Sounding Out!

Listening in Plain Sight: The Enduring Influence of U.S. Air Guitar

The mention of “air guitar” might conjure images of the Bill and Ted series. Or Risky Business. Or maybe even Joe Cocker at Woodstock. You might think of air guitar as an embarrassing fan gesture. So when you hear there’s an annual U.S. Air Guitar competition, you might imagine an entirely superficial practice without any artistic merit. Maybe you just think of it as gimmicky. Or a celebration of the worst aspects of classic rock fandom and the white male guitar heroes that often populate its pantheon. In all honesty, I thought all of these things at first, until I began to take the competition seriously. 

The title of this clipping from the Washington Post on November 28, 1983 reads: “Music to Their Airs!” Text appears alongside a large image of a man flying through the air with an invisible guitar in his arms.

I did not realize, for example, that air guitar competitions have an enduring history since the late 1970s, existing as an incredibly influential popular music pantomime practice that informs platforms like TikTok. I did not realize how invested contemporary competitors could be—dedicating years to learning the craft. And I did not realize how these reconstructions of guitar solos could creatively rupture the relationship between guitar virtuosity and privileged identities in popular music’s past.

The U.S. Air Guitar Championships began in 2003 as the national branch of the Air Guitar World Championships, which began in 1996 in Oulu, Finland. The competition emerged as a bit of a joke alongside the Oulu Music Video Festival. Eventually, two people—Cedric Devitt and Kriston Rucker—founded U.S. Air Guitar, which expanded across the country (thanks, in part, to the influential documentary Air Guitar Nation). Today, folks compete in order to advance from local to regional to the national competition, ultimately hoping to be crowned the best air guitarist in the nation and sent to Finland to represent the United States (think: Eurovision but air guitar). United States air guitarists do incredibly well in the international competition, although they face formidable air guitarists from Japan, France, Canada, Australia, Russia, and Germany (as well as less-formidable air guitarists from elsewhere).

In each competition, competitors perform as personas, such as Rockness Monster, AIRistotle, Agnes Young, and Mom Jeans Jeanie. They don elaborate costumes. They painstakingly practice elaborate choreographies and compete in some of the most famous musical venues in the country—from Bowery Ballroom to the Black Cat. Competitors stage routines that bring a particular 60-second rock solo to life, using their bodies to simulate playing the real guitar (what air guitarists call “there guitar”). Think of these as gestural interpretations of the affective power of guitar solos, rather than a mechanical reproduction of particular chords, frets, and licks. They use their bodies to draw out timbre, rhythm, and pitch, and they also play with the juxtaposition of their own identities and those of the original artists. Judges evaluate performances based on three criteria:

· Technical merit (does the pantomime more or less correspond to the guitar playing in the music?)

· Stage presence (is it entertaining?)

· ‘Airness’ (does the performance transcend the imitation of the real guitar to become an art form in and of itself?)

Scores are given on a figure skating scale, from 4 to 6. So a perfect score is 666 from the three judges. Winners in the first round advance to the second round, where they must improvise an air guitar routine to a surprise song selection. 

As part of my ethnographic work on air guitar, I competed in a local competition, where I was crowned third best air guitarist in Boston in the year 2017 (a distinction that will likely never appear on my CV). I have also conducted fieldwork in Finland twice and attended countless competitions in the U.S. I judged the 2019 U.S. Air Guitar Championships in Nashville alongside Edward Snowden’s lawyer, which resulted in a three-way air off to crown a winner. 

Competitions depend on recruiting new competitors, celebrity judges, and large crowds, all of which can be at odds with creating an inclusive community. Organizers have worked hard to eliminate racist, sexist, ableist, and other forms of discriminatory language from judges’ comments. Women within U.S. air guitar have formed advocacy groups. The proceeds of the most recent competitions have been donated to Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, which took up the case of a disabled Black veteran named Sean Worsley who was incarcerated for playing air guitar to music at a gas station. Both organizing bodies at the national and international level emphasize world peace as central to their mission. 

Air guitar routines are themselves political statements too. These acts of musical interpretation enable women, BIPOC, and disabled performers to author sounds credited to guitar idols, like Eddie Van Halen or Slash. Performers make arguments about their access to popular music, using only their bodies. Sydney Hutchinson’s work  examines how air guitar can challenge Asian American stereotypes and gendered conceptions of dance. 

My current work revolves around disabled air guitarists. Andres SevogiAIR drew me in, as a result of his expressive flamenco-inspired seated style he called “chair guitar.” He passed away but left me with an enduring appreciation for air guitar’s ability to challenge conventional virtuosity, a term that can often reproduce an ableist link between physical ability and musical virtue. I came to appreciate how air guitarists could invent imaginary instruments that serve their particular bodies. I witnessed competitors coupling chronic illness and impairments with air guitar routines, as well as competitors using air guitar to fully amplify their struggles with cancer.

I also came to appreciate how air guitarists embrace stigma (e.g., madness, craziness, and gendered forms of listening), turning taboo into a source of creativity. This led to academic writing that traces the history of madness in relation to air guitar, showing how imaginary instrument playing has often been pathologized, and yet contemporary disabled air guitarists reclaim these accusations of insanity as a source of power. 

* * *

A few weeks ago, I received a request from Lieutenant Facemelter to judge the Midwestern Online Regional U.S. Air Guitar Competition. I accepted. As with many things these days, the contemporary competition has morphed into a Twitch-hosted online spectacle, featuring combinations of live and pre-recorded elements. One woman gave birth between first- and second-round performances (made possible by a multi-day filming period for an asynchronous part of the online competition). One man’s air guitar performance evoked an exorcism in his basement. Another middle-aged competitor competed while suffering the side effects of his second shot of coronavirus vaccine, ultimately winning the competition with a pro-vaccination message. His parents appeared in the livestream when he accepted the award, and the host of the show–the Master of Airimonies–jokingly said to them: “You two must be so proud.” 

I think of U.S. Air Guitar as a stained-glass window, through which prisms of popular music history shine through. The competition can bring troubling facets of that history to light, but the competition can also revise that history (or, at least, reimagine how that history can influence the future). Either way, performers celebrate the idea that rock solos live most powerfully in the embodied listening practices of everyday people. Listening becomes the subject of these performances–the source material for these persuasive displays of music reception. Indeed, air guitar can be one of the strangest things you’ll never see. 

The competition continues this summer. 

—

Featured Image: US Air Guitar National Finals, The Midland Theater, Kansas City, MO, August 9, 2014, by Flickr user Amber, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

—

Byrd McDaniel | Byrd is a scholar who researches disability, digital cultures, and popular music. He currently works as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. His forthcoming book–Spectacular Listening— traces the rise of contemporary practices that treat listening as a performance, including air guitar, podcasts, reaction videos, and lip syncing apps. Byrd is enthusiastic about work that addresses any facet of air guitar, including global and historical approaches. He welcomes outreach from those who want to research these topics.

—

tape-reel

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening–Airek Beauchamp

Digital Analogies: Techniques of Sonic Play–Roger Moseley

Experiments in Aural Resistance: Nordic Role-Playing, Community, and Sound—Aaron Trammell

Writing from Below

Listening in Plain Sight: The Enduring Influence of U.S. Air Guitar

The mention of “air guitar” might conjure images of the Bill and Ted series. Or Risky Business. Or maybe even Joe Cocker at Woodstock. You might think of air guitar as an embarrassing fan gesture. So when you hear there’s an annual U.S. Air Guitar competition, you might imagine an entirely superficial practice without any artistic merit. Maybe you just think of it as gimmicky. Or a celebration of the worst aspects of classic rock fandom and the white male guitar heroes that often populate its pantheon. In all honesty, I thought all of these things at first, until I began to take the competition seriously. 

The title of this clipping from the Washington Post on November 28, 1983 reads: “Music to Their Airs!” Text appears alongside a large image of a man flying through the air with an invisible guitar in his arms.

I did not realize, for example, that air guitar competitions have an enduring history since the late 1970s, existing as an incredibly influential popular music pantomime practice that informs platforms like TikTok. I did not realize how invested contemporary competitors could be—dedicating years to learning the craft. And I did not realize how these reconstructions of guitar solos could creatively rupture the relationship between guitar virtuosity and privileged identities in popular music’s past.

The U.S. Air Guitar Championships began in 2003 as the national branch of the Air Guitar World Championships, which began in 1996 in Oulu, Finland. The competition emerged as a bit of a joke alongside the Oulu Music Video Festival. Eventually, two people—Cedric Devitt and Kriston Rucker—founded U.S. Air Guitar, which expanded across the country (thanks, in part, to the influential documentary Air Guitar Nation). Today, folks compete in order to advance from local to regional to the national competition, ultimately hoping to be crowned the best air guitarist in the nation and sent to Finland to represent the United States (think: Eurovision but air guitar). United States air guitarists do incredibly well in the international competition, although they face formidable air guitarists from Japan, France, Canada, Australia, Russia, and Germany (as well as less-formidable air guitarists from elsewhere).

In each competition, competitors perform as personas, such as Rockness Monster, AIRistotle, Agnes Young, and Mom Jeans Jeanie. They don elaborate costumes. They painstakingly practice elaborate choreographies and compete in some of the most famous musical venues in the country—from Bowery Ballroom to the Black Cat. Competitors stage routines that bring a particular 60-second rock solo to life, using their bodies to simulate playing the real guitar (what air guitarists call “there guitar”). Think of these as gestural interpretations of the affective power of guitar solos, rather than a mechanical reproduction of particular chords, frets, and licks. They use their bodies to draw out timbre, rhythm, and pitch, and they also play with the juxtaposition of their own identities and those of the original artists. Judges evaluate performances based on three criteria:

· Technical merit (does the pantomime more or less correspond to the guitar playing in the music?)

· Stage presence (is it entertaining?)

· ‘Airness’ (does the performance transcend the imitation of the real guitar to become an art form in and of itself?)

Scores are given on a figure skating scale, from 4 to 6. So a perfect score is 666 from the three judges. Winners in the first round advance to the second round, where they must improvise an air guitar routine to a surprise song selection. 

As part of my ethnographic work on air guitar, I competed in a local competition, where I was crowned third best air guitarist in Boston in the year 2017 (a distinction that will likely never appear on my CV). I have also conducted fieldwork in Finland twice and attended countless competitions in the U.S. I judged the 2019 U.S. Air Guitar Championships in Nashville alongside Edward Snowden’s lawyer, which resulted in a three-way air off to crown a winner. 

Competitions depend on recruiting new competitors, celebrity judges, and large crowds, all of which can be at odds with creating an inclusive community. Organizers have worked hard to eliminate racist, sexist, ableist, and other forms of discriminatory language from judges’ comments. Women within U.S. air guitar have formed advocacy groups. The proceeds of the most recent competitions have been donated to Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, which took up the case of a disabled Black veteran named Sean Worsley who was incarcerated for playing air guitar to music at a gas station. Both organizing bodies at the national and international level emphasize world peace as central to their mission. 

Air guitar routines are themselves political statements too. These acts of musical interpretation enable women, BIPOC, and disabled performers to author sounds credited to guitar idols, like Eddie Van Halen or Slash. Performers make arguments about their access to popular music, using only their bodies. Sydney Hutchinson’s work  examines how air guitar can challenge Asian American stereotypes and gendered conceptions of dance. 

My current work revolves around disabled air guitarists. Andres SevogiAIR drew me in, as a result of his expressive flamenco-inspired seated style he called “chair guitar.” He passed away but left me with an enduring appreciation for air guitar’s ability to challenge conventional virtuosity, a term that can often reproduce an ableist link between physical ability and musical virtue. I came to appreciate how air guitarists could invent imaginary instruments that serve their particular bodies. I witnessed competitors coupling chronic illness and impairments with air guitar routines, as well as competitors using air guitar to fully amplify their struggles with cancer.

I also came to appreciate how air guitarists embrace stigma (e.g., madness, craziness, and gendered forms of listening), turning taboo into a source of creativity. This led to academic writing that traces the history of madness in relation to air guitar, showing how imaginary instrument playing has often been pathologized, and yet contemporary disabled air guitarists reclaim these accusations of insanity as a source of power. 

* * *

A few weeks ago, I received a request from Lieutenant Facemelter to judge the Midwestern Online Regional U.S. Air Guitar Competition. I accepted. As with many things these days, the contemporary competition has morphed into a Twitch-hosted online spectacle, featuring combinations of live and pre-recorded elements. One woman gave birth between first- and second-round performances (made possible by a multi-day filming period for an asynchronous part of the online competition). One man’s air guitar performance evoked an exorcism in his basement. Another middle-aged competitor competed while suffering the side effects of his second shot of coronavirus vaccine, ultimately winning the competition with a pro-vaccination message. His parents appeared in the livestream when he accepted the award, and the host of the show–the Master of Airimonies–jokingly said to them: “You two must be so proud.” 

I think of U.S. Air Guitar as a stained-glass window, through which prisms of popular music history shine through. The competition can bring troubling facets of that history to light, but the competition can also revise that history (or, at least, reimagine how that history can influence the future). Either way, performers celebrate the idea that rock solos live most powerfully in the embodied listening practices of everyday people. Listening becomes the subject of these performances–the source material for these persuasive displays of music reception. Indeed, air guitar can be one of the strangest things you’ll never see. 

The competition continues this summer. 

—

Featured Image: US Air Guitar National Finals, The Midland Theater, Kansas City, MO, August 9, 2014, by Flickr user Amber, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

—

Byrd McDaniel | Byrd is a scholar who researches disability, digital cultures, and popular music. He currently works as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. His forthcoming book–Spectacular Listening— traces the rise of contemporary practices that treat listening as a performance, including air guitar, podcasts, reaction videos, and lip syncing apps. Byrd is enthusiastic about work that addresses any facet of air guitar, including global and historical approaches. He welcomes outreach from those who want to research these topics.

—

tape-reel

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening–Airek Beauchamp

Digital Analogies: Techniques of Sonic Play–Roger Moseley

Experiments in Aural Resistance: Nordic Role-Playing, Community, and Sound—Aaron Trammell

INC

The Digitarian Society @ Tetem met Geert Lovink en Chloë Arkenbout

In de driedelige serie The Digitarian Society onderzoekt Tetem samen met mediakunstenaar Roos Groothuizen en gasten van het Institute of Network Cultures, Waag en PublicSpaces wat er nodig is om verder te komen in onze zoektocht naar een veiliger internet.

De bewustwording over internet dilemma’s in relatie tot online verslaving, privacy en verantwoordelijkheid groeit; niet alleen onder organisaties, in de media en bij de overheid, maar ook onder het ‘grote publiek’. We hebben allemaal wel eens gedacht om alternatieve apps, videoplatforms en social media te verkennen, maar we doen het niet massaal. Wat houdt ons tegen?

Deze serie events gaat verder in op de dilemma’s van de escape room tentoonstelling ‘I want to delete it all, but not now’ die Roos Groothuizen voor Tetem heeft ontwikkeld. Daarin komt de vraag naar voren wat ons tegenhoudt om te stoppen met diensten van bijvoorbeeld Facebook en Google. Hoe worden we een digitariër, iemand die geen producten of diensten gebruikt van bedrijven die hun geld verdienen met het verkopen van persoonlijke data? Of is het mogelijk die moeilijke stap te verzachten door een flexidigitariër te worden, waar je zoveel mogelijke bewuste keuzes probeert te maken, maar nog geen afscheid wilt of kunt nemen van bijvoorbeeld Whatsapp? Het idee is dat we met kleine stappen onszelf en andere mensen en organisaties aansporen om bewuster te worden ten aanzien van de apps die we gebruiken en samen de stap naar een veiliger internet zetten. De drie events vinden plaats op verschillende platforms waarmee we als flexidigitariërs gaan experimenteren.

The Digitarian Society #1
Dinsdag 25 mei waren Geert Lovink en Chloë Arkenbout te gast bij Tatem.

De titel van de tentoonstelling ‘I want to delete it all, but now now’ van Roos Groothuizen komt uit het boek ‘Sad by Design’ door Geert Lovink. Het boek biedt een kritische analyse van de groeiende controverses op sociale media zoals nepnieuws, giftige virale memes en online verslaving. Tegelijkertijd roept Geert Lovink op tot het omhelzen van de digitale intimiteit van sociale media, berichtenverkeer en selfies, in de hoop dat verveling de eerste fase is van het overwinnen van ‘platformnihilisme’. Om daarna de afbraak van – verslaving aan – sociale media in te zetten.

Tijdens The Digitarian Society #1 ontdekten we wie de mensen achter het Institute of Network Cultures zijn en wat er bij hen persoonlijk is veranderd na het publiceren van het boek ‘Sad by Design’. Roos ging met Geert Lovink in gesprek over de schaduwzijde van online platforms, menselijke verlangens die ons tegenhouden en hoe je als individu de theorie in praktijk kunt brengen. In een gesprek met Chloë Arkenbout werd er  ingezoomd op Chloë’s onderzoek naar de macht van memes, media ethiek, morele verantwoordelijkheid, (digitaal) activisme, call out culture en de manieren waarop zij als nieuwe generatie onderzoekers met social media omgaat. Ook werd er Doen, durven of je data gespeeld.

Kijk hier The Digitarian Society #1 terug

The Digitarian Society #1 from Tetem on Vimeo.

INC

Will gaming become tomorrow’s music stage?

The pandemic is causing labels to hold out with album rollouts for the time concerts are allowed again. This streamlining of revenue models is quite common but doesn’t sit well with fans. But if there’s one thing this pandemic has shown, is the culture industry’s ability to innovate. Other ways of streamlining business models are conjured. Musicians find shelter in digital live streams and gaming environments. Travis Scott and Marshmallow both did a virtual performance during a live event in Fortnite, while Zara Larsson and Lil Nas X did a similar performance in the game Roblox.

 

The digitization of live music performance hints at the consolidation of the two industries that have a 40-year standing history together. While this convergence isn’t even in its infancy, the emerging industry asks for new standards, technicities and protocols. The development and various instances of virtual performance accelerated during the pandemic. The aforementioned examples are the most pronounced ones, where the artists perform songs as a virtual version of themselves. They’re digitized, allowing for majestic and surreal experiences. Travis Scott performances is a 10-minute show where the user journeys through exhilarating environments. These cases illustrate the power behind the two collaborating capitalist culture industries where big budgets are available. But other cases come in various formats:

Established gaming brands and artists coming together during the pandemic is a classic case of how markets emerge through supply and demand: record labels and artists look for environments where they can play their music and sell their merch, while MMO games want to solidify their brand name to their audience. Through this lens, the congregation between gaming and music doesn’t seem all that innovative, but more out of economic interest. Lil Nas X’s Roblox performance was attended 33 million times, while 12.3 million and 10.7 players participated in the performances by Travis Scott and Marshmello respectively. Regardless, there are quite some subversive possibilities that arise and can take both industries and the newly emerging culture an octave higher. 

Changes in games

While a philosophical argument can be formed around the blurring borders between reality and the virtual, the more interesting, perhaps most tangible differences beyond business changes are found in the socio-cultural. 

In his Rekto Verso article, Roel Vergauwen sums various reasons why digital concerts will coexist next to live concerts: Increased reach and engagements between artists and fans, digital sales market for products such as vinyl, CDs and merch. Additionally, new forms of merch such as cosmetic skins and NFTs become available through this new infrastructure. 

In other cases the artist becomes the merchandise. Rockstar’s GTA Online included the aforementioned 3 DJs into its world whom players have to solve a quest for to hear them play in a nightclub in Los Santos. A clear case of affiliate marketing, which is more of a cultural nod to Moodymann, Palms Trax and Keinemusik than it is a simulation of a music event. This affiliate marketing can take on really dull forms, as this collaboration between Rockstar and music platform Beatport illustrates (killer set, though). 

New networked publics

The new emerging virtual concert stages in-game environments thus also are non-geographically bound public spaces. Whereas visitors of a concert are tied through their mutual musical interest, these new publics are by default also networked through their shared interest in a specific game. Games serve as a new medium that provides the platform both for artists and fans as networked publics. 

Sociality

Musical meaning emerges from its relationship to other forms of media. While music has always been both a solo and multiplayer experience– think walkmans, vinyl, practicing or listening parties, background music during social events, concerts and so on– digital technologies have heightened its sociality. Spotify UI and UX for example socialize musical experience through features that harmoniously stack like extended chords: sharing, public playlists or friend activity (desktop). So too does the application of the gaming UI and UX socialise the music experience further. 

Take Travis Scott’s performance for instance, where sociality comes in multiple ways. Firstly, the individual or the player embodied in the avatar draped in their cosmetic skins attended the virtual event, experiencing the concert in the gaming environment. Additionally, affordances such as dancing increase immersiveness and the simulation of real-life concerts. Emulating mosh pits, people together in video or voice chats sharing their shared experience. Moreover, you can interact with the environment and see what other players are doing.

Secondly, sociality is prevalent when I watch the video on YouTube and see that players are part of the recording of the virtual performance. This is underlined by various remarks from people who attended the event in the video’s comment section. Both in the official videos and in streamer reaction videos, players who attended the performance happily leave comments explaining their experience. 

Socialisation will play an important role not only during the adoption phase, but also in terms of business. Sociality, as we know, is highly potent in its commodification.

Sterility 

Looking at this from a different key, virtual performances in their current form underline the perfectionism stimulated by social media. Songs are performed without curse words, perfectly pitched, compressed and mixed, while also being aligned with the visual effects which make for fantasy-like experiences (shapeshifting, teleporting,  giant-sized, gravity-defying). To put it in another phrasing, music is subject to the polishing of the virtual. 

Similar to the now ubiquitous Spotify track, where a dominant medium shapes the aesthetic, so too could the conjoining of gaming as a medium and music cause a shift. While visuals are always part of a live performance, in a gaming environment this is buffed up to a more surreal and immersive level to maintain the attention span of gamers. Consider the Marshmello concert below, where his virtual version provides a hit after hit, drop after drop DJ set.

 In a virtual and online setting, a concert is less about music and more about the experience. You can see this as the next step from people recording performances on their phone while at a live concert. In particular the Fornite performances by Travis Scott and Marshmello were all tunes familiar to the audience– as they were chart-topping hits. This plays an important factor because the music requires less attention, which can be allocated to the overall virtual audio-visual experience, as indicated in this reaction video. 

 What about the independents?

Alongside the top-down examples above in which big companies and artists (read: record labels) are creating these majestic experiences, there are also bottom-up ventures emerging. Blockchain-based VR world Decentraland has seen a slew of concerts by independent music artists in the past couple of months, ranging from bands to DJs. Atari already partnered with Decentraland and set up a casino in the environment, where–similar to Marshmello– DJ Dillon Francis performed a set as well. 

New protocols, standards and technology

The converging characteristic of digital technologies will result in a symbiosis where gaming and the music business become increasingly intertwined. Looking ahead, we would see an industry where companies are working simultaneously on both gaming and music. Professions from both fields would have to converge as well. You can already see this in the University of Arts (HKU) in Utrecht for example. It has overarching courses for Music & Technology and Games & Interaction, within the former’s curriculum there is a bachelor’s in Music Design for Games & Interaction. This surely will foster a future industry without boundaries between music and gaming. 

 

INC

Cyberia: Exploring infrastructures of Bangalore’s Cybercafés

Cyberia is a poetic provocation in the form of a photographic series that explores infrastructures of Cybercafés in Bangalore. What does it mean to use these overlooked spaces today—as a worker, a client, or simply an artist? These sites composed of passages, objects, and stories—reveal a sense of connection, privacy, self-expression, surveillance, and manipulation. Against this backdrop, the work migrates across different supports, shaping and affecting people, landscapes, politics, and social networks.

As an artist based in Bangalore, I am interested in looking at the ramification and behind the scene of the power of tech-enabled innovation from a localized perspective. How has the internet changed the way we encounter various conditions? A domestic space as well as a technological screen, allows structural ironies of the world to be projected, and imagination-driven suggestions to be pondered upon in contemporary times.

Furthermore, my photographs respond to these questions: what is so culturally particular about these structures in Bangalore? How are these spaces a reflection of the social urban fabric? And what is the future of these frameworks especially in the age of new technologies, open-source software, and cyber-security? The images evoke artistic and conceptual associations to forgotten histories, occupations, circulations, and localities, documenting and capturing the inherently curious nature of these sites as well as the uncanny ability of Cybercafés – that transform and activate in a variety of models. Conceived as a portal to disrupt prevailing patterns—aspirations, truth and fiction, society—and their limitations.


This project is part of the 25 x 25 Initiative by India Foundation for the Arts, supported by lead donor Kshirsagar-Apte Foundation, and philanthropy partners Titan Company Limited, Priya Paul, and Sethu Vaidyanathan.

About the artist: Born in Bangalore, India, Shruti Chamaria graduated from the Royal College of Art (London) in 2017, after working as a graphic designer for cultural institutions and creative individuals across Europe and Asia such as Studio Thomas Buxo (Amsterdam) and Art Asia Pacific (Hong Kong). Her personal practice deals with hyperreality of spaces, objects, and memories, and her work in this regard has been shown at Rotterdam Photo Festival (Rotterdam), Offprint – Tate Modern (London), Athens Photo Festival (Athens), J Book Show – Cork Photo Festival (Cork) and India Foundation for the Arts (Bangalore). Her publication How to Sit for the Camera is also distributed by A6 Books, a subsidiary project of the London Centre for Book Arts (London), as well as MoMA PS1 (New York) and Printed Matter (New York).

INC

A conversation between Anab Jain and Marta Peirano, as recorded and retold in a small colony of ants

Written by: Gabriele Ferri and Inte Gloerich

Ant 1: [Wiggles antennae, wiggles antennae, wiggles antennae.] I bring an interesting message to pass along.

Ant 2: [Wiggles, wiggles.] I’m listening.

Ant 1: This is something that I’m passing along on behalf of my other sisters in the colony, who received it from another anthill, which received it from another anthill, and so on until we can’t count that anymore.

Ant 2: [Opens jaws. Closes jaws.] I’m listening.

Ant 1: My sisters have been using internet quite a lot. It’s not difficult after you get the hang of it. A few sunsets ago, they listened to a human conversation. It’s complicated to understand, they just can’t wiggle their antennae, but we don’t want to judge their communication system. It’s not necessarily worse than ours, it’s just different.

Ant 3: What is the message? [Wiggles antennae.]

Ant 1: Some humans are showing some encouraging signs of a more mature rapport with our environment. This is a thought that come for our queen ant. We have listened to Anab Jain and Marta Peirano discuss at an event called “(re)programming – Strategies for Self-Renewal”. If you find an internet cable, you can watch the recording at this URL, write it down:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k40Rddp7OE0

Ant 2: [Scratches jaws.] Who is Anab Jain?

Ant 1: Anab Jain co-founded Superflux, which is a studio that “creates worlds, stories, and tools that provoke and inspire” the humans “to engage with the precarity of our rapidly changing world.” [Wiggles antennae.] You should remember about the other ant colony that lived in that small apartment full of things that grow food like we do in our tunnels. That’s something that Anab and her partner Jon Ardern call “Mitigation of Shock,” and if you wait your turn to use our antennae-to-internet connection you can look it up here: https://superflux.in/index.php/work/mitigation-of-shock/.

Ant 4: Humans are not smart at all. [Shrugs antennae, wiggles butt.] It is a well-known fact that they can’t interpret future scenarios. Our reality could be their future!

Ant 1: [Shakes jaws, shakes antennae.] Anab and Superflux seem to prove differently, if you care to pay attention to these strange humans. They say that what they do is not predicting a future that will necessarily take place, and it is not about making accurate predictions. Instead, they emphasize storytelling and the creation of imaginaries that provoke reflection on what could happen.

Ant 4: Just like we do when we raise an alarm throughout the ant colony.

Ant 1: [Wiggles antennae.] Yes, something like that. Anab says that they search for ethnographic and anthropological insights. They listen for what they call “weak signals,” which are meaningful elements that they capture throughout human discourses, and that may hint to future possibilities. Then, they produce diagrams, quadrants, and other schemas that highlight interconnections and interdependencies. When they find something that captures a provocative possibility, they flesh it out. It is a matter of putting different weak signals in relation to one another and exploring/expanding that constellation of elements. Anab and Superflux are interested in examining the fringes and experimenting with when and how they enter mainstream mundane life. For them, envisioning a future is never a matter of abstract thinking, but mostly of translating a set of interdependencies in an experience.

Ant 2: [Scratches head. Wiggles antennae.]

Ant 1: [Wiggles head.] Marta asked how Superflux avoids the pitfall of imagining future scenarios that are very different to what we are experiencing now.

Ant 4: [Closes jaws.] She’s right! Humans should look closer at what is happening around them.

Ant 1: Anab thinks that there’s no future without history, and so it stands to reason to look back in order to look ahead. Of course, it’s fundamental to avoid falling into determinism. This could be achieved by considering multiple levels of critical sense-making – which are the diagrams and interdependencies that she mentioned before – and by reflecting on the biases and preconceptions that the analyst inevitably brings to the table.

Ant 4: [Wiggles butt.] Of course, humans have a tendency to visualize the past and the future as a sequence of events carried out by well-defined actors, often anthropomorphic.

Ant 2: Ah! Anthropomorphic! Why not ant-ropomorphic for a change?? [Wiggles butt vigorously.]

Ant 1: Anab thinks that humans must embrace complexity and be critical of reductive visions of the future based on the ‘archetypical single hero.’ (Also, our mother queen ant agrees with Anab.) This is what Superflux experimented with in Mitigation of Shock, which is less a tale of survival and more a reflection on the interconnecting social, cultural, and ecological forces that shape humans’ future. Instead of those awful shiny materials that don’t welcome critters like us, when Anab looks ahead, she sees systems that build bridges between multiple species and are useful for more than just humans.

Ant 4: [Wiggles antennae, wiggles antennae.] This reminds me of what happens in a forest, where the connections between mushrooms and plants shape the whole ecosystem with very complex feedback loops, where we ants play a fundamental role.

Ant 1: [Wiggles antennae enthusiastically.] Indeed! [Wiggles antennae.] We should all – ants and humans – imagine an ecological cooperation between different multispecies actors. If we could imagine a cooperative network of different entities, we would be able to have a much larger positive impact on the world. It’s never a matter of one project, one species, one hero, but a convergence/emergence of many factors that lead to an outcome.

Ant 3: [Wiggles antennae.] Excuse me! [Wiggles antennae.] I want to discuss this in the next colony study group. Who’s with me?

Ant 1: Me! I already picked up some books that Anab referred to so we can study them together. I will put them in the communal library later. I found a book about our friends the mushrooms and how they can thrive in the ruins that humans create around the world: Anna Tsing – The Mushroom at the End of the World. Perhaps we can find out how to learn from the mushrooms. It seems like humans like to write about what happens at the end of the world, because I also took this book by Timothy Morton with me, it’s called Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World and it is about how there are things in the world that are so big that it is hard to see them, like climate change. And the other book I found is really nice because it refers to all kinds of beings and machines as critters, not just ants and other normal-sized animals like us. Everyone is a critter, and everyone can become kin! We are all together in this! It’s written by Donna Haraway and called Staying with the Trouble.

Ant 5: [Wiggles antennae, wiggles butt.] This is all fine and dandy, but I’m curious to know what Anab and Superflux are working on these days.

Ant 1: [Opens and closes jaws.] You’re right, I was a bit curious after hearing about them. I had to queue for a while to find an empty spot in our antennae-to-internet connection, but I was finally able to find this link: https://superflux.in/index.php/work/refuge-for-resurgence/. Superflux will be presenting a new work, titled Refuge for Resurgence, at the Venice Architecture Biennale. It is a large, beautiful oak table around which all life-forms – including ants, and also humans – can gather as equals to dine together.

Ant 4: [Wiggles antennae.] Seems appropriate. As humans go, these ones seem smart enough.

Ant 6: Make way! Make way! We found an edible seed!

Everybody rushes to help, as more-than-human philosophical conversations temporarily leave space to foraging and caring for the anthill.

The (re)programming: Interdependence event was organized by Aksioma and can be watched here.

 

INC

Political Art As Critical Theory In Armand Hammer’s Haram

‘It’s difficult to write about somebody who is a better writer than you,’ billy woods elucidates. Together with fellow rapper ELUCID, they make up the New York duo Armand Hammer, whose recently released album Haram dotted with lyrical references to literature, Critical Theory, shrewd social and political commentary. As a digital humanities grad student and music enthusiast, I rejoiced to see these worlds colliding in an artistic endeavor composed so aesthetically, executed with such skillful ingenuity and dense in its subject matter. But how can I write something about someone who’s a better writer than I am? Well, by not aiming to do an album review but instead trying to stitch together what makes this album important to introduce to an audience beyond the (abstract) hip hop demographics: the INC reader. We can look beyond our own discourse and find similarities in the avant-garde assemblage that is Haram, where critical writing is mediated through a different format: music and lyricism.

Armand Hammer is regarded as underground, abstract, or experimental. This genre is often signified by the musical choice or abstract lyrics. In Haram’s case, however, it’s the entire aesthetic beyond the music and lyrics is abstract, the complete presentation is an experimental experience. I’d say it is submerged in an avant-garde aesthetic even. I’m not using that word lightly here. In various ways, it’s unconventional and unorthodox. Lending the term from Islamic vernacular, Haram refers to impurity, forbidden, or to those not initiated into sacred knowledge. Together with the provoking and symbolic cover of two severed pig heads, one should feel warned about the content. Not to scare of without trigger warnings, but to approach this art piece with caution as it presents radical ideas.

Home - Backwoodz Studioz

Cover art for Haram.

These radical ideas are not only found in lyrics but also in the way the immaculate producer The Alchemist sampled, created, and arranged the music. There is a keen coherence between the rappers’ lyrics, cadence, and applied delays, echoes, or stutters on the vocals by The Alchemist, his beats, the song titles, and the audio snippets from boxing matches, David Lynch, Barry White, Little Richard, 60s movies and conversations on hysteria with references to Freud’s professor and neurology pioneer Charcot scattered across this album. Collectively, this amounts to a layered narrative, consciously assembled piece by piece in order to provoke the listener with thought-provoking or radical ideas. So even before addressing the lyrics, the conformity or coherence of the experimental aesthetic that is Haram already hints at the unapologetic insights to be found in the lyrics.

You need permission to have an issue with me
I’m not privy to the stories you live inside
A home of alt history, I just bend the rhyme
No mystery, God, deepest look inside
Thick fog on the channel, rando pseudo Rambo, bad camo
Armed to a T as in tango
Letha Brainz Blo, baldhead in Kangol
(ELUCID on Sir Benni Miles)

Thought-provoking music–especially in rap, of course– is nothing new. Rap is viewed as a channel of free speech that connects listeners to social and political issues explained by the artist in poetic fashion. It also creates solidarity among those with similar subcultural capital, that is those in the know: music was used during times of slavery to communicate experiences beyond the understanding of the colonizers. You can look at the godfather of rap Gil-Scott Heron for a 20th-century example of this. Situated in a jazz-funk and soul, his spoken-word performances utilized social commentary, satire, and literary influence from Harlem Renaissance writers to conjure his art pieces. Songs like ‘Whitey on the Moon’, ‘Winter in America‘ or ‘The Revolution will not be Televised’ provided insight into the zeitgeist of the 70s black American. Weaving together street poetry and songwriting in order to reflect then-contemporary conditions, Heron inspired rappers to take on a similar approach in order to encapsulate their time and space.

You can view Armand Hammer as an extension of Heron. Where class struggle in Marxist terms has always been tied to hip-hop, Armand Hammer, like Heron, expands and argues not only against class struggle but its cultural formation as a system as well, reminiscent of Western Marxist critical theory. “It’s not [only] fuck the police, but more fuck the police state,” professor Skye argues (see video below). The cut Chicharonnes illustrates this as a verbose prose pulling in various pop-cultural and literary references to pigs. The holistic aesthetic returns as the track refers to the double killing of the pigs in the cover: the police state oppressing black Americans and the cop in your thoughts. Critical Theory around identity is present as woods questions the double consciousness of his demographic. As a form of auto-ethnography, they mention what outcomes systems of oppressions have on them. These systems of oppression take form as neoliberalism, Marxist class struggle, or police states. Humor or cynicism also plays an important role here. Kafka-esque surreal humor is surrounded by grudge which, based on the entire aesthetic of Haram, shouldn’t come as a surprise to be a theme. 

Got caught with the pork
But you gotta kill the cop in your thoughts
Still sayin’ “Pause”
Negroes say they hate the cops
But the minute somethin’ off, they wanna use force
I just work here, I’m not the boss (I’m not the boss)
I never bought in, so when it go left, it’s no loss (No loss)
When they look back in history, make sure I’m absolved (Make sure)
Don’t try to rewrite the past, it’s oral history where I’m involved
(billy woods on Chicharonnes)

The scholarly inclination mainly comes from billy woods, whose father was a Zimbabwean Marxist politician, while his mother was an English literary scholar. woods’ entire discography confesses his interest in creative and critical writing (which I’ll leave up to you to discover). Flowery verses are filled with figurative phrases you’ll comprehend only after a few listens. I get the same from reading theory. Try to read a thousand plateaus just once and tell me what it’s about. You can’t (partly because of French theorists are masters in masking the intention of their work behind layers of complex sentences–which get lost in translation even further. Speaking of which… 

A thousand plateaus, a constellation of prisons
An ocean of archipelagos, an algorithm
Apply pressure to achieve desired results
Voices in the ventilation float different
Foucault call collect, sound like long distance
(billy woods on Wishing Bad)

Here, the system of oppression is the ubiquity of platform capitalism, which applies pressure to achieve desired results, whether that be motivated by capital or by increasing control through surveillance. Black boxed algorithms of platforms create an economy in which users perform immaterial labor through digital practices. woods juxtaposes arguably juxtaposes this with life in the gulag, as he uses the word archipelago to pull in a reference to The Gulag Archipelago by Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Foucault can’t be omitted when we talk about systems of discipline and control. woods jumps from the Deleuze and Guattari reference to a parallel he sees in the Foucauldian panopticon (the constellation of prisons) before modernizing the idea that algorithms not only isolate but create self-government in subjects or users of digital platforms. As mentioned in the opening paragraph, it’s difficult to write about somebody who is a better writer than I am. So surely this small deconstruction is probably just half of it, but just well illustrates the density of Haram. (If somebody wants to help me out decipher the last line, that’d be great.)

This subject matter and craft go far beyond the status quo within hip-hop discourse. It can be read and deconstructed as a literary essay. The radical ideas that make it avant-garde are presented in an equally avant-garde manner and thus require a certain literary proficiency. This is exactly what makes the abstract vision of Armand Hammer underground. While the collaboration with the critically acclaimed Alchemist– who dives into the most experimental bag he’s ever touched on this album–does well for Armand Hammer’s reach beyond the underbelly, the rappers’ philosophy just does not stroke with ‘what’s hot’. What’s hot sells, not only numbers but ideology as well. I don’t think Billboard is all that relevant anymore but for the sake of this argument, have a look at the charts: flaunting consumerist and capitalist desire, self-medication through drug use, and the contemporary discourse on love and sex (the latter two also underscore the former two). In order words, popular rap is neoliberal ideology remediated through music, whereas Haram remediates critical thought as a literary narrative through music. This is not my inner old-head speaking, but rather looking at rap as an art form 😅.

One could spend the length of a thesis on a lyrical analysis of billy woods’ art. But using music as a medium, Armand Hammer not only makes political thought on a scholarly level more accessible, it is also presented through the aesthetic lens. The almost redundant aphorism by McLuhan still rings true here: the medium is the message, as it’s far more equipped to deliver the actual message and make an impact than scholarly articles could.

In addition, Armand Hammer goes beyond Hip-hop’s characteristic trait of social commentary. Where Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly (TBAP)–in my humble opinion the best album of this century– did have a broad cultural impact through its timely release during civil unrest and its widespread success, Armand Hammer is a little less digestible by means of its density. You could see TPAB as an investigative research journalist while Haram (and essentially all Armand Hammer’s albums) mirror a Critical Theory essay on a similar topic. It’s less focused on timely relevance and more on proposing radical thought through free-flowing association.

Similar to Gil-Scott Heron’s encapsulation of the 70s zeitgeist, Armand Hammer captures the black experience in contemporary neoliberalism. While auto-ethnography presents off-kilter anecdotes or haunting punchlines– starting your album with ‘Dreams are dangerous’ is a certain example. There is no call for reform. However, billy and ELUCID aim to disclose what they discover through their oblique experiences with contemporary society. The critical artform reads like a literary prose, which– in my opinion– is an example of why we can and maybe even need to look beyond our isolated field to situate and trace theory in the wild itself.

 

Sounding Out!

“Vous Ecoutez La Voix du Peuple”: The Kreyol Language Pirate Radio Stations of Flatbush, Brooklyn

Haitian Radio //
Radyo Ayisyen

Learning from other scholars’ work on Haitian radio was, and still is, one of the greatest pleasures in the process of writing Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC 2016). People living in or from Haiti widely acknowledged and almost took for granted radio’s outsized role in public and political life. Edwidge Danticat and Jonathan Demme also understood this and paid tribute in Claire of the Sea Light and The Agronomist respectively, but historians remained largely fixated, understandably, on pivotal moments in Haiti’s rich history. Radio is different. Not pivotal, but witnessing the pivotal. Less dramatic and more long lasting and adhering to the same format for days, years, decades. It speaks to people who wouldn’t read newspapers or books. It floods private and public space with the sounds of music, talking, ruling, dissenting, explaining, satirizing, creating, crying, testifying, lying. But it leaves few archival traces. This is why the work of the five scholars in this series is so important. They allow us to hear a little and honor the listeners who make the medium what it is.

To start the series, Ian Coss gave a finely tuned account of a “day in the life” of a radio station in Cap Haïtien that follows the programming rhythm of days and nights.  Then, Jennifer Garcon recounted one of the pivotal points in the relationship—its near breakdown and ultimate survival—also a turning point for a 19-year-old Jean Claude Duvalier, newly proclaimed President for life. Last week, Laura Wagner, who listened to each recording Radio Haïti-Inter and its archive (now at Duke University) and wrote its archival descriptors, writes of the work itself, the emotional, financial and intellectual challenges involved, and the reason this archive is essential to anyone interested in Haiti, or radio, or racial justice.

We continue the series in Brooklyn this week, where amidst gentrification and millennials seeking upscale vegan quesadillas, the ‘culture of the transistor’ is alive and well. Pirate radio stations broadcasting music and news in Haitian Creole have loyal followings, mostly of an older generation for whom radio was the primary medium during their youth. Listening brings back memories of a prosperous 1940s and 50s Haiti that recent narratives centered on catastrophe tend to bury. David Goren, who has not just written about but also mapped Brooklyn’s pirate stations, reminds us that these aural communities connect past and present, and perhaps future as well.

Guest Editor– Alejandra Bronfman

Click here for the full series!

—-

Station Logo Grid, Courtesy of Author

‘A lot of these stations, especially the Haitian stations, they have such an extensive music library that a song will come on the radio and all of a sudden my mom is like, ‘Oh my God! Your grandma used to have this record and she played it every Saturday!’ says Joan Martinez, a young Haitian-American born in the US and a former program host on some of the unlicensed Kreyol language stations. “Now she’s transported back to being on the island, with the big radio that’s a piece of furniture in the living room. People are chatting, little drinks are flowing about, my grandmother milling about in a gorgeous dress. It’s kind of like that whole nostalgia era that unfortunately was probably lost because of the political turmoil in Haiti. So it’s harkening back to a good time, to a simpler time, a better time, a more carefree era.”

Every day, the skies of New York City fill up with unseen clouds of radio signals spreading over immigrant neighborhoods. These culturally charged clouds of radio energy burst with a flow of content that continually shifts and transforms, following the lifecycle and rhythm of the streets.

From clandestine studios tucked behind store fronts, DJs transform time and physical space with Konpa, Reggae and Soca music, mixing the sounds of ancestral homes with the thump and challenge of adapting to a new life in the United States. Jolted by electrified fingers of Signal, the old radio poetry of hiss and hum leaps from a scattered forest of antennas connected to transmitters hidden away inside rooftop sheds. In Brooklyn, the signals alight on Flatbush Avenue, blasting from radios in dollar vans, bakeries, churches and on street corners and kitchen tables. By accessing an analog technology that (outside of the radio itself) is essentially free for the listener, economically marginalized communities avoid the subscription and data fees built in to the conveniences of the digital life. Listeners, often the elders of the community, extend metal antennas and position the radios just so, trying to catch the elusive vibrations of crucial music, news and information that are seldom felt in New York City’s legal and mostly corporate owned media soundscape. 

“These underground, unlicensed or pirate stations have been around for as long as there has been radio,” Martinez says. The legality of radio stations stems from The Communications Act of 1934, legislation that created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency tasked with penalizing unlicensed stations and shutting them down. “The focus really was on the listeners.” says Rosemary Harold, chief of FCC Enforcement ‘because what had happened before licensing became what we know as today, was that listeners weren’t able to consistently hear radio broadcasts. And now we’re kind of in a modern iteration of that.” 

Others, like pirate radio historian John Anderson, see the Act as unfairly slanted towards commercial interests, awarding “the highest powers and clearest channels” to stations that sold advertising, tilting the medium away from serving specific communities. “By privileging commercial speech over non-commercial speech and by basically saying if you are a special interest, we will not award you a license.” Anderson says. “You create the conditions for there to be dissension over the media policy, which will lead people into radical actions, like putting stations on the air without permission.” In Flatbush, stations broadcast primarily to Haitians, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Grenadians and Orthodox Jews. The Haitian stations are particularly active in East Flatbush with just under a dozen broadcasting daily in Kreyol to the large Haitian community. 

Jacques Dessaline Boulevard sign, courtesy of author
Joan Martinez, courtesy of author

“I came across it at a very young age. There was this really popular station back in the late 80s, Radio Guinee, and it was based in Brooklyn.” Joan Martinez says. “Nobody knows where it was, there are suspicions. But all I know is from Friday night all the way to Sunday night, you would just hear a series of these stations every weekend and it would be the place where you could listen to the latest in Haitian pop music, rap music. It was also the news, my parents and their friends would all sit around the radio and they would just be politicking in the living room getting really loud, you know, dancing, singing along that sort of thing. It was just like a meeting ground and the radio was guiding it.” 

This phase of New York City pirate radio rose from the ashes of a previous scene dating to the late sixties: a dozen or so stations sporadically run mostly by white teenagers: a mix of hippies, radicals and electronically inclined misfits. By 1987, this loose collective of friends and rivals devolved into infighting after a short-lived attempt to broadcast from international waters off Jones Beach. This created room for new pirate radio voices from diverse communities that were increasingly being pushed off the legal airwaves by high costs, format consolidation, and  “the low power desert”, an FCC-led phaseout of small community broadcasters. The local pirates joined a growing national wave of progressive pirate radio activity taking  advantage of a new generation of cheap FM transmitters imported from China or homebrewed in makeshift workshops by free radio activists.

Radio La Voix Du Peuple Flyer,
Image by Author

By the early 90’s, immigrant community-focused broadcasters In New York City flipped the unspoken rules of the earlier pirates who broadcast mainly late at night on a few pre-determined “safe” frequencies, instead filling the FM dial from bottom to top, day and night. In 2000, under pressure from a nationwide increase in pirate radio activity, the FCC introduced a new license class: Low Power FM (LPFM) but opposition from National Public Radio and the National Association of Broadcasters shut down the issuing of new licenses. That severely limited LPFM’s availability in major urban markets due to rules requiring LPFM’s to be “three click aways” from existing stations. Local pirates felt they had no alternative but to continue broadcasting and some stations in Flatbush have been on the air for decades. Despite the passage of the Local Community Radio Act in 2011, opening a new licensing window with relaxed spacing requirements, few new frequencies were available in NYC due to an already crowded dial. The continued pirate presence is enabled by a sort of safety in numbers, an FCC enforcement team hampered by a low budget and a bureaucratic process of enforcement. 

Though the stations exist to serve their communities with news and culture and maybe make a little money for their owners and dj’s, they can and do cause interference for listeners of licensed stations, particularly low-powered non-commercial broadcasters like WFMU, a beloved freeform music station. Interference near their frequency has inspired the Brooklyn Pirate Watch Twitter group to keep a wary eye on pirate operations.

Storefont available, photo courtesy of author

Interference aside, FCC commissioners and staff publicly fume at the pirates for a range of potential public safety violations, some more theoretical than others and claim they are somehow harming their own communities, and wonder finally, why don’t they just stream on the internet. By viewing radio piracy purely from a legal perspective, critics miss the cultural and historic forces driving the Haitian pirates. During the Duvalier dictatorship (1957-1986) Haitians had access to only two stations broadcasting in Kreyol, rather than French, the language of the elite. One was Radio Lumiere, a religious station and the other Radio Haiti-Inter, a fiercely independent voice whose director Jean Dominque was assassinated in 1999.

“The peasant in Haiti, while he’s working on his farm you know he had a transistor.” Says Dr. Jean Eddy St. Paul, Director of the Haitian Studies Institute at the City University of New York. ‘And many peasants, they don’t have money to buy tobacco to smoke, but they will have money to buy the battery to put in the transistor. The first generation of migration, in the US, was during the 1960s and for many of those people the culture of transistor was part of their everyday life, so they’re still maintaining the culture of transistor. For them, having a radio station is very important.’ 

In July 2019, on a side street in East Flatbush, I met a man calling himself “Joseph” aka “Haitian” (“because I’m a pure Haitian!”), part of a group that keeps Radio Comedy FM on the air. “There’s no owners and committee. It’s a bunch of young guys”. Joseph says, “We have to do something positive for our community. Right now the Marines are in Haiti and we don’t know what’s next! CNN don’t show you this! BBC don’t show you this! So what we do, we have people in Haiti that call us and tell us what’s going on and will send us pictures. This is how we get our information. And bring it to the people…. I have family over there, my mother’s still there. So I have to know what’s going on. 

At this point in the digital age, it’s an open question how long these analog pirate stations will remain relevant, as their audiences age, neighborhoods gentrify and younger listeners gravitate to social media platforms. The answer seems to lie with their elderly and impoverished listeners. “They don’t have enough money to buy the newspapers understand?.” Joseph says.” For him that makes it worth it to keep Radio Comedy on the air despite a crackdown from the FCC backed by the PIRATE Act signed into law in 2020 that increases fines to $100,000 a day up to $2 million. But the legislation lacks funding to enforce the new regulations. With a federal statute still in place reducing fines down to the ability to pay, it’s unclear whether the PIRATE Act will be anything more than another in an escalating series of scare tactics. 

“If they don’t want us to do it just make it easy for us. Let’s make a meeting with those guys [the FCC],” Joseph says. ‘We’re going to provide the air for you. A frequency. You’re going to pay for example, $500 a month even $1,000 a month.’ We will be more than happy to do it. “

Pirate Radio Activity Chart, Courtesy of Author

Though the FCC has recently suggested the possibility of a new round of LPFM licenses in the future, the already crowded nature of NYC’s FM band makes it unlikely that new frequencies will be made available to the current pirate stations. In addition the FCC doesn’t want to be seen as rewarding illegal activity by granting a license to former pirate broadcasters, which was a prohibition in LPFM’s earlier licensing periods. And for the moment, Joseph, who’s been running unlicensed stations since 1991 (‘it’s an addiction’) is equally unlikely to cede the airwaves. He sees Radio Comedy as not just a radio station, but a community lifeline. 

 “You know many children we save? There was a bunch of guys…Jamaican, Trinidadian, Haitian trying to form a gang. We talked to them, bring them to the station. Most of them have a diploma now. Without the radio, most of them probably get locked up or dead.” 

Even with the PIRATE act on the books, the number of stations on the air in Brooklyn has remained steady with an average of about 25 per day and the advent of the Coronavirus pandemic has only sharpened their mission. In March 2020 as the spread of Covid-19 lead to NYC’s lockdown, the unlicensed Haitian broadcasters and the other West Indian stations in Brooklyn took a step closer to their listeners, increasing their air time and enhancing their formats to deliver information about the virus both in New York and in their countries of origin amid the heavy toll it took on the community.

Click here to hear Station IDs for Radio Lumiere, Radio Independans, and La Voix du Peuple!

—

Featured Image: Antenna in Flatbush, courtesy of David Goren

—

An award-winning radio producer, David Goren has created programming for the BBC, Jazz at Lincoln Center Radio, the Wall Street Journal Magazine, and NPR’s “Lost and Found Sound” series, as well as audio-based installations for Proteus Gowanus Radio Cona and the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective. In 2016, he was an artist-in residence at Wave Farm, a center for the transmission arts.

Since 2014, David has been recording New York City’s prodigious pirate radio activity and researching the evolution of this grassroots community radio movement resulting in the release of  “Outlaws of the Airwaves: The Rise of Pirate Radio Station WBAD” (2018) for KCRW’s “Lost Notes” podcast, New York City’s Pirates of the Air for the BBC World Service (2019) and the “Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map 2.0” (2020)  which was featured in The New Yorker. He presented “Tracing Neighborhoods in the Sky,” as part of the Fall 2019 Franke Lectures at Yale University. In January 2021, the Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map became a partner of the Library of Congress’ Radio Preservation Task Force.

—

tape reel

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Archivism and Activism: Radio Haiti and the Accountability of Educational Institutions–Laura Wagner

Listen to yourself!: Spotify, Ancestry DNA, and the Fortunes of Race Science in the Twenty-First Century–Alexander Cowen

SO! Amplifies: Marginalized Sound—Radio for All–J Diaz

Writing from Below

“Vous Ecoutez La Voix du Peuple”: The Kreyol Language Pirate Radio Stations of Flatbush, Brooklyn

Haitian Radio //
Radyo Ayisyen

Learning from other scholars’ work on Haitian radio was, and still is, one of the greatest pleasures in the process of writing Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC 2016). People living in or from Haiti widely acknowledged and almost took for granted radio’s outsized role in public and political life. Edwidge Danticat and Jonathan Demme also understood this and paid tribute in Claire of the Sea Light and The Agronomist respectively, but historians remained largely fixated, understandably, on pivotal moments in Haiti’s rich history. Radio is different. Not pivotal, but witnessing the pivotal. Less dramatic and more long lasting and adhering to the same format for days, years, decades. It speaks to people who wouldn’t read newspapers or books. It floods private and public space with the sounds of music, talking, ruling, dissenting, explaining, satirizing, creating, crying, testifying, lying. But it leaves few archival traces. This is why the work of the five scholars in this series is so important. They allow us to hear a little and honor the listeners who make the medium what it is.

To start the series, Ian Coss gave a finely tuned account of a “day in the life” of a radio station in Cap Haïtien that follows the programming rhythm of days and nights.  Then, Jennifer Garcon recounted one of the pivotal points in the relationship—its near breakdown and ultimate survival—also a turning point for a 19-year-old Jean Claude Duvalier, newly proclaimed President for life. Last week, Laura Wagner, who listened to each recording Radio Haïti-Inter and its archive (now at Duke University) and wrote its archival descriptors, writes of the work itself, the emotional, financial and intellectual challenges involved, and the reason this archive is essential to anyone interested in Haiti, or radio, or racial justice.

We continue the series in Brooklyn this week, where amidst gentrification and millennials seeking upscale vegan quesadillas, the ‘culture of the transistor’ is alive and well. Pirate radio stations broadcasting music and news in Haitian Creole have loyal followings, mostly of an older generation for whom radio was the primary medium during their youth. Listening brings back memories of a prosperous 1940s and 50s Haiti that recent narratives centered on catastrophe tend to bury. David Goren, who has not just written about but also mapped Brooklyn’s pirate stations, reminds us that these aural communities connect past and present, and perhaps future as well.

Guest Editor– Alejandra Bronfman

Click here for the full series!

—-

Station Logo Grid, Courtesy of Author

‘A lot of these stations, especially the Haitian stations, they have such an extensive music library that a song will come on the radio and all of a sudden my mom is like, ‘Oh my God! Your grandma used to have this record and she played it every Saturday!’ says Joan Martinez, a young Haitian-American born in the US and a former program host on some of the unlicensed Kreyol language stations. “Now she’s transported back to being on the island, with the big radio that’s a piece of furniture in the living room. People are chatting, little drinks are flowing about, my grandmother milling about in a gorgeous dress. It’s kind of like that whole nostalgia era that unfortunately was probably lost because of the political turmoil in Haiti. So it’s harkening back to a good time, to a simpler time, a better time, a more carefree era.”

Every day, the skies of New York City fill up with unseen clouds of radio signals spreading over immigrant neighborhoods. These culturally charged clouds of radio energy burst with a flow of content that continually shifts and transforms, following the lifecycle and rhythm of the streets.

From clandestine studios tucked behind store fronts, DJs transform time and physical space with Konpa, Reggae and Soca music, mixing the sounds of ancestral homes with the thump and challenge of adapting to a new life in the United States. Jolted by electrified fingers of Signal, the old radio poetry of hiss and hum leaps from a scattered forest of antennas connected to transmitters hidden away inside rooftop sheds. In Brooklyn, the signals alight on Flatbush Avenue, blasting from radios in dollar vans, bakeries, churches and on street corners and kitchen tables. By accessing an analog technology that (outside of the radio itself) is essentially free for the listener, economically marginalized communities avoid the subscription and data fees built in to the conveniences of the digital life. Listeners, often the elders of the community, extend metal antennas and position the radios just so, trying to catch the elusive vibrations of crucial music, news and information that are seldom felt in New York City’s legal and mostly corporate owned media soundscape. 

“These underground, unlicensed or pirate stations have been around for as long as there has been radio,” Martinez says. The legality of radio stations stems from The Communications Act of 1934, legislation that created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency tasked with penalizing unlicensed stations and shutting them down. “The focus really was on the listeners.” says Rosemary Harold, chief of FCC Enforcement ‘because what had happened before licensing became what we know as today, was that listeners weren’t able to consistently hear radio broadcasts. And now we’re kind of in a modern iteration of that.” 

Others, like pirate radio historian John Anderson, see the Act as unfairly slanted towards commercial interests, awarding “the highest powers and clearest channels” to stations that sold advertising, tilting the medium away from serving specific communities. “By privileging commercial speech over non-commercial speech and by basically saying if you are a special interest, we will not award you a license.” Anderson says. “You create the conditions for there to be dissension over the media policy, which will lead people into radical actions, like putting stations on the air without permission.” In Flatbush, stations broadcast primarily to Haitians, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Grenadians and Orthodox Jews. The Haitian stations are particularly active in East Flatbush with just under a dozen broadcasting daily in Kreyol to the large Haitian community. 

Jacques Dessaline Boulevard sign, courtesy of author
Joan Martinez, courtesy of author

“I came across it at a very young age. There was this really popular station back in the late 80s, Radio Guinee, and it was based in Brooklyn.” Joan Martinez says. “Nobody knows where it was, there are suspicions. But all I know is from Friday night all the way to Sunday night, you would just hear a series of these stations every weekend and it would be the place where you could listen to the latest in Haitian pop music, rap music. It was also the news, my parents and their friends would all sit around the radio and they would just be politicking in the living room getting really loud, you know, dancing, singing along that sort of thing. It was just like a meeting ground and the radio was guiding it.” 

This phase of New York City pirate radio rose from the ashes of a previous scene dating to the late sixties: a dozen or so stations sporadically run mostly by white teenagers: a mix of hippies, radicals and electronically inclined misfits. By 1987, this loose collective of friends and rivals devolved into infighting after a short-lived attempt to broadcast from international waters off Jones Beach. This created room for new pirate radio voices from diverse communities that were increasingly being pushed off the legal airwaves by high costs, format consolidation, and  “the low power desert”, an FCC-led phaseout of small community broadcasters. The local pirates joined a growing national wave of progressive pirate radio activity taking  advantage of a new generation of cheap FM transmitters imported from China or homebrewed in makeshift workshops by free radio activists.

Radio La Voix Du Peuple Flyer,
Image by Author

By the early 90’s, immigrant community-focused broadcasters In New York City flipped the unspoken rules of the earlier pirates who broadcast mainly late at night on a few pre-determined “safe” frequencies, instead filling the FM dial from bottom to top, day and night. In 2000, under pressure from a nationwide increase in pirate radio activity, the FCC introduced a new license class: Low Power FM (LPFM) but opposition from National Public Radio and the National Association of Broadcasters shut down the issuing of new licenses. That severely limited LPFM’s availability in major urban markets due to rules requiring LPFM’s to be “three click aways” from existing stations. Local pirates felt they had no alternative but to continue broadcasting and some stations in Flatbush have been on the air for decades. Despite the passage of the Local Community Radio Act in 2011, opening a new licensing window with relaxed spacing requirements, few new frequencies were available in NYC due to an already crowded dial. The continued pirate presence is enabled by a sort of safety in numbers, an FCC enforcement team hampered by a low budget and a bureaucratic process of enforcement. 

Though the stations exist to serve their communities with news and culture and maybe make a little money for their owners and dj’s, they can and do cause interference for listeners of licensed stations, particularly low-powered non-commercial broadcasters like WFMU, a beloved freeform music station. Interference near their frequency has inspired the Brooklyn Pirate Watch Twitter group to keep a wary eye on pirate operations.

Storefont available, photo courtesy of author

Interference aside, FCC commissioners and staff publicly fume at the pirates for a range of potential public safety violations, some more theoretical than others and claim they are somehow harming their own communities, and wonder finally, why don’t they just stream on the internet. By viewing radio piracy purely from a legal perspective, critics miss the cultural and historic forces driving the Haitian pirates. During the Duvalier dictatorship (1957-1986) Haitians had access to only two stations broadcasting in Kreyol, rather than French, the language of the elite. One was Radio Lumiere, a religious station and the other Radio Haiti-Inter, a fiercely independent voice whose director Jean Dominque was assassinated in 1999.

“The peasant in Haiti, while he’s working on his farm you know he had a transistor.” Says Dr. Jean Eddy St. Paul, Director of the Haitian Studies Institute at the City University of New York. ‘And many peasants, they don’t have money to buy tobacco to smoke, but they will have money to buy the battery to put in the transistor. The first generation of migration, in the US, was during the 1960s and for many of those people the culture of transistor was part of their everyday life, so they’re still maintaining the culture of transistor. For them, having a radio station is very important.’ 

In July 2019, on a side street in East Flatbush, I met a man calling himself “Joseph” aka “Haitian” (“because I’m a pure Haitian!”), part of a group that keeps Radio Comedy FM on the air. “There’s no owners and committee. It’s a bunch of young guys”. Joseph says, “We have to do something positive for our community. Right now the Marines are in Haiti and we don’t know what’s next! CNN don’t show you this! BBC don’t show you this! So what we do, we have people in Haiti that call us and tell us what’s going on and will send us pictures. This is how we get our information. And bring it to the people…. I have family over there, my mother’s still there. So I have to know what’s going on. 

At this point in the digital age, it’s an open question how long these analog pirate stations will remain relevant, as their audiences age, neighborhoods gentrify and younger listeners gravitate to social media platforms. The answer seems to lie with their elderly and impoverished listeners. “They don’t have enough money to buy the newspapers understand?.” Joseph says.” For him that makes it worth it to keep Radio Comedy on the air despite a crackdown from the FCC backed by the PIRATE Act signed into law in 2020 that increases fines to $100,000 a day up to $2 million. But the legislation lacks funding to enforce the new regulations. With a federal statute still in place reducing fines down to the ability to pay, it’s unclear whether the PIRATE Act will be anything more than another in an escalating series of scare tactics. 

“If they don’t want us to do it just make it easy for us. Let’s make a meeting with those guys [the FCC],” Joseph says. ‘We’re going to provide the air for you. A frequency. You’re going to pay for example, $500 a month even $1,000 a month.’ We will be more than happy to do it. “

Pirate Radio Activity Chart, Courtesy of Author

Though the FCC has recently suggested the possibility of a new round of LPFM licenses in the future, the already crowded nature of NYC’s FM band makes it unlikely that new frequencies will be made available to the current pirate stations. In addition the FCC doesn’t want to be seen as rewarding illegal activity by granting a license to former pirate broadcasters, which was a prohibition in LPFM’s earlier licensing periods. And for the moment, Joseph, who’s been running unlicensed stations since 1991 (‘it’s an addiction’) is equally unlikely to cede the airwaves. He sees Radio Comedy as not just a radio station, but a community lifeline. 

 “You know many children we save? There was a bunch of guys…Jamaican, Trinidadian, Haitian trying to form a gang. We talked to them, bring them to the station. Most of them have a diploma now. Without the radio, most of them probably get locked up or dead.” 

Even with the PIRATE act on the books, the number of stations on the air in Brooklyn has remained steady with an average of about 25 per day and the advent of the Coronavirus pandemic has only sharpened their mission. In March 2020 as the spread of Covid-19 lead to NYC’s lockdown, the unlicensed Haitian broadcasters and the other West Indian stations in Brooklyn took a step closer to their listeners, increasing their air time and enhancing their formats to deliver information about the virus both in New York and in their countries of origin amid the heavy toll it took on the community.

Click here to hear Station IDs for Radio Lumiere, Radio Independans, and La Voix du Peuple!

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Featured Image: Antenna in Flatbush, courtesy of David Goren

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An award-winning radio producer, David Goren has created programming for the BBC, Jazz at Lincoln Center Radio, the Wall Street Journal Magazine, and NPR’s “Lost and Found Sound” series, as well as audio-based installations for Proteus Gowanus Radio Cona and the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective. In 2016, he was an artist-in residence at Wave Farm, a center for the transmission arts.

Since 2014, David has been recording New York City’s prodigious pirate radio activity and researching the evolution of this grassroots community radio movement resulting in the release of  “Outlaws of the Airwaves: The Rise of Pirate Radio Station WBAD” (2018) for KCRW’s “Lost Notes” podcast, New York City’s Pirates of the Air for the BBC World Service (2019) and the “Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map 2.0” (2020)  which was featured in The New Yorker. He presented “Tracing Neighborhoods in the Sky,” as part of the Fall 2019 Franke Lectures at Yale University. In January 2021, the Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map became a partner of the Library of Congress’ Radio Preservation Task Force.

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tape reel

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Archivism and Activism: Radio Haiti and the Accountability of Educational Institutions–Laura Wagner

Listen to yourself!: Spotify, Ancestry DNA, and the Fortunes of Race Science in the Twenty-First Century–Alexander Cowen

SO! Amplifies: Marginalized Sound—Radio for All–J Diaz

INC

What Doesn’t the Algorithm See? With Rosa Menkman and Joanna Zylinska

“We need to focus on what remains unrendered, or unseen – what we are blind to.” – Rosa Menkman

On Friday evening, NCAD (National College of Art and Design, Dublin) and The Digital Hub hosted a webinar with Rosa Menkman and Joanna Zylinska. It was the fifth event in the Digital Cultures series, and my first time tuning in. I expected a straightforward panel discussion, but after the host, Rachel O’Dwyer introduced the two artists, we were shown two presentations first by Rosa and Joanna. Seeing them back-to-back provided a nice opportunity to notice similarities between their areas of expertise and differences in how they approach machine vision and algorithmic blindspots.

Rosa’s presentation “Destitute Vision” demonstrated her keenness to experiment with alternative forms of lecturing. In a mesmerising 15-minute work, she explores how artistic interventions can help us understand technologies of perception. In a calm voice-over, she proposes that data has the potential to be fluid, but it is the architecture through which it moves that distorts it and molds it into a singular form. Instead of asking what algorithms see, Rosa inquires what they render invisible.

I enjoyed learning about her “BLOB of Im/Possible Images” project, a playfully named 3D gallery that shows images chosen by a group of particle physicists, who visualised important concepts or phenomena that cannot (yet) be rendered. I can see how this type of speculative thinking opens up new possibilities for understanding each other across disciplines and types of expertise.

Still from Rosa Menkman’s “BLOD of Im/Possible Images,” found on newart.city (click on image to visit).

Joanna’s presentation explored her experience of using an Artbreeder GAN algorithm to render images of eyes and brains, which turned into an artwork titled “Neuromatic.” Her choice to focus on these body parts points to an interest in pinning down what exactly constitutes seeing. She explained that even though we know a lot about the human body and its complex processes, the phenomenon of seeing remains somewhat of a mystery.

In her research, Joanna considers what it means for humans to endow machines with the capacity of seeing, and inquires whether machines can see at all. Her approach proves the value of artists borrowing from other fields – in this case, from philosophy – to tackle a concept they deem interesting. Indeed, later in the discussion, Joanna talked about how her practice requires re-learning biology and philosophy and using their knowledges in a way that breaks rules and poses unconventional questions. These methods are usually inaccessible by scientists, who are more limited by funding requirements and goal-oriented methodologies.

What followed the presentations was a productive discussion about collaboration, modes of seeing, and the role visual arts play in rendering visible different technological and biological phenomena. I left the event feeling like I got to look at artistic research from a new angle, one that reveals their playfulness and lack of rigid expectations as assets and activators of interdisciplinary understanding.

Found on Wellcome Collection: Dissection of the skull, showing the eyes with attached nerves and muscles. Lithograph by G.H. Ford, 1864.

In the discussion, Rosa pointed out that scientists want to open up their knowledges to other experts and communities, and that artists are often a bridge between scientific fields and people who are unfamiliar with them. Similarly, Joanna noted that artists often deal with the same themes as engineers or scientists, but the endpoint of their projects tends to differ, and their scope can be broader.

On the topic of interdisciplinarity, Joanna pointed out that jumping between fields reveals similarities between them, but also shows their respective blindspots. She stressed that the aim shouldn’t be to create some sort of (unattainable) universal knowledge, but rather to notice each other’s limitations and find common ground, without flattening the differences that remain.

Still from Joanna Zylinska’s “Neuromatic.”

What started as a conversation about specific themes – machine vision, algorithmic limitations, collaboration – shifted to a meditation on why people desire to model and represent the world. Joanna asked if there is a single world out there to be represented, hinting at the intrinsic subjectivity of perception and sensations.

“Vision is just one of the senses, it is never just vision because it’s always already expanded, it’s environmental, it’s always been haptic. But the human has been constructed as a visual being. There is a history to vision and the human as a visual, visualising subject. We have to address that history.” – Joanna Zylinska

The discussion also carried climate urgency undertones, as the guests noted the importance of recognising non-human actants in the world in our explorations of modes of perception. Instead of seeking a “total vision” that encompasses different kinds of experiences, Joanna suggested that treating this concept as a speculative, artistic question allows for exploring the human desire to understand our limitations.

Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square” painting: the experience of looking at “nothing”?

Joanna noted she could see a corporation exploiting an idea of “hyper vision.” Yes, I can imagine a neoliberal Tesla-esque project using computer vision to obtain the “perfect” way to see and analyse the world. Elon Musk would announce it at a self-serving event, claiming he is changing the world, only to grant access to this new “product” to a select few, dodging critique and refusing to consider why a “total vision” would be a good idea in the first place. In this ecocentric and capitalist mode of thinking, to see the world from every angle would mean to own it from every angle.

Trees have eyes in Rachel MacLean’s “Eyes to Me”

In the end, it boils down to agency. Knowing that current infrastructures of digital cultures are shaped by profit- and data-oriented corporations, we have to be vigilant when thinking about who acts as a user and who is being used. Both Joanna and Rosa discussed these power structures. They highlighted that algorithms – sometimes perceived as abstract and incorporeal – have very real socio-political consequences, often harming already marginalised groups when used in the hands of immigration enforcement or banks.

For me, the all-encompassing influence algorithms already have was the most important takeaway from this event. Artistic interventions can shed light on the shadowy inner workings of certain algorithms without vilifying them. But we have to acknowledge the limitations of our perception – literal and conceptual – before we engage with other modes of seeing.

Links for further research:

Watch the full event back on YouTube.

See other events in the Digital Cultures series here.

Read Rosa’s recent publication, Beyond Resolution.

Read Joanna’s recent publication, AI Art.