LIVE FEEDS… hybrid cuisine from the new radio kitchen…a dinner invitation to radio cooks everywhere
Originally published in Radio Territories, ed. Brandon Labelle. Please click ‘continue reading’ to unfold this playful text which will give a detailed insight and overview of core practices and projects of foodradio_network., approx. 5min read. Also available as a PDF from the book here.
We are at a particular moment in radio practice that offers the possibility to build audience relationships that bridge the listening modes of terrestrial and net broadcasting by drawing on the diverse bodies of practice that have grown up around these technologies, and around the ways they are regulated and distributed. The radio production that emerges is not the futurist ideal where food can be centrally broadcast directly into the stomachs of the listeners, but a network of exchange where specific and local conditions must negotiate spatial and temporal distance to be shared. Taking food as a model for participatory activity, collaborative creation, and sonic exchange, our radio cooks explore ways to lay on splendid feasts for our listeners…
[sizzle sizzle]
We are radio cooks. Our audiences are not consumers but diners. They talk with us while we are in the kitchen they help chop the vegetables they comment on what we serve up maybe they bring some ingredients or a bottle of wine.
[pop glugluglug chink]
Cooking together as a creative activity can be a very revealing collaboration in miniature. Are you a whizz at following the nuances of complex recipes with the best ingredients? or do you shine brightest in the kitchen when improvising with leftovers? perhaps you are the beloved guest who pays the compliment of wanting third helpings? Whatever your appetites, this is radio that aims to nourish!
Hybrid radio cuisine distributes active performer/participants and lurking performer/participants throughout the networks in which it takes place Ñ there is no separate location for audience. It is a networked experience both in its conception and execution. Rather than represent a network to participants, let us invite them to share food/food for thought from their own global position and local variables. We aim to provide suitable hosts and clear protocols for open participation. We exchange recipes and we share ingredients, exploring models of open content and accessible technologies as ways to circumvent commercial and legislative gatekeepers of spectrum and net. Our recipes are in a state of constant variation as we experiment with the ingredients and utensils at hand.
[clatter clang slosh rattle crunch]
We have learned a great deal from the fine cuisines of radiophonic tradition and as we enter new territories we seek to work with what is fresh and local. Let us take our time to savour a ‘slow media’ like ‘slow food’ Ñ a culinary ethos which contends that local fresh produce prepared carefully and consumed at leisure may be more nutritious Everybody needs to eat and the radio experience should nourish everyone who participates in it. If the experience doesnÕt provide sustenance our guests will choose to dine elsewhere and in better company.
[crackle hiss whine click beep whirr tick hum]
What is interesting about radio as a live network between remote locations is the location and not merely the fact that it is remote. here and there have different flavours. Food, like sound, enters the body and indexes it to a place and time. The processes of digestion and metabolism are temporal and cyclic and cannot adjust easily to sudden changes of time zone, resulting, for example, in being hungry at the wrong time when jet-lagged. Listen globally, eat locally. From grabbing a text-only coffee and cake in an ascii only virtual world, all the way to gourmet dinner shared across continents, the idea of food sharing as a trope for exploring remote social interactions is not a new one. But this myth of a shared eating space gives way to an engagement with local conditions of possibility for meaningful exchange of sonic and kinaesthetic experiences based in actual eating spaces which are not shared, and which are located in very different places and spaces. Without attending to the specificities of the places involved, the transmission of their locales collapse into indistinguishable virtual space, which can never be truly remote nor fully present.
Our radio cooks explore the local motives and conditions that precipitate remote connection, particularly through an orientation to sound. Sonic experiences as indices of being in place and time, precipitate a close knit region of intertwined concerns between the interfacing of spaces and the technologies and techniques of remote connection.
[murmur shuffle scrape crunch crunch]
In the text ‘Where are We Eating? and What are We Eating?’ John Cage brings together place, sound and motion around the trope of food. The calorific furnaces of Merce Cunnigham’s dancers on tour metabolise time and place. Food becomes a filter of circumstance. This invites an analogy between food consumed and energy expended, between time, place and what is consumed. Nearly 30 years later the question ‘where are we eating?’ has some different resonances and perhaps the digital kitchen engages culinary quanta in a somewhat changed economy of consumption. Food cannot be broadcast. We cannot download food, it must make a physical journey if we are to eat it far from its origin. The Futurist vision of “nourishment by radio” is a logical extreme of the ways in which those physical journeys are backgrounded in contemporary food economies. And the fascist aesthetic of disconnecting the substance of food from its nutritional function that pervades Futurist gastronomy calls for a cuisine of olfractory and oral sensations that is as divorced from the necessity for sustenance as it is unsustainable. To what extent does the consumption of food impact the ecology and economy of place? The availability of foods in a certain place may also have a great deal to do with the displacement of people. ‘Where are we eating?’ can mean where are we when we eat? it can also mean ‘what place do we consume?’ Where are we getting our ingredients from? Broadcasting originates as a local scattering of seeds for the production of food, dependent on the immediate environment of reception in order to germinate and flourish. What time is dinner? As dinnertime moves through different timezones, so does dinner time conversation move through different languages and geopolitical contexts. What are the sounds of differing food cultures? And how are our ‘foodscapes’ changing? Does the contradiction between welcoming foreign foods, but not always foreigners, ever leave a bitter taste for those far from home in the wrong kitchen with the wrong ingredients? But also, what is local and fresh? what is in season where you are? The audience is invited to the table, and their physical listening space considered. Whether cooking or dining or a bit of both, where they are determines their mode of reception. Of course it is utopian to suggest there is a place at the table for everyone, even if none are turned away. Where are we eating? and which ingredients of the situation define ‘we’? In a culture of media practice that frequently privileges visual modes, the preparation and consumption of food demands the extension of our sensory perceptions engagement to sound, tactility and taste. The challenges of engaging these very ‘present’ sensations remotely provide a rich ground for investigation and experimentation, for exploring the connection of motion and gesture in public space and hybrid transmission spaces dispersed and mobile modes of exchange. Welcome to a moveable feast with its morsels of digital finger food for sampling and digestion.
[crackle squelch whirr gurgle]
Whilst customs differ as to how the invitation is framed in different styles of cooking and eating, few need an explanation that food invites participation. With the emergence of cooking facilities that are distributed rather than centralised, passive consumption of radio can yield to the possibility of dishing up whatever we find delicious by getting in the kitchen and cooking from wherever we are. The early histories of radio are filled with traces of possibility that resurface as the internet has provided a vehicle for exploring radio as a networked medium in a way that the state regulation and commercial exploitation of radio spectrum has made difficult. However we now come to this space with a history of radio art which contested and negotiated its places on the dial and with a body of practices which have nourished our ears. Beyond being a new venue for pre-existing utopian ideas, net radio practices engage not only the specificities of the internet as a medium for audio but also the increasing necessity to address the dwindling access audiences have to radio art on terrestrial radio. There is a diminishing space for live practices on public radio arts programmes and a proliferation of new ways to feed material into net radio practices using participatory tools or simple techniques such as podcasting. We can conserve access to our radiophonic delicacies by stocking up our online larders. But alongside sumptuous morsels of canned duration, let us also prepare fresh feasts in a proliferation of live feeds.
[clatter swoosh clang rattle scratch]
INGREDIENTS
Here are some popular ingredients for hybrid radio cuisine. Recipes should be adapted to you own tastes and according to the ingredients that are locally available.
Transmission:
Mini FM is always a popular delicacy and there is nothing fresher than crackle of a home baked transmitter. But even if you live somewhere with very harsh broadcasting legislation that doesn’t permit microbroadcasting, keep your ears pealed for seasonal opportunities such as special event licenses. Siting a transmitter near a good net connection or vice versa will allow you to operate you station from anywhere you can get online, this innovation in kitchen ergonomics opens the way for many cooks to add ingredients to the mix.
Server:
Any reasonably fast machine will do. Operating system to taste. If you can stomach admining linux then this robust and versatile choice will enable you to serve up a tasty selection of experimental artist softwares in a variety of delicious open sources. A light and lean ‘heat n serve’ variation could be as simple as a mac mini. Either way you’ll want to season your box with at least an audio player, access for uploading files and a means of remote control.
Netconnection:
Bandwidth is a bit of a decider between dishing up a whole station and relaying a snack of stream to a server somewhere else. Even if you are eating on the run with free wireless in a cafe someplace every spot on the network has it’s own local flavour. If you can’t get the bandwidth you need for what you want to bake, then you need to take advantage of available bandwidth somewhere else (see serving suggestions). This may sound like importing off season fruits from the other side of the world, but it uses a lot less fossil fuel.
Telephones:
I.P. telephony and computerbased phone interfaces, SMS to speech gateways etc. all enhance your options for contribution and signal routing. Sometimes a plain old telephone is just the easiest way to do a live feed. Handy hardware to have is a hybrid for connecting the phone signal to an audio mixer. You can try making your own (see pickles and preserves).
Software:
If you enjoy software slightly al dente then test driving experimental artists software can be a real treat as there are a lot of very fresh morsels around for remote real time collaboration developed by practitioners in the field, tho this often necessitates direct collaboration on produce that you won’t find in the marketplace. For those looking for something a little less rare there are many cheap or free options for streaming, playing, storing and routing audio. Exact flavours depend on which platforms are most easily available to you.
Programmes:
Of course the most important ingredients in the new radio kitchen are the programmes themselves. Technology salad by itself is never going to provide the nourishment a listener or participant needs. Following the debates about GM food makes it quite clear that consuming only items subject to exclusive intellectual property regimes may not be entirely healthy. Fortunately there are numerous ways to approach open content and creative commoning as a radio practice that encourages diversity and experimentation.
SERVING SUGGESTIONS: €€
ÄÄNIRADIO
Making the most of cool low cost special event licensing to the non profit and education sector in finland and of the abundant bandwidth available in this nordic country all year round, ŠŠniradio is a sporadic FM broadcast in Helsinki that celebrates open content and creative radio. Take whatever radiophonic ingredients you have available, add a large pinch of imagination and don’t expect it to turn out the same two years in a row. It’s fairly economical dish that can feed the entire city of Helsinki and an online audience with unexpected listening for up to a month at a time. Open content programming policies will keep your copyright collection costs down of course but requires careful sifting to keep copyright material out as this can sour the whole dish. Making use of various bleeding edge collaborative remote scheduling and mixing software allows cooks to stir the pot from anywhere on earth with a net connection. Just sit your programme server and streaming box next to the FM transmitter and connect it to the internet. Easier than baked alaska.
GRILLIRADIO & where_are_we_eating?
This is a high calorie treat for occasions such as ISEA2004 that makes use of digital food available on the streets of Helsinki as part of a multi course meal served up in various locations around the world. Grilli kiosks are an important part of local food culture in Finland. Small street kiosks that open at night to sell sausages, burgers, and other hand-held fast food to people on their way home from drinking. This dish foregrounds the grilli as a street interface to the where_are_we_eating? global sonic feast. Take 1 informative and witty tour of grilli kiosks accompanied by radio operators relaying a mix of the tour, a stream of grilli sounds from around the city and the sounds of international snacks and suppers from around the region gradually fading in and out. Garnish with on the spot phone interviews co-ordinated by chat over gprs and mixed through a phone hybrid back into the stream going up to the transmitter and to the radios on the street. After the ranskalaiset and lihis with kaikki mausteet follow with another 6 courses over the next 10 hours from Sydney, Copenhagen, Brighton, Baltimore and Santa Barbara…
Particle / Wave
Why not have a really big cook off over five days with tens of fantastic radio cooks from all over the world. Select flavoursome practitioners from diverse areas of creative radio practice for an exchange between traditional public radiophonic production practices and the techniques and tactics of newer network based radio arts. Take the output of 20+ artists talking, listening, performing, and making radio on air, online and on the streets… add cooking together and combine all the ingredients at once. Serve on a platform or ŠŠÄäniradio. Makes a great accompanying dish for Pixelache festival.