News from the Collective

This is the first of what will be a three-part blog series in which we present the insightful conversation between film professor, media producer, theorist, and activist dr. Alexandra Juhasz and journalist, historian, and filmmaker Peter Snowdon. Last year, the two held multiple virtual conversations at the digital roundtables of Zoom about the ubiquity of such communication methods and underlying philosophical themes such as being human in communities across distance in times of the pandemic.

In the Fall of 2020, Alex Juhasz, in lockdown at home in Brooklyn, NY wrote an email to Peter Snowdon in Belgium. They didn’t know each other, but he had quoted her once or twice in his new book, The People Are Not an Image (Verso: 2020), which she had just completed reading. They knew of each other, as people of certain intellectual/art worlds are wont to do. Over a few email back-and-forths, she explained that beyond complimenting him on his book, she hoped for something quite a bit more: might they talk? Could they record this, transcribe it, and try to share what emerged from their digital encounter about online video? These resulting words have been both edited and changed for clarity, and at one or two points extended, to give space for tracks of thought unfolding. What follows became something they named and did together online during COVID (to which they both ultimately succumbed over this time!): a demonstration of some possibilities for being alive, human, and connected, in what we hope is a non-sentimental, non-simplifying kind of way, albeit via corporate technologies and their dominant capitalist platforms.

Alex

Peter, I want to start by situating ourselves in place and time and technology—a conversation recorded and transcribed from Zoom—for reasons related to our kindred theories and practices around what you call “vernacular video.” I also need you to know that this will be my last scholarly endeavor for a while. My mother is really sick and I’m flying to Colorado this afternoon. I’m very stressed out. But I also need you to know that I prepared for this conversation as one of the last things I did in my own specific space of COVID-inspired trauma. I was just as re-energized and excited by your book this morning as I was the first time I read it, and this reminded me that our intellectual and activist commitments, and the ideas and practices that matter to us as individuals and allies, are part of what makes me feel most alive, human, and connected. So, that’s where I’m coming from: a little distracted and stressed and also a human being meeting and talking with you for the first time on a video-screen about activist digital media, what I myself called “ThirdTube” in 2007 in my born-and-stay-digital Learning from YouTube (MIT Press), so many years ago now in the short but fertile life of social media and its dominant capitalist platforms.

Peter

Thank you for that—for making the space and time to talk at a moment that is so fraught for you, and for letting me know that for you, this conversation isn’t just another piece of work, but—like all the best things we call “work”—something that gives you energy.

It’s a strange period. As we speak, I’m sitting in an unorthodox position myself, not surrounded by books or DVDs for once, because I’m in the bedroom! My partner and I, we’re both working from home in an apartment that is large enough, but still isn’t really designed for that. But it’s quite nice in some ways to be in what is not my usual space! And I’m really grateful to you for reaching out because this is the first evidence for me that the book physically exists, aside from one friend who posted a photograph of it on Twitter just before I completely bailed out of social media in order to try and remain relatively sane. So, it’s nice to feel that the connections that can arise by publishing a book can continue in different forms in this time and even make possible some things which weren’t possible—or were at least a lot less likely—before.

And what you said about feeling human through being engaged with reading or watching actually resonates a lot with my feelings when I was working on the whole project: which for me is indivisibly made up of the film I made back in 2013 (The Uprising), the book I have just published, and also—just as vitally—all the invisible networks of roots and tendrils around them and which connect them to each other, and which are by far, for me who was in them, the larger part of the iceberg. For there was something about the insurrections that broke out across the Arab world in 2010-2011, and about the videos produced by their actors which, when I encountered them at the time they were being made, reconnected me with a sense of my own humanity. So, if the book serves any purpose, I would hope that it is one of reconnection—in a non-sentimental, non-simplifying kind of way—that mirrors some of what I experienced when watching and working with these videos the first time.

Alex

I have gotten into the practice of reaching out to authors when I read a book that moves me. Usually just a short email of recognition and thanks. But in your case, I wanted more! I was writing voluminously in its margins as I was reading; I was so active and excited. I no longer really work on YouTube. But this isn’t because I’m not interested in its potential, or what we can learn about people, technology, activism, and video inside of and because of this corporate media behemoth. So, I didn’t just want to read you, I wanted to talk with you about people-made video, so many years after I had spent too much time in that very space. And I wanted to actively engage with you as a writer and thinker, because while our work shares an object, a political sensibility, a shared training in avant-gardist or formalist media traditions, our findings are often quite dissimilar. I’m excited to learn with you and I’m really thankful to you for your book. This is a review, a celebration, a conversation.

I thought we could start by you explaining the book and the larger project.

Peter

I think everything I do is part of my own learning process. So, I hope the book remains open-ended in its inquiry. Now that I am in some sense detached from the arguments I put forward – if only by the simple fact of the book being out there, in the world, in material form, and I cannot change it anymore – I can step back a little and look at them again.

The book grew out of making the film, The Uprising – a montage film made exclusively out of videos posted to social media in 2011-12 by the actors of the Arab revolutions. But the film too grew out of something else, because it was not originally intended to be “a film.” It became what it is through a series of decisions that were made over the years, and which were all oriented towards trying to help these videos reach as many people as possible. While I was working on the film, over two years of research and editing with my friend and partner in crime, Bruno Tracq, I was seeing lots of things that I couldn’t put in it and having lots of ideas that didn’t fit into the constraints that we had set. So, I began to write about these things in order to provide an outlet for everything that was bubbling. Over time that slowly grew into this book.

And there was also a more formal context that encouraged the choice to seek an outlet in writing: I was only able to do all that I did because I had, at a rather late age, entered a PhD program for which I had been awarded a very generous bursary. This meant I was able to give up other forms of gainful employment for a while and really just focus on my filmmaking and writing. I was doing a practice-based PhD, so as the written component, I was able to present a piece of writing that was more like a book than a traditional dissertation. I wanted above all to write something that could stand on its own, independently of the film, because I didn’t want the reception of the book to be conditioned by people’s reception of the film – I wanted it to be able to win its own audience, including among people who might not like, or might even be quite hostile, to the film itself. So, the book isn’t an attempt to explain the film, though I hope that it can provide a context which may lead some people to be able to see the film differently than they would have done without it.

In any case, the book and the film are driven by the same underlying invitation, which is that I want people to look at the videos produced by the actors of the Arab revolutions. I want people to actually take the time to see these videos and to form their own responses and reactions to them. I want to persuade people that it’s worth taking the time to engage with these images as an aesthetic proposition, not just a data point for social scientists. And I want to argue that both the videos themselves, and the act of posting them online, are worthy of our attention, whether we feel ourselves to be addressed by them directly, or less directly.

Alex

I am drawn to be in conversation with you in large part because you are doing work that I think of as in conversation or connection to mine: a practice-based engagement with contemporary political media.

You started this project by making a film, but your making was not disconnected to your writing or your PhD work. And that was not disconnected to a political project in which you seem deeply invested. Your orientation and practice as a media maker and writer invested in digital culture called to me because I don’t have many compatriots in a practice-based project itself rooted in a deeply felt and enacted political and theoretical engagement in the space of media. In my own PhD research in the eighties, I was making AIDS activist video with a VHS camcorder within my own activist community. My collective’s video activism (The Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise) became part of my doctoral research that itself evolved into my first monograph on activist media, AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video (Duke 1995).

These linked meditated iterations—making, thinking, and writing—about activist media were embedded within the first decade of the ongoing AIDS pandemic in North America. And that raises my first question: what was your political stake and position in relation to the uprisings and their videos? And did that change through the period you were making the film, and then writing your book, that is through your praxis?

Peter

Perhaps what I am most conscious of, also coming out of other films that I’ve made, whether they were explicitly political or not, is that all of them extend for me out of something that one might call not simply an ethics, but also a politics of friendship. I’ve realized over time that one reason why I’m a lousy would-be professional filmmaker is that I don’t enjoy making films with people who are not or could not potentially become my friends. There has to be a sense of complicity, and of mutual play, which can possibly – but not certainly – open up on to a deepening sense of trust. So, I guess I see friendship in this context as both a politics, and an experiment – something that may not work out, a risk that has to be taken, and which is deeply imbricated with the eventual success or failure of the film. And for me, this is far more important than anything more rationally identifiable, like a conceptual or ideological alignment, or even some participatory protocol that is meant to safeguard against the abuse of power, but will probably, or even inevitably, fail.

Alex

I’m curious to know what led you to believe that you could be in an ethical friendship with these human beings, these video makers. My practice as a community-based activist video maker and theorist has led me to try to make video in communities in which I already reside. So, it’s not even friendship for me, it’s shared alignment in a known community. I made AIDS activist videos when I was an AIDS activist. I made a documentary about leftist understandings of media and the scale of political movements with and about my sister, Antonia, a well-known activist and writer in the United States during and about ending the Bush administration (Scale: Measuring Media Might, 2007). I understand making media where I live, and with those with whom I want to change the world, as a feminist ethics of documentary. So, do you want to talk about how potential friendship was a facet of your politics or practice of with these videos?

Peter

Perhaps the basic question is, why was I watching these videos in the first place? And the simple answer is that at the time when these revolutions broke out, a lot of my closest friends were living in these countries – were from there, had been born there – and I wanted to know what was going on with them.

My work on these videos was therefore one outcome of my own personal journey over the preceding twenty years. And there were two essential stages to that. The first was when I moved from the UK to live in Paris in 1992. I was there for five years, and by the time I left, essentially 90% of my time was spent among friends who were Algerian immigrants or the children of immigrants. At a certain moment, when I was beginning to struggle with the fact of being a foreigner in Paris, through a series of chance encounters, these people had – from within their own even more complex and conflicted situation – taken me in, and adopted me, as it were. There was one family in particular who gave me a sense of being at home, even though – and, perhaps, especially because – this was with and among people who were never going to really feel straightforwardly at home themselves. This was my first real encounter with structural racism, not as something analysed in a book, or implicated in my own relative privilege (“relative” as in “situated,” not “relative” as in “less than”), but as something directly impacting the people who were at the centre of my life. But it was also more than that – it was an experience of great generosity welling up out of the centre of that injustice, despite and beyond it. From these friends, I learned something important about being a human being which connected with and deepened things I already knew, if more obscurely, through my own family background, as someone who had grown up at one generation’s remove from the working class. And if I had to sum that up in one word, it would be, hospitality.

My friends in Paris were not all Algerian, of course. When my time in Paris ran out, I’d been working for a year or so on short-term contracts with UNESCO, where I’d met people from across the whole world, including most of the Arab region. And so, as I was beginning to think about leaving a city where I felt there was no professional future for me, and I didn’t have a clue about what to do with my life, an opportunity came up through an Egyptian friend to go and work there. I jumped at that opportunity. After all, I had spent several years writing documents for UNESCO about what was wrong with the way that “the West” dealt with other peoples and their cultures, but I’d never been outside Europe. And I thought, well, what if I’m all wrong about that? I should go and see!

So, I went to Egypt and lived there for three years, working at the English edition of the Al-Ahram newspaper, and that was also a deeply transformative experience for me, both personally and politically. Not least because Cairo in general, and the paper in particular, were a meeting point for people from well beyond Egypt: from Palestine of course, but also from Sudan, Zimbabwe, Ghana… what felt like a large part of the African continent. It was also a place that looked east, towards the Indian sub-continent and the rest of Asia, in a very different way from the way that Europe did. Which meant that when I finally went to India, I arrived there from Egypt – not just in the sense that that was where I got on the plane, but conceptually, too. This helped reconfigure my inner map of the world, not just intellectually, but also physically and intuitively. It helped me realise in my bones that there isn’t just one world, one map, but many, and that “my” map – the one I had grown up with – had no particular importance or priority, in and of itself.

After I came back to Europe in 2000, I spent much of the next decade travelling back to Cairo at every opportunity. It was Cairo that still felt like “home,” like the place where my most important, and most vital, friendships were. I put a lot of energy into maintaining that as best I could, despite the distance. So, in 2011, when the revolutions broke out, almost the first thing I did was go online looking for my friends.

Remember, in the first days of the Egyptian uprising, there was a concerted attempt by the regime to disrupt communications with the outside world. So, I couldn’t get in touch with anyone by email, and the telephone lines weren’t working. But many of my friends were journalists, as I had been when I lived in Cairo. I knew that if anyone had access to a satellite phone, it would be them. I might be able to find them online to see if they were safe, even if I couldn’t talk to them directly. Almost immediately, I fell down the rabbit hole that is social media in times of popular unrest. And at the bottom of the rabbit hole were not just many of my friends, who were, by and large, doing okay, but also all these people making videos. And suddenly, I was spending all my waking hours hanging out with these videos, and with the people who were making them, some of whom I knew personally, and some of whom I came to know, or at least be in contact with, through the online connections forming around these events.

A lot of this activity was sharing videos and talking about them, and that combination of circulation and discussion stuck with me. Everything I’ve done since is basically an attempt to enlarge (or recreate) the circle of that initial sense of residing in a community through video – a community of discourse and exchange that goes well beyond just looking at images, and includes many, many layers of displacement and non-coincidence.

Alex

Your words resonate with what draws me to social media as well. I became a theorist of the internet and internet video in the decades after my AIDS work because my media praxis has always been medium agnostic. I am not a theorist or maker of video or film or websites per se. Rather, I’m an activist and a human being who wants to be in community and change the world with like-minded people using whatever medium is at hand. Your “being human” in community across distance is particularly resonant to me, especially because I’ve been recently working on practices of media proximity, given the protocols of social distancing and the fact of fake news (fakenews-poetry.org).

My current work on fake news and radical digital media literacy (including a 2021 book co-written with Nishant Shah, Really Fake! that blends out creative renderings of situated authentification through stories, poetry, photos, and dating, in its many senses, temporal and inter-personal) strives to be human together while not letting go of technology. Media suit or align with their people, struggles, and places. I appreciate how your work on vernacular video is situated in a specific local and temporal struggle—what became known as the Arab Spring—itself locally and differently experienced across the countries of the region, and the changing conditions of their struggles. You name here and with more detail in the book, how making video and then also talking about and sharing this is a powerful place for political empowerment, agency, and humanity making—well, I agree with you—and am pleased to learn about this in both its situated and distributed formats.

Peter

For me, too, these videos were never just about “video”. They were always about experimenting with the multi-layered nature of community via technologies that preserve or repurpose some of those layers in order to bring us together differently, even as they create new kinds and qualities of distance and absence. And that is also what we are doing “here” today – coming together differently to trace out yet another path, or at least one segment of what may become one, through these fields of presence and absence we call “media”.

––

Read the follow-up to the conversation here.

by: Xuan Zhao & Heather Morrison

Abstract

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ, http://doaj.org/) is an essential world-wide open access service (16,134 journals listed, as of March 29, 2021), which promotes quality, peer-reviewed open access journals. The journals included can get higher and broader visibility. To make the most of this service, journal editors need to pay attention to the accuracy of their entries in the DOAJ metadata (journal-title, publisher information, location information, subject, language, URLs, etc.). This post aims to explain the benefits for journals of improving the quality of metadata and what journal editors can do. 

Our discussion is mainly based on recent research of the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons team and cites some other researchers’ findings. 

For journals, what are the benefits of improving the DOAJ metadata?

As detailed on the DOAJ website (DOAJ, https://doaj.org/apply/why-index/), there are five benefits for journals indexed in DOAJ, and accordingly, five reasons to improve the metadata: 

1. “Reputation and prominence”

“DOAJ is the most important community-driven, open access service in the world and has a reputation for advocating best practices and standards in open access. By indexing your journal in DOAJ, its reputation and prominence will be enhanced.”

We assume that journals with accurate and precise entries can give a serious and active impression, helping them maintain the reputation. 

2. “Standards and best practice”

“DOAJ’s basic criteria for inclusion have become the accepted way of measuring an open access journal’s adherence to standards in scholarly publishing. We can help you adopt a range of ethical and quality standards, making your journals more attractive publishing channels. DOAJ is committed to combatting questionable publishers and questionable publishing practices, helping to protect researchers from becoming trapped by unethical journals.”

As open access journals are listed in a quality standards system like DOAJ, it is important to make sure that their information is correct to distinguish them from the questionable journals undoubtedly. 

3. “Funding and compliance”

“Open access publication funds often require that authors who want funding must publish in journals that are included in DOAJ. Indexing in DOAJ makes your journals compliant with many initiatives and programmes around the world, for example Plan S in Europe or Capes/Qualis in Brazil.”

With correct entries in metadata, the DOAJ journals can be more easily discovered by foundations, related programmes and organizations.

4. “Discoverability and visibility”

“DOAJ metadata is free for anyone to collect and use, which means it is easily incorporated into search engines and discovery services. It is then propagated across the internet. If you provide us with article metadata for your journal, this will be supplied to all the major aggregators and the many research organisations and university library portals who use our widgets, RSS feeds, API and other services. Indexing your journal in DOAJ is likely to increase traffic to your website and give greater exposure to your published content. Levels of traffic to a journal website typically increase threefold after inclusion in DOAJ. Your journal’s visibility in search engines, such as Google, will improve.”

Indexing journals in DOAJ means they are more easily discovered and cited by other researchers. Correcting metadata will help raise the chances that people working in the same area will find the relevant research they need.

5. “International coverage”

“Our database includes more open access journals from a diverse list of countries than any of the other major indexing services. We have a global editorial team via a network of Managing Editors, Ambassadors and volunteers, so we will do our best to offer local support in your language. We promise you that information about your journal will be seen around the world.”

The DOAJ journals are aimed at readers from all over the world and may be seen by people who are not proficient in the journals’ language. In this case, journal editors need to ensure the correctness of data entry so that readers can read with confidence. 

What’s more, a higher quality database will be more valuable for researchers and promote the entire OA ecosystem. Especially for services like university libraries, which tend to keep up with the latest content and take advantage of metadata corrections. 

In brief, keeping the entries of DOAJ metadata correct reinforces the advantages for journals mentioned above and benefits the users of DOAJ. 

As journal editors, what can we do?

As demonstrated in a study of the SKC (Zhao, Borges & Morrison, 2021), “as of January 5, 2021, only 30% of DOAJ journals have a ‘last update’ date within the previous year (2020)”, which means only 30% of DOAJ journals fully or partially updated their information in DOAJ system. To make the best use of DOAJ, journal editors should regularly check their entries to ensure that their data is correct and up to date. For example, if journal URLs are not kept up to date, an incorrect URL means, at best, that the journal cannot be found. Crawford (2016), in a study of DOAJ journals, found journals flagged that were as malware (or as containing malware) by Mal- warebytes, Windows Defender, McAfee Site Advisor or Office 2013. 

Most of the visible inconsistencies in the metadata are input errors or location errors (listed below). Most of the input errors are “small differences in punctuation and/or characters, extra spaces at the beginning and/or at the end”, as reported by SKC (Zhao, Borges & Morrison, 2021). Combined with the findings of Crawford (2016), we list the data to be modified by categories as follows:

• Input error or location error in:

wrong column, journal title, special character, keywords, copyright information URL, plagiarism information URL, URL for journal’s instructions for authors, other submission fees information URL, preservation services, preservation service: national library, preservation information URL, deposit policy directory, persistent article identifiers, URL for journal’s open access statement, etc. 

• Publisher name duplicates:

Extra space or short of space, minor detail (e.g. non-English character in one but not the other), minor difference in punctuations and/or characters (e.g. “Abant İzzet Baysal Üniversitesi” vs. “Abant İzzet Baysal University”), abbreviation in one but not the other (e.g. “Asociación Interuniversitaria de Investigación Pedagógía” vs. “Asociación Interuniversitaria de Investigacion Pedagogica (AIDIPE)”), etc.

• “APC-charging journals that don’t clearly state the amount charged” (Crawford, 2016)

Sometimes it is hard to indicate “who is the publisher”. We list some situations below:

• When there are branch publishers under one publisher, and all of them are recorded in DOAJ, especially when their journals’ websites do not have any clear indications ;
• When a publisher has more than one active names (perhaps due to different sponsors of one publisher, or the nature of commercial publishers), but their journals’ websites do not have any clear indications ;
• When journals changed their websites but didn’t renew the URLs in the DOAJ database;
• Invalid URLs;
• Unmatched publisher name/journal name and URLs.

DOAJ also provides article-level search and is working to encourage more journals to provide article-level metadata. It makes both the journal-level and article-level metadata available for anyone to download. (DOAJ, https://doaj.org/docs/public-data-dump/) Thus, it would be better if journal editors can ensure the correctness of the articles’ information. 

References

Crawford, W. (2016). Gold Open Access Journals 2011 – 2015. https://waltcrawford.name/goaj1115.pdf

Directory of Open Access Journals. Retrieved March 29, 2021, from http://doaj.org/

Public data dump. Directory of Open Access Journals. Retrieved March 29, 2021, from https://doaj.org/docs/public-data-dump/

Why index your journal in DOAJ? Directory of Open Access Journals. Retrieved March 29, 2021, from https://doaj.org/apply/why-index/

Zhao, X., Borges, L., & Morrison, H. (2021). Some limitations of DOAJ metadata for research purposes. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons. https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2021/02/10/some-limitations-of-doaj-metadata-for-research-purposes/

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.

Liveness, and company: Ian Coss’s finely tuned account of a “day in the life” of a radio station follows the programming rhythm of days and nights, from rollicking to quiet and back again. Radio is a predictable presence, an intimate friend who anticipates your needs even before you do. Coss draws from his years of listening to the listeners as he marks radio time and space in Cap Haïtien. Guest Editor– Alejandra Bronfman

——-

Fabrice Joseph is a mender, set up on a street corner in Cap Haïtien, Haiti’s second largest city. He shows me a red plastic toolbox filled with supplies — thread, wires, scraps of fabric—which he can use to fix a jammed zipper or stitch up a torn backpack strap. I stop because he’s cradling a radio set in his hands, tuned to the city’s most popular station: Radio Venus. 

We meet on a quiet day; Fabrice has been sitting on the stoop for five hours already with no work. Another day he’s engrossed in assembling a large umbrella—the kind food vendors use for shade—but the radio is still on, now propped on a ledge just behind his head. He replaces the batteries almost weekly, because the radio is always on. In the morning Radio Venus plays news, Fabrice tells me, followed by music as the day heats up. Then in the afternoon he’ll hear sports or perhaps a religious program, before the station returns to music in the evening. 

This arc Fabrice describes is designed to follow the arc of his day. In this post, I trace that link: between the rhythms of radio programming and the rhythms of daily life, to show how formatting choices create a heightened sense of ‘liveness’ on Haiti’s airwaves, with all content located in a specific moment: the present moment. 

In a technical sense, terrestrial radio broadcasting has always been defined by real time or ‘live’ transmission (an dirèk in Creole), a characteristic that is often invoked in discussions of the medium’s capacity to create shared experiences or even ‘imagined communities.’ And yet where I live in the United States, the passage of time is barely discernible on most commercial stations. Where radio schedules once varied from hour to hour (often reflecting gendered and classed norms of listening), today market research has driven the rise of so-called “format stations” that target specific interest groups and demographics with an equally targeted form of programming: non-stop sports, news, top 40, easy listening, etc. 

When I first visited Haiti in 2015, I was surprised to find a radio format unlike any I had grown up with, and not unlike those broadcast schedules of the 1920s and 1930s. While doing research in Cap Haïtien, I conducted a series of bandscans—systematic reviews of the entire radio dial—in order to identify the different types of programming heard on stations throughout the day there. I found the full range of talk and music-oriented shows you might expect, and yet of the 31 stations I picked up, only a handful carried the same type of programming all day. The vast majority carried every kind of program, including Fabrice’s favorite station, Radio Venus.

The Radio Venus studio sits on top of a three-story building, with a door leading straight out onto an open roof deck where the transmitter tower rises several more stories up in the air. That tower operates at 10 watts, just enough to relay the signal to a nearby mountain, where it’s then rebroadcast at roughly 450 watts, blanketing the country’s whole Northern Department. The person in charge of this whole system, as well as the overall flow of the day’s programs, is known as the opérateur. The station employs four operators—Molliere, Louis, Wilkonson and Simon—who work in shifts to cover the 24-hour schedule. This rotation provides stability as the hosts (or animateur) of different programs come and go—often showing up late, and sometimes not showing up at all. For long stretches of the day there is no host, so the operator just cues up a folder of songs in Windows Media Player, occasionally leaning over to trigger a station ID: a chesty voice that declares, “W’ap koute Radio Tele-Venus”—‘You are listening to Radio Tele-Venus.’

One day, while sitting behind the board of the cramped control room, Simon explains that the goal of the station’s format is to satisfy all of the listeners’ interests and to provide “stability” in their often unstable lives. That last descriptor, “estabilite,” strikes me as somewhat ironic, given that the station’s programming is constantly changing. But for Haitians like Fabrice, who listen all day while they work, the description fits: he never needs to touch the dial, and at the same time he knows exactly what he will hear. Indeed, most of the radio listeners I meet in Cap Haïtien praise the medium’s consistently variable nature; if they wanted to hear the same thing all day they could get a stereo that takes a kat memwa—a memory card—and load it up with their favorite mp3s. Radio should change with the hours of the day; that’s part of what makes it radio. 

Many of the staff at Radio Venus describe the art of matching programming to the mood of the moment, in terms of ‘hotness’ (cho). For example, it’s important to have a lively host on the air between about 10am to noon, usually playing konpa music, so that the radio ‘heats up’ to give listeners more energy for their day. This shift takes place simultaneously across virtually every station on the dial, such that it’s literally audible on the street, from countless battery-powered radio sets. The timeliness of this ‘heating up’ is further emphasized by the host—at Venus, a local favorite named Don Lolo—who constantly reads the exact hour and minute off of a large analog clock on the studio wall. Lolo’s job is to make the music live in the moment; to make it ‘hot.’ By the same token, when I interview the overnight operator, Louis, he tells me that since many listeners keep the radio on all night, it’s important that he doesn’t play any music that’s ‘too hot,’ so as not to disturb their sleep. Everything in its right time.

The most dramatic shift in programming, however, begins on Friday evening. For the entire weekend, the station drops most of its talk-oriented shows and plays constant music—almost all of which is bootlegged recordings of live concerts. The idea is to convey the freewheeling mood of a night out on the town, even for those who won’t be at a bar or concert. To keep up this atmosphere, the station operators can choose from whole folders of “konpa live” tracks dating back decades—most of which run twelve to fifteen minutes long. Again, this programming convention of playing live recordings on weekends is ubiquitous across the dial, and indeed across Haiti. Turn on the radio on a Saturday night and you will be hard pressed to find any music that was recorded in a studio. 

My first weekend at Radio Venus, I step out of the studio at dusk, and find the station’s signal is suddenly all around me—far more present than just a few hours earlier. Around the corner from the station, an electronics store has set up a row of folding chairs in the street, and is blasting Radio Venus for a small audience. At the end of the same block is a barbershop; there too the stereo is tuned to Venus, with one cabinet speaker set in its arched entryway. 

At this hour, both the street and the shop are definitively male spaces—save for some market women packing goods and a mother overseeing her son’s haircut, those listening in public are men. A cell card vendor is perched on top of the stereo speaker itself; a man with two live chickens—their heads poking out of the bottom of plastic shopping bags—stops by and quickly exchanges some money with one of the barbers, who plays some air guitar as the next customer takes his seat. One of the other remaining barbers is perched sideways in his stool, feet in the air and a bottle of Barbancourt rum in one hand. The energy is loose, encouraged by the radio announcer.

Back at the station, the small studio is lit only by a single fluorescent bulb, whose harsh light spills through the glass pane into the neighboring control room. Don Lolo is on the air once again, but his style is different. No more telling the time or giving long monologues. Instead he sings along in a full-throated voice, occasionally adding personal shout-outs. We learn that Gerald is celebrating a birthday today, just as Claire and Alex are marking their anniversary. When his phone then rings, instead of picking it up Lolo silences the call and responds by radio: “Sorry, I can’t talk now!” 

It’s late when Don Lolo wraps up his show and we head out of the studio, leaving Louis alone to cool the music back down for the overnight shift. The evening operator, Simon, offers to walk me home. At this hour, we can stroll down the middle of the street side by side, the city’s elaborate facades cast in silhouette by the occasional streetlight. As we head up the hill towards my place, Simon cocks his head and gestures across the street. I turn just in time to catch the station ID—“W’ap koute Radio Tele Venus”—coming out of a barbershop. The radio is still on.

Tune into a livestream of Radio Tele-Venus via Tune In: https://tunein.com/radio/Radio-Tele-Venus-1043-s181945/

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Featured Image: “An electronics vendor in Cap Haïtien, Haiti” by Ian Coss

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Ian Coss is an audio producer, composer and sound designer whose work spans the worlds of podcasting and performance. He has produced several critically acclaimed series with the Radiotopia network, including Ways of Hearing, The Great God of Depression, and Over the Road. His audio work has been reviewed by the New Yorker and the Guardian; featured on NPR, Al Jazeera and the BBC; and recognized with an Edward R. Murrow Award for ‘excellence in sound.’ Additionally, Ian has premiered live sound works at the Boston Museum of Science and Harvard University, and collaborated on immersive audio tours for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Richmond ICA, and other major art institutions. Ian holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from Boston University, where he conducted research on Haitian radio broadcasting and Indonesian shadow-puppetry. He continues this work as musical director for The Brothers Čampur, an international puppetry collaborative that has performed at major festivals in Indonesia, and at universities throughout the eastern United States. More on all these projects at iancoss.com.

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

Radio de Acción: Violent Circuits, Contentious Voices: Caribbean Radio Histories–Alejandra Bronfman

Radio Ambulante: A Radio that Listens –Carolina Guerrero

The Sweet Sounds of Havana: Space, Listening, and the Making of Sonic Citizenship–Vincent Andrisani

Over het plezier van samen servers overbelasten

Gisteravond vond onder leiding van The Hmm en PublicSpaces een virtuele tour plaats rond verschillende alternatieve platforms. Ongeveer 90 online deelnemers bezochten 5 open source platformalternatieven voor sociale media, samenwerktools, videoconferencing en onderwijspresentaties. Platforms waar eigen databeheer, hosting en de privacy van gebruikers voorop staan, en zo wel degelijk een alternatief bieden voor de infrastructuren van o.a. Google en Facebook waar we niet van lijken los te komen.

De tocht startte via de eigen livestream van The Hmm, waarna er uitstapjes naar de 5 platforms werden gemaakt. Bezoekers kregen steeds een link in de chat om zo naar de volgende stop te kunnen navigeren. Je kon echter ook in de livestream blijven hangen en daar de presentaties van de ‘platform hosts’ volgen. We ‘lurkten’ en namen online ruimtes over bij Fediverse (Mastodon), Ethercalc, Mozilla Hubs, Nextcloud en de command line interface Terminal.

Het platformhoppen verliep echter verre van vlekkeloos. Geluid viel soms weg, het laden van websites duurde erg lang, we kregen foutmeldingen en overbelastten servers. Maar dat was juist vermakelijk. Je zou het niet zeggen in tijden waarin de zinsnede ‘je staat nog op mute’ ons de strot uit komt en elke schermhapering ons irriteert, maar hier viel dat allemaal weg. Recent onderzoek van de Boekmanstichting naar online evenementen in coronatijd laat zien dat bezoekers bereid zijn over technische problemen heen te stappen, als het onderwerp interessant genoeg is. Gisteravond bleek dat eens te meer. Het onderwerp was nota bene de functionaliteit van deze platforms, en de improvisatie die van zowel hosts als bezoekers nodig bleek om de tocht voort te zetten, zorgde voor een gevoel van gezamenlijkheid. Het technisch trouble shooten was niet langer ruis, maar verplaatste naar de voorgrond. Na die eerste korte vlaag van irritatie, zagen we er met z’n allen de lol en het belang van in: de chat stroomde vol met triomfantelijke berichten als ‘We broke it!’

Een gevoel van eigenaarschap maakte zich daarnaast (onbewust) van ons meester. Gezamenlijk testen en ervaren hoe deze alternatieve platformen werken, zorgt voor frictie. Ze worden niet gehost door Big Tech met hun bijbehorende financiële en personele middelen, maar zijn kleinschalig en kunnen dus soms geen negentig mensen tegelijkertijd aan. Dit drukt je met je neus op het feit dat we gewend zijn geraakt aan geruisloze ervaringen op gratis platforms waar we niets zelf in de hand hebben. Het plezier van ontdekken, leren snappen hoe iets werkt is echter een broodnodige eerste stap naar dataeigenaarschap. Online evenementen als deze laten zien dat er behoefte aan is, dat het leuk is, en dat het kán!

Paz Sastre (ed.). Manifiestos sobre el arte y la red 1990-1999. EXIT Libris.

(Texto en español a continuación)

During the 90s, manifestos devoted to exploring the relationships between art and the ever-expanding net abounded. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the World Wide Web, the era of the “pioneers” of the 80s was fading and the limits of the “electronic frontier” and its future were beginning to be discussed. Artists, activists, hackers, writers, musicians, researchers, curators and theorists expressed in manifestos their political concerns and aesthetic stakes of the time, which are still relevant today. This publication, in Spanish, brings them together for the first time in a selection populated with web links that exceeds the margins of printed paper and transforms the book into a time machine, a non-stop journey through the “cyberspace” of the 20th century.

With selected texts from: VNX Matrix, Hakim Bey, Marko Peljhan, Critical Art Ensemble, Mark Dery, ADILKNO/BILWET, Sadie Plant, Matthew Fuller, Mark Amerika, Antoni Muntadas, Luther Blissett, Roy Ascott, TechNET, Strano Network, Richard Barbrook, Andy Cameron, Morgan Garwood, John Eden, Association of Autonomous Astronauts, Monochrom, Vuk Ćosić, Akke Wagenaar, Alexei Shulgin, Old Boys Network, Andreas Broeckmann, Guy Bleus, Pit Schultz, Geert Lovink, David Garcia, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Francesca da Rimini, Claudia Giannetti, Bruce Sterling, El Aleph, Amy Alexander, autonome a.f.r.i.k.a. gruppe, Sonja Brünzels, Ben Russell, James Wallbank, Redundant Technology Initiative, Natalie Bookchin, Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky and Randall Packer.

We hope you enjoy this trip and support us by purchasing the book or making a donation when you download the free digital version so that we can continue to explore the manifestos of the 21st century about the art and the net in future publications: https://exitmedia.net/EXIT/en/exit-libris/263-manifiestos-sobre-el-arte-y-la-red-1990-1999.html

Here you can download the ebook: https://exitmedia.net/EXIT/es/exit-libris/267-manifiestos-sobre-el-arte-y-la-red-1990-1999-pdf.html

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Who wants a ‘perfect’ algorithm?

Yesterday, the Nxt Museum hosted a Q&A with filmmaker and activist Shalini Kantayya. She is the director of the investigative documentary “Coded Bias” (2020) which exposes and explores the biases of artificial intelligence technologies prevalent yet mostly invisible in daily life. During the event moderated by filmmaker Bogomir Doringer, Kantayya stated that in the discussions surrounding the ethics of AI, the solution is not always technological, and it will likely not materialise in the never-ending race towards optimum efficiency. A different approach is needed to tackle the inequalities and biases built into AI.

In her film, Kantayya gives the spotlight to computer scientist and digital activist Joy Buolamwini, whose research into face detection algorithms helped expose their biases on the basis of race and sex. Alongside Buolamwini, multiple scientists and government watchog groups in the documentary explain and expose the biases that are programmed consciously and unconsciously into algorithms that perform inaccurately when interacting with photographs of women and people of colour.

Kantayya explains that the aforementioned inaccuracy is not the only issue. It is, of course, a symptom of the monopoly and inclusion problem of Silicon Valley. Kantayya notes that employing people of different marginalised experiences makes the biases in Big Tech visible, and provides the companies with teams of talented and passionate people able to diversify the data feeding the biased machines. However, she also states a change in employment strategy is not a solution to the continuing threats surveillance and its algorithms pose.

Doringer and Kantayya discussed the importance and logistics of campaigning for a more humane future of technologies. Kantayya stressed that “we cannot miss our humanity” as we continue to develop machines and ideas, and that we need science communicators and artists to work together to facilitate AI literacy. This collaboration will provide an easy-to-digest and engaging way of understanding the science behind it. Alongside education, Kantayya identified engaged and organised citizens as another crucial force behind positive change, as they have the capability to put pressure on lawmakers to recognise the threats of algorithmic biases.

Inequalities became amplified in 2020, with a new wave of civil rights activism sparked by the murder of George Floyd by police enforcement in the United States. Kantayya notes it took both tragedy and civil unrest for some Big Tech companies to acknowledge their use and abuse of facial recognition; only in 2020, two years after Buolamwini released her first study on the topic. Still, companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook continue to collect data and predict our patterns using biased machines. “We do not want perfect invasive surveillance,” says Kantayya when discussing the aims of companies to increase the accuracy of their algorithms. “We do not want a perfect algorithm.” Buolamwini agrees, sharing in a DLD conference talk that it’s not just about the accuracy of the system itself, it’s about deciding what kinds of systems we want in the first place. If a system (algorithm) functions efficiently in a surveillance state built on oppression based on race, gender, and class, whom does it serve, if not the oppressor?

Towards the end of the Q&A, Shalini Kantayya encouraged viewers to recognise data rights as human rights. She also shared resources for further education and research on the topic (linked below). Participants were invited to unleash new imaginations about how these technologies can be used in a human rights framework. Big Tech companies must be held accountable for their active participation in racial profiling and the continued surveillance of citizens. Accessing and sharing education tools is a good step individuals can make to start organising and secure a more humane future of AI.

You can watch “Coded Bias” here for free until the 27th of March 2021: https://nxtmuseum.com/community/ 

Links for further research and engagement:

Big Brother Watch UK https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/ 

Algorithm Justice League https://www.ajl.org/about

Gender Shades http://gendershades.org/overview.html