13:12:48]

mort

listening to the back, or top of the sound, in quieter moments, the high ends are full of voices far away

its hard to tell the distance

[13:15:11]

mort

"don't leave me now.........too many bloody people"

[13:16:25]

mort

amplified voices booming in the distance

distortions from the bodies and buildings

its hard to be away

its hard to be complicit

[13:19:33]

mort

grant writes: "oxford circus"

i remember previous demos where they locked shoppers inside shops scared of the damage they may face from the action

drums are back

grant writes: "v difficult shopping conditions"

[13:22:19]

mort

i cannot hear london

i hear people

[13:22:53]

mort

electronically amplified voices and instruments

the voices are chanting in english

but the accents and pitches are very varied

grant writes: "a few shoppers not givi g up"

im thinking about the bystanders

i don't hear them

if we were only to listen it sounds like everyone is on the march

even if they are talking they are mixed in with the talking the comes from attendees too

the action takes their voices and adds them, they are in radio with palestine

a choir is harmonising

free palestine

there are aesthetics of protest

and a harmonising choir (english sounding, church associations) are not in them

"can I take your picture?! thank you!"

a banjo is playing?

grant writes: "busker looking uneasy"

thinking again on how the action takes the buskers sound

to make sounds that disrupt the street

grant writes: "march is dispersed"

"regent st and side streets are closed"

who has closed the streets?

grant writes: "seems like a route but not stopping like before"

"so more freeform"

"slightly surreal mingling w shoppers"

"on the edges"

[13:33:42]

mort

edge of the crowd, edge of the protest, where are we [listeners]?

grant writes: "in the midl hoping for signal"

"now bunching some more"

[13:35:53]

mort

i am sat in my kitchen, listening on headphones, I am with the protest, in a way, but Sam who is also sat here is not with the protest

the voices leading the chat sound young

[13:36:30]

mort

chant*

[13:36:58]

mort

it sounds like there more young voices in the response

"rishi sunk shame on you"

"1 we are the people, 2 we won't be silenced, 3 stop the bombing, now now now now"

[13:42:57]

mort

"in our lifetimes, end apartheid, in our lifetimes, free free palestine"

"we need a ceasefire now, we want a ceasefire now, we want a ceasefire now, we need a ceasefire now"

two scales next to one another

over each other

[13:46:44]

mort

" what is that"

"its a radio transmitter. we're doing thins thing called radio with palestine."

"is it a live broadcast"

"yes it is"

"thank you for telling me"

"thank you for asking"

grant went on to explanin the scale of different actions and demos included in radio with palestine

and the partners of radio with Palestine

the asker moved back into the crowd

clipping audio as a group chanting moves around the stream

[13:50:16]

mort

the voice asking sounded suspicious (maybe)

thinking on conversations grant, sasha and I had about the awareness of cameras and visual media at actions, protests and demonstrations

and the critiques of cameras and visual media at actions, protests and demonstrations

but the perhaps the lack of thought on microphones and sonic media

[13:53:15]

mort

critiques on microphones point to bugging, cold war spies, listening in

[13:57:20]

mort

the sounds of the space seem to be deeper, stronger lows, less high end

the architecture of the city filtering the sounds

[14:00:55]

mort

grant writes: "piccadilly circus"

[14:02:14]

mort

i just checked the route, they are marching to 11 Downing street

[14:03:24]

mort

roughly halfway through the rote

route*

when the audio clips as a mixer/engineer i ask grant to move or to lower the gain

but as a person, i want the audio clip, i want the audio to be loud, i want my ears to move, i want be touched by the sounds

[14:08:41]

mort

"shame on you!shame on you!shame on you!shame on you!"

i don't know who they are addressing, but voices are chanting in unison

[14:11:30]

mort

grant writes: "r wing group w police cordon"

"hence shame on u.."

"openi g into haymarkeu [sic]"

[14:13:20]

mort

it sounds more open

the distance increased

grant writes: "giant chatter"

"ppl grabbing snacks"

someone approaches

"excuse me what is this"

"its a transmitter, we're broadcasting live"

"as in the sounds for the speakers"

the conversation moves too fast for me to minute

but the asker sounds interested

said that it's really good

and that they will look it up

the asker did not sound suspicious (maybe)

[14:16:47]

mort

when talking about the streambox it takes a little time to get past expectations of the media at actions

expectations of who gets to be transmitted

expectations of how microphones should be situated

[14:19:52]

mort

grant writes: "junction w pallmall"

calls for people to join a demo on monday at the Royal Courts of Justice for a recognised Palestinian state

[14:23:05]

mort

grant writes: "approaching trafalgar sq now"

[14:26:39]

mort

"can i take your picture"

"this is the official collective point for..... we are collecting to fund todays demonstration"

grant writes: "trafalgar sq"

"quite spread out"

"turning down whitehall"

"considering stopping pretty soon"

[14:28:58]

mort

the sounds seems thinner than before

less low end

the sound of chants over distance?

more conversations, laughter, chatter

underlaying a number of chants happening over one another

a sense of large collections of people rather than blocs

a dip

a pause

a voice over a sound system is getting clearer

i think we are almost at the end of the march

transitions from groups marching (flat sound) to crowds in front of speakers (hierarchal sound)

drums and chants not disrupted by speakers

cheers clip the mics

the speaker yells to the crowd, passionate

the crowd cheers back

the speaker is talking of lived generational experience of Nakba

[14:37:00]

mort

grant writes: "approaching downing st"

an mc announces the next speaker

now that the march is stationary the chatter increases

or the microphone is closer to the chattering

[14:38:49]

mort

the dispersed crowd, the different points of attention, the transitions between spaces

[14:42:04]

mort

people ask their companions if they want to leave, but in the next breath join the free free Palestine chant

[14:44:27]

mort

the cheers and wells of the crowd are high pitched

for a moment they remind me of the pacific ocean

the sounds shift as grant moves away

grant writes"leaving thru a side route"

[14:45:52]

mort

there are footsteps, young people talking, it sounds warm

i go to end the broadcast

[14:46:47]

mort

the sounds of the london demonstration fades down

and i am back in my kitchen

there is a wren calling just by an open window

the fridge is humming

sounds sound closer

and i feel far away

thank you for listening

Radio With Palestine #17

DISCONNECTED

[Notes from Internet Relay Chat]

acousticommons.net/listen

) Listening room (

11 January 2023

Outside the International Court of Justice, The Hague

Live stream by Ivo Blackwood

[08:20:15]

ⓘ web98 is now known as grant

[08:20:46]

@ grant

Ivo Blackwood is outside the International Court in The Hague

[08:56:04]

@ grant

Resonance is a phenomenon that occurs when an object or system is subjected to an external force or vibration that matches its natural frequency.

When this happens, the object or system absorbs energy from the external force and starts vibrating with a larger amplitude.

[08:58:50]

@ grant

Resonance can occur in various systems, such as mechanical, electrical, or acoustic systems, and it is often desirable in certain applications, such as musical instruments or radio receivers.

[09:01:21]

@ grant

Gascia Ouzonian has spoken about how in Gaza the war announces itself through sounds

[09:02:18]

@ grant

with pings of phones announcing impending air strikes

buildings will transduce sounds

acoustic energy and mechanical energy combine in a relentless chain of transduction

in which 'sounds of the heart are mocked'

in moving sounds from place to place..

[09:05:35]

@ grant

can we work in support of an acoustic justice

[09:18:08]

web42

listening here and listening to radio a hara.

[09:18:35]

@ grant

thank you for listening

[09:18:55]

web42

here there is a sense of space, of people next to each other, close to one another, chattering, murmuring, booing, cheering

radio al hará is straight from the speakers mic or at least much closer, you cannot hear the crowd cheer between pauuses

[09:19:47]

@ grant

so many textures of voices, also rustling..

[09:20:39]

web42

two very different versions of what is happening

[09:21:16]

@ grant

for sure

[09:36:43]

@ grant

al hara will try to mix both feeds

[09:48:35]

@ grant

when i hear bike bells i think of that recording of a demo on aporee by radio CONA: Protest from the balconies foes to the wheels.

[09:49:57]

@ grant

In Ljubljana on 1 May 2020. A thread of minor acts or sonic resistance..

ha

[09:52:00]

@ grant

'After weeks of silence..... Ljubljana is.. alive again [they wrote – during the pandemic]

Something about activating the streets and public spaces..

.. causing sounds to resonate and bounce around

soup!

[09:53:19]

web42

"everything is getting live streamed"

[09:53:44]

@ grant

ha ha it is and yet..

what is quite nice here.. we can t see the screen

[09:55:00]

web42

way marker screen

[09:55:47]

@ grant

ah yes

whereas listening here is maybe more about disorientation

[09:56:22]

web42

how long have we been walking?

how far away are we?

[09:56:27]

@ grant

a kind of uncertainty that comes from being on edge

multiply on the edges

not long

'Articulation implies a separation, a distance'

This voice is very clear. Is it from the screen?

[09:59:07]

web42

is it from the court room? brought out to the people who couldn't get in

only 14 people were allowed into the public gallery

[10:00:06]

@ grant

ah yes – the voice resonates in the building but it is now outside

[10:00:45]

web42

?

hacking?

[10:02:20]

web42

does this voice know they were overwritten, briefly

[10:03:29]

@ grant

it s like: intrinsically lossy

[10:06:20]

@ grant

you hear the speaker dealing with their breathing

as they produce the words

[10:16:16]

web42

the crowd does not respond anymore

[10:17:30]

web42

is it the weight of what we hear, or the big screen suppressing collective response

[10:18:21]

@ grant

it s very theatrical to listen to

[10:19:02]

web42

bird sings, child cries

[10:19:06]

@ grant

as well as the weight of the declaration

[10:19:37]

@ grant

yes – this seems to add something indefinable

[10:20:27]

web42

ah!

[10:20:56]

@ grant

resonance

[10:21:59]

@ grant

we sense people as a whole mobilising resources – from biblical texts to audio equipment to outdoor gathering..

to try to perform some kind of response

this sense that the court has no capacity to enforce its findings..

[10:23:25]

web42

yes

[10:23:36]

@ grant

so the quality of the performance becomes almost the main thing

every hoot

[10:25:08]

web42

electronic crackle - like dust on a vinyl

is it in the air from the speakers or is it on our stream

[10:25:41]

@ grant

or snow

[10:25:46]

web42

sound of materiality

or light rain

[10:26:11]

@ grant

recalling air

[10:27:27]

@ grant

'I am breathing my house'

(Eyal Weizman)

[10:29:54]

@ grant

dust, barely noticeable, contains traces of violence to people and land

Sumayya Vally – Ingesting Architecture on urbanism in Johannesburg

[10:30:50]

web42

the court feels so remote, that their actions are remote, but listening together, to people listening together, feels closer

[10:31:47]

@ grant

mm

[10:32:04]

web42

our actions face the court, or other systems of power

it feels like some organisers set it up that way, and some, perhaps better organisers, ask us to face each other

[10:33:00]

@ grant

the assembly, and the distance – a kind of extended witnessing – there it is again

like cellophane

ah yes

different dramaturgies..

i would say the remote listening is both less and more in the way some of the patterns are suspeneded (like the screen)

but others like the presence of others, are lost

[10:35:15]

web42

do you not feel the people next to you when listening?

[10:37:03]

@ grant

i think in Swahili the word 'sikia' spans both 'hear' and 'feel' in English

[10:38:12]

@ grant

as in kusikia barida to feel cold or kusikia ndege to hear a bird

I wonder if Ivo is feeling cold

[10:39:16]

web42

When they sing together my skin raises in goosebumps, when they cheer and laugh i smile

[10:40:31]

@ grant

This stream is coming to an end

Thank you to Ivo Blackwood for the live stream from near the International Court or Justice

in The Hague

Thank you for listening

4 people here

grant

commonslog

web42

web85