Wave Farm is delighted to announce that Andy Stuhl will serve as the 2021/2022 Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow. During his engagement, September 2021 - May 2022, Stuhl will make additions to the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource and a syndicated weekly radio show "The Radio Art Hour." Stuhl will also create original radio artworks for broadcast, and conduct workshops and listening sessions with WGXC programmers and interested members of the public.

Andy Kelleher Stuhl is a media researcher, sound artist, and digital humanities practitioner. He is currently completing a dissertation, through the department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill, on the cultural meaning of automation in radio’s industrial and artistic contexts from the 1950s into the 21st century. His writing has appeared in Sounding Out!, the Canadian Journal of Communication, Amodern, and the Velvet Light Trap.

Stuhl got his start in radio as a show host, live sound engineer, and training director at KZSU Stanford. More recently, he appeared as a guest contributor to the Musée des ondes Emile Berliner’s Radio100 programming on CKUT Montreal. Exploring the fraught interplay of automated technology and autonomous expression in radio, his ongoing research and artistic practice both aim to amplify ways that artists have used radio transmission as a means to critique the radio medium’s industrial structures—and also to connect these moments as important precedents for critical interventions into newer media like streaming platforms. More of his work is described at akstuhl.net.

The Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellowship is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; and the Greene County Legislature through the County Initiative Program, administered in Greene County by CREATE.

Wave Farm is delighted to announce that Andy Stuhl will serve as the 2021/2022 Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow. During his engagement, September 2021 - May 2022, Stuhl will make additions to the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource and a syndicated weekly radio show "The Radio Art Hour." Stuhl will also create original radio artworks for broadcast, and conduct workshops and listening sessions with WGXC programmers and interested members of the public.

Andy Kelleher Stuhl is a media researcher, sound artist, and digital humanities practitioner. He is currently completing a dissertation, through the department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill, on the cultural meaning of automation in radio’s industrial and artistic contexts from the 1950s into the 21st century. His writing has appeared in Sounding Out!, the Canadian Journal of Communication, Amodern, and the Velvet Light Trap.

Stuhl got his start in radio as a show host, live sound engineer, and training director at KZSU Stanford. More recently, he appeared as a guest contributor to the Musée des ondes Emile Berliner’s Radio100 programming on CKUT Montreal. Exploring the fraught interplay of automated technology and autonomous expression in radio, his ongoing research and artistic practice both aim to amplify ways that artists have used radio transmission as a means to critique the radio medium’s industrial structures—and also to connect these moments as important precedents for critical interventions into newer media like streaming platforms. More of his work is described at akstuhl.net.

The Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellowship is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; and the Greene County Legislature through the County Initiative Program, administered in Greene County by CREATE.

Wave Farm is delighted to announce that Andy Stuhl will serve as the 2021/2022 Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow. During his engagement, September 2021 - May 2022, Stuhl will make additions to the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource and a syndicated weekly radio show "The Radio Art Hour." Stuhl will also create original radio artworks for broadcast, and conduct workshops and listening sessions with WGXC programmers and interested members of the public.

Andy Kelleher Stuhl is a media researcher, sound artist, and digital humanities practitioner. He is currently completing a dissertation, through the department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill, on the cultural meaning of automation in radio’s industrial and artistic contexts from the 1950s into the 21st century. His writing has appeared in Sounding Out!, the Canadian Journal of Communication, Amodern, and the Velvet Light Trap.

Stuhl got his start in radio as a show host, live sound engineer, and training director at KZSU Stanford. More recently, he appeared as a guest contributor to the Musée des ondes Emile Berliner’s Radio100 programming on CKUT Montreal. Exploring the fraught interplay of automated technology and autonomous expression in radio, his ongoing research and artistic practice both aim to amplify ways that artists have used radio transmission as a means to critique the radio medium’s industrial structures—and also to connect these moments as important precedents for critical interventions into newer media like streaming platforms. More of his work is described at akstuhl.net.

The Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellowship is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; and the Greene County Legislature through the County Initiative Program, administered in Greene County by CREATE.

Wave Farm is delighted to announce that Andy Stuhl will serve as the 2021/2022 Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow. During his engagement, September 2021 - May 2022, Stuhl will make additions to the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource and a syndicated weekly radio show "The Radio Art Hour." Stuhl will also create original radio artworks for broadcast, and conduct workshops and listening sessions with WGXC programmers and interested members of the public.

Andy Kelleher Stuhl is a media researcher, sound artist, and digital humanities practitioner. He is currently completing a dissertation, through the department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill, on the cultural meaning of automation in radio’s industrial and artistic contexts from the 1950s into the 21st century. His writing has appeared in Sounding Out!, the Canadian Journal of Communication, Amodern, and the Velvet Light Trap.

Stuhl got his start in radio as a show host, live sound engineer, and training director at KZSU Stanford. More recently, he appeared as a guest contributor to the Musée des ondes Emile Berliner’s Radio100 programming on CKUT Montreal. Exploring the fraught interplay of automated technology and autonomous expression in radio, his ongoing research and artistic practice both aim to amplify ways that artists have used radio transmission as a means to critique the radio medium’s industrial structures—and also to connect these moments as important precedents for critical interventions into newer media like streaming platforms. More of his work is described at akstuhl.net.

The Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellowship is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; and the Greene County Legislature through the County Initiative Program, administered in Greene County by CREATE.

Wave Farm is delighted to announce that Andy Stuhl will serve as the 2021/2022 Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow. During his engagement, September 2021 - May 2022, Stuhl will make additions to the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource and a syndicated weekly radio show "The Radio Art Hour." Stuhl will also create original radio artworks for broadcast, and conduct workshops and listening sessions with WGXC programmers and interested members of the public.

Andy Kelleher Stuhl is a media researcher, sound artist, and digital humanities practitioner. He is currently completing a dissertation, through the department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill, on the cultural meaning of automation in radio’s industrial and artistic contexts from the 1950s into the 21st century. His writing has appeared in Sounding Out!, the Canadian Journal of Communication, Amodern, and the Velvet Light Trap.

Stuhl got his start in radio as a show host, live sound engineer, and training director at KZSU Stanford. More recently, he appeared as a guest contributor to the Musée des ondes Emile Berliner’s Radio100 programming on CKUT Montreal. Exploring the fraught interplay of automated technology and autonomous expression in radio, his ongoing research and artistic practice both aim to amplify ways that artists have used radio transmission as a means to critique the radio medium’s industrial structures—and also to connect these moments as important precedents for critical interventions into newer media like streaming platforms. More of his work is described at akstuhl.net.

The Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellowship is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; and the Greene County Legislature through the County Initiative Program, administered in Greene County by CREATE.

What is the nature of the programming that radio programmers do? How did radio practices take shape early on under the idea that it was a programmable medium? What does the work of broadcast programming have to do with other types, namely computer programming, that today construct complex new media systems? What can we do about the growing sense that these media are trying to program us -- to track and adjust our behaviors toward commercial and political ends?

Designed and led by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2021/22 Andy Stuhl, this four-part, free workshop series took place on Monday evenings in February 2022. Participants experimented with proposals for what it might mean to deprogram media, starting from but not confined to the medium of radio.

In the mid-1990s, artist Christof Migone's Radio Naked generated a set of "tactics for community radio towards a radio without programming." Radio Naked's twenty-two prompts constitute a "manifesto that naively impels the radio programmer to dispense (or at least question) all of the conventions and expectations of what radio should sound like." If programming, at its extremes in automated commercial stations, aims to standardize and solidify schedules and formats, then deprogramming media would require us not simply to ignore those routines but to make their hidden contours audible or visible in the process of transgressing them. Drawing on Migone's work for form and inspiration, workshop participants first examined lineages in radio history and in transmission art that contribute to a definition of deprogramming radio, then developed new prompts to serve as micro-interventions either in radio and other media. The Radio Deprogramming workshop culminated in 53 collaboratively authored and recorded media-deprogramming prompts, which are shared here as related audio files, as well as the full contents of the workshop website created by Stuhl.

Workshop meeting plans

Code of conduct

Though our workshop is taking place remotely, we will all benefit from making conscientious efforts to treat each other as respectully as we would in person. This entails listening carefully, making sure criticism is invited and constructive, and setting clear expectations for how we communicate. Wave Farm is dedicated to providing a harassment-free and inclusive experience for everyone regardless of gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disabilities, neurodiversity, physical appearance, body size, ethnicity, nationality, race, age, religion, or other protected category. We do not tolerate harassment of event participants in any form. Harassment includes, but is not limited to: language that reinforces social structures of domination related to gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disabilities, neurodiversity, physical appearance, body size, ethnicity, nationality, race, age, religion, or other protected category; unwelcome recording or image capturing; sustained or targeted disruption of group conversations; and continued one-on-one communication following a request to cease. We want to hear from you if any situation arises that you feel jeopardizes your ability to safely participate in this workshop. You can reach Wave Farm staff at info@wavefarm.org.

Schedule overview

Mondays in February 2022, 5 p.m. EST (UTC-5:00). Sessions will run 90 min. and be conducted via Zoom.

• Remote Session 1: (Feb. 7) Overview, discussing programming in radio/media history, setting up deprogramming.
• On your own: Close listening to the Radio Deprogramming Workshop Listening Syllabus, including Radio Naked.
• Remote Session 2: (Feb. 14) Discussion of Radio Naked and working toward a definition for media deprogramming.
• On your own: Choosing a media context and drafting prompts for intervention.
• Small groups and “office hours” meetings: Discuss and revise prompts with other participants.
• Remote Session 3: (Feb. 21) Presenting prompts, discussing production ideas for audio versions.
• On your own: Producing audio versions of others’ prompts.
• Remote Session 4: (Feb. 28) Special Guest: Christof Migone. Listening to audio versions, reflecting on process, discussing ideas for staging or presenting the collective work.

Session 1: February 7, 5:00-6:30 p.m. EST

Recap

Our workshop got off to a great start thanks to 28 enthusiastic attendees. Much of the time was spent introducing ourselves and collaboratively building a list of associations with the word “programming” in a jamboard. Here’s some of what we came up with, which I’ve loosely reordered to start with the more imagistic associations, moving into the more abstract and then aspirational ideas about what programming and deprogramming could become.

• paper programs at events
• automation and clocks (in radio); constraint
• music synthesizer programming – creating patches and presets
• formats
• the sound story of a radio station
• recorded voice as material in radio
• concerts: what is played for an audience; who gets to make decisions about who + what is listened to
• web programming – creating input/output structure
• how we interface with machines on their own terms
• tennis metaphor: sending something and seeing what comes back
• straight line, linear, Terminator robots!
• centralized control of peripherals to make something specific happen
• something pre-ordained, or pre-organized
• biological processes, DNA
• organizing (thoughts and content)
• going to work
• sterile
• rationalization
• manufacturing consent
• repetition, predictability, reliability
• hospitality
• anticipating the listener experience – who is the audience?
• developing other artists’ work – listening
• developing seamless inclusivity and inspiration
• rethinking and understanding radio editing/producing
• using multimedia and found media (e.g. voicemails)
• historical exploration
• structure, order; re-thinking and interrupting that
• dechronoprogramming and morphomoving
• deprogramming to face the mass media
• deprogramming and/as decolonization

In the latter part of the session, a mini-lecture walked through five senses of “programming” to do give a historical overview of how this notion has developed in and alongside American radio. The slides from this presentation are here.

Agenda

• Welcome from Wave Farm Executive Director Galen Joseph-Hunter
• Land acknowledgement
• Session overview and introduction
• Brief participant introductions plus brainstorm
  • What do you do that you hope to develop through this workshop?
  • What’s an association that comes to your mind with the word “programming?”
• Mini-lecture: Five senses of (radio) programming
  • Controlling time in American radio’s first decade
  • The programmer as convener in Indigenous and other community radio traditions
  • Music radio formats, automation, and the roots of algorithmic media ills
  • Programmability: computational culture and Cold War anxieties
  • “Software for People,” the sonic event score, and bases for deprogramming
• Introducing listening syllabus

Session 2: February 14, 5:00-6:30 p.m. EST

Recap

We began session 2 by discussing Radio Naked, generating some great commentary on the work’s individual prompts and on its larger aims and merits.

Here is our annotation layer of sorts for Radio Naked (direct link for easy reference):

1

• Fun, direct, silly
• Audio version 3 abandons the prompt text, becomes more poetic

2

• Reminds us of the taken-for-granted yet complex chain between sender and receiver, disrupts the commonplace idea of radio as real estate
• Relates to The Joy Channel

3

• Simple, clear directive that would both break the flow and show how radio is done

8

• Very funny, and perhaps hazardous if street names overlap

11

• Touches on the broadcaster’s eagerness to pick up phone calls when they don’t know if anyone’s listening

14

• The idea of passing over control resonates, brings to mind a musical experiment where audience members would gradually replace members of a performing band

15

• An interesting exercise and a reminder of what radio is made of

16

• Nice way to stretch the definition: what is radio and what isn’t radio?

17

• The more successful you are, the more of a failure you’d become in terms of traditional programming

18

• Inverting what is content and what is format or information infrastructure

19

• Mixes the broadcasting point with the receiving point
• Doesn’t have to be bicycles; perhaps a flock of pigeons

20

• Relates to a Rare Frequency (WZBC) broadcast of sound from a subway rail
• Recalls “piano burning/drowning” performances by Annea Lockwood and others

21

• Subverts a common issue in community radio: the consantly felt need to cater to an imagined listener

22

• Appreciating the Bertolt Brecht reference

What does Radio Naked do?

• Reveals and questions our assumptions about the radio medium
• Contributes to the Radio Rethink context, provides momentum for radio art
• Taken literally/actionably, the prompts suggest ways to destabilize something that can appear as an “unscalable wall” – as a rigid institution in terms of format/technology/access
• Works through metaphor within conceptual art traditions
• Provides “poetic ruptures or disruptions of order” – even if just momentary
• Gestures back to “La Radia” (1933) in challenging commercialization of radio and commodification of the listener; stands to refresh the charter for experimentation in some community radio sectors

Questions that Radio Naked provokes

• How much does the radio listener matter? (Do these prompts envision radio as for the broadcaster rather than for the listener – and is that how more radio should be, given that we can only guess at or make assumptions about the listener?)
• Following from that question, can anyone say honestly they are broadcasting solely for themselves? Why the need for a platform/medium in that case?
  • The interpretive gap – between wanting to communicate and knowing the ideal listener doesn’t really exist – as “a fruitful place to play and a substrate to create work in”
  • An artistic mantra: “the listener is always the composer” – or are they a “co-composer”? And in a community radio context, the listener as “program-maker”
• What were the stylistic decisions in the creation of the audio versions? For instance, why more synthetic sounds than indexical/acoustic sounds (e.g. bicycles in #19)? Why (in most cases) is the text of the prompt itself spoken, rather than actuated to produce other sounds?

Preparing

Please take a listen through the works in our listening syllabus in advance of the second session. The audio player at the top of that page will automatically loop through the recorded Radio Naked prompts and some other syllabus excerpts, which might be a good way to background-listen while you wash dishes. I recommend also reading through the text version of Radio Naked.

Agenda

• Radio Naked discussion
  • Which was your favorite of the 22 prompts?
  • What was confusing?
  • What connections do we see/hear to other works?
  • What questions do we have for Christof Migone?
• Exploring the event score form
  • Sonic meditation 1 (programming): “Listening Across Distance”
  • Sonic meditation 2 (deprogramming): “Inactive Speaker”
• In breakout groups, drafting deprogramming prompts for non-radio media (see below)
• Reconvening to share prompts and build a definition for deprogramming
• Planning small group meetings in advance of next session

Deprogramming non-radio media exercise (breakout rooms)

Your task with your group is to draft at least one “deprogramming prompt,” in the style of Radio Naked, for the medium assigned to the breakout room you choose. (Choices included cable TV, Facebook, YouTube or TikTok, email, and print journalism.)

Here are some questions that may be useful to pose:

• What makes someone a “programmer” for this medium?
• What are some routines that are always followed in this medium?
• What’s a routine that would be interesting to question or disrupt? How would the programmer do that? What would it look/sound/feel like?

For next session

In advance of our third session, please draft three short deprogramming prompts. Please send these by email before noon on Monday, Feb. 21 so that we can all view each other’s work in the session.

Your prompts can address radio or any medium / combination of media you choose. Do not worry if you feel you don’t “get” the format yet: now is the time to experiment and cast a wide net as to how we want to shape this project. We’ll all have the chance to refine our drafts based on collective feedback.

Session 3: February 21, 5:00-6:30 p.m. EST

Recap

Most of the session was spent working our way through a list of 46 deprogramming prompts that we had so far generated. We heard each participant read the prompts they had drafted, after which the group offered reactions and questions.

With our remaining time, we discussed production tools and conceptual strategies as we prepared to create audio interpretations of each other’s prompts.

Preparing

In advance of our third session, please draft three short deprogramming prompts (you are welcome to draft more if inspiration strikes). Please send these by email before noon on Monday, Feb. 21 so that we can all view each other’s work in the session.

Your prompts can address radio or any medium / combination of media you choose. Do not worry if you feel you don’t “get” the format yet: now is the time to experiment and cast a wide net as to how we want to shape this project.

If you are feeling confused, would like some help in drafting your prompts, or otherwise just want to chat, I’ve set up a Calendly page to schedule one on one meetings. We’ll use the same Zoom link for these as for the workshop sessions. If you would be interested in meeting as a small group with other participants, please email me and let me know your timezone + general availability and I will try to put folks in touch.

Agenda

• Sharing and workshopping everyone’s deprogramming prompt drafts
• Brainstorming audio version ideas; identifying production skill needs and resources
• Reflecting and defining: what did we learn about “deprogramming” in the process of scripting it?

Session 4: February 28, 5:00-6:30 p.m. EST

Zoom link in email to registered participants.

Preparing

For our final session, we are producing audio versions of each other’s deprogramming prompts. Registered participants have been sent a link to a spreadsheet where we are keeping track of the prompts themselves and of who plans to produce audio for which prompts (add your name to the Audio 1/2/3 column). There is also a section of the spreadsheet where we’re adding links to interesting audio editors/tools/effects/etc.

We’re looking/listening to Radio Naked for inspiration as we make these recordings, so a typical production would be less than a minute long and might involve recording the text of the prompt, then altering the audio in some way that creatively aligns with it. But as always, departures from the form are also welcome: we’ve talked about how an audio version might actualize the prompt rather than present its text as speech, and about ideas to carry out some prompts as longer-form experiments. Our goal is to each produce at least one audio prompt, for participants who are newer to sound editing; or three audio prompts for participants with more familiarity.

Agenda

• Introducing Christof Migone
• Revisiting Radio Naked with questions for Christof
• Listening party! Airing the audio prompts, sharing reactions in text chat
• Reflecting together on the process
  • What should deprogramming mean?
  • How has this interacted with your own practice?
• Where do we go next? Brainstorming ideas for broadcast, web, and other presentations of our collective work

Listening syllabus

Radio Naked is a “manifesto that naively impels the radio programmer to dispense (or at least question) all of the conventions and expectations of what radio should sound like.” Radio artist Christof Migone composed the twenty-two prompts that make up the work in the early 1990s, and audio versions were later produced for each prompt. Radio Naked lends a key precedent to this workshop, providing form and inspiration for the deprogramming prompts we will develop together.

From its start in 1941 into the 1970s, the Indians for Indians Radio Hour was a vital presence on the airwaves of University of Oklahoma station WNAD and in the social fabric of Indigenous communities that intersected the station’s broadcast area. Whistler, a chief of the Sac and Fox Nation who also went by the name Kesh-ke-kosh, offers us a model of the radio programmer as cultural convener. His approach departed from and at times playfully critiqued the authoritative conventions of talk programming and pop music on network radio at the time. Radio historian Josh Garrett-Davis points out that Whistler’s ethos carries forward in widespread community radio practices as an anti-hierarchical mode of radio programming.

In 1966 and 1967, New York City station WBAI hosted a series of relaxed, informal, one-on-one conversations between composers John Cage and Morton Feldman. In the first of these “Radio Happenings,” Cage explains how his experience of the radio medium changed after using it as a compositional tool. He also (around 22:50 in the recording) describes an attitude toward sounds and their effects on listeners that we will consider as a type of programming. This cybernetic approach to experimental composition was expanded by other artists including Pauline Oliveros (here are some longer thoughts on Oliveros and the computational arts context), and it offers one precedent for our artistic stance of deprogramming.

In an undated aircheck, the celebrated 1970s music radio personality The Black Pope insists to listeners that he transcends the “disc jockey” category. Shelley Pope’s contributions to the Black radio community in Alabama are documented by the Birmingham Black Radio Museum. This recording has circulated, with an unfortunate degree of ironic distance, through largely white freeform radio and culture jamming scenes. Hearing Pope instead through the context of Birmingham’s intense intramural radio rivalries, we can ask what it would mean to take him literally when he declares that he is not a DJ but rather “a human radio station.” One interpretation hears Pope as a radio programmer merging with and subsuming the technical apparatus whose parts he lists off, anticipating by several decades the kind of bodily-electrical figurations that Matthew Fuller would use to comprehend pirate radio’s intermedial flows.

St.GIGA is considered the world’s first digital satellite radio station. Director Hiroshi Yokoi developed a radical broadcast methodology - St.GIGA’s broadcasts initially followed no externally fixed timetable. Rather, broadcast themes were approximately matched to the current tidal cycle throughout the 24-hour broadcasting period. Under this innovative schedule, the station broadcast a variety of primarily ambient music programs, various jazz programs, and live sound-broadcasts of the ocean shore. Between 1995 and 2000, St. GIGA partnered with Nintendo to broadcast video game-related programming to owners of the Super Famicon Satellaview peripheral – this included video games that could only be played during the live broadcast schedule.

Producer Sherre DeLys, writer Rick Moody, and performer John Lurie created Pirate Radio Station for WNYC’s The Next Big Thing. The piece presents a kind of biography for an imagined station that flees from programming conventions. As definitions dissolve into absurdity, the piece’s characters and authors all confront the question of what radio could or should be in the absence of imposed structures.

Participating in both transmission art and speculative fiction, The Joy Channel is a performance piece in which radio transmissions from various characters reveal a dystopian world and the arrival of a neural-emotional broadcasting technology. Though set more than 100 years into North America’s future, The Joy Channel heightens the stakes of an already existing clash between monolithic media corporations’ mollifying programming and the subversive or saboteurial efforts of smaller scale broadcasters.

In a short work for his audio zine U+1F60C, James T. Green performs what we might call a deprogramming of a very specific, non-radio audio medium: the Nordstrom department store phone menu. Lighthearted and direct, “Please Hold” lets us hear Green as he encounters the people in the interior of this medium – call center operators and sales clerks – and asks them to

Wave Farm is delighted to announce that Andy Stuhl will serve as the 2021/2022 Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow. During his engagement, September 2021 - May 2022, Stuhl will make additions to the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource and a syndicated weekly radio show "The Radio Art Hour." Stuhl will also create original radio artworks for broadcast, and conduct workshops and listening sessions with WGXC programmers and interested members of the public.

Andy Kelleher Stuhl is a media researcher, sound artist, and digital humanities practitioner. He is currently completing a dissertation, through the department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill, on the cultural meaning of automation in radio’s industrial and artistic contexts from the 1950s into the 21st century. His writing has appeared in Sounding Out!, the Canadian Journal of Communication, Amodern, and the Velvet Light Trap.

Stuhl got his start in radio as a show host, live sound engineer, and training director at KZSU Stanford. More recently, he appeared as a guest contributor to the Musée des ondes Emile Berliner’s Radio100 programming on CKUT Montreal. Exploring the fraught interplay of automated technology and autonomous expression in radio, his ongoing research and artistic practice both aim to amplify ways that artists have used radio transmission as a means to critique the radio medium’s industrial structures—and also to connect these moments as important precedents for critical interventions into newer media like streaming platforms. More of his work is described at akstuhl.net.

The Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellowship is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; and the Greene County Legislature through the County Initiative Program, administered in Greene County by CREATE.

What is the nature of the programming that radio programmers do? How did radio practices take shape early on under the idea that it was a programmable medium? What does the work of broadcast programming have to do with other types, namely computer programming, that today construct complex new media systems? What can we do about the growing sense that these media are trying to program us -- to track and adjust our behaviors toward commercial and political ends?

Designed and led by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2021/22 Andy Stuhl, this four-part, free workshop series took place on Monday evenings in February 2022. Participants experimented with proposals for what it might mean to deprogram media, starting from but not confined to the medium of radio.

In the mid-1990s, artist Christof Migone's Radio Naked generated a set of "tactics for community radio towards a radio without programming." Radio Naked's twenty-two prompts constitute a "manifesto that naively impels the radio programmer to dispense (or at least question) all of the conventions and expectations of what radio should sound like." If programming, at its extremes in automated commercial stations, aims to standardize and solidify schedules and formats, then deprogramming media would require us not simply to ignore those routines but to make their hidden contours audible or visible in the process of transgressing them. Drawing on Migone's work for form and inspiration, workshop participants first examined lineages in radio history and in transmission art that contribute to a definition of deprogramming radio, then developed new prompts to serve as micro-interventions either in radio and other media. The Radio Deprogramming workshop culminated in 53 collaboratively authored and recorded media-deprogramming prompts, which are shared here as related audio files, as well as the full contents of the workshop website created by Stuhl.

Workshop meeting plans

Code of conduct

Though our workshop is taking place remotely, we will all benefit from making conscientious efforts to treat each other as respectully as we would in person. This entails listening carefully, making sure criticism is invited and constructive, and setting clear expectations for how we communicate. Wave Farm is dedicated to providing a harassment-free and inclusive experience for everyone regardless of gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disabilities, neurodiversity, physical appearance, body size, ethnicity, nationality, race, age, religion, or other protected category. We do not tolerate harassment of event participants in any form. Harassment includes, but is not limited to: language that reinforces social structures of domination related to gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disabilities, neurodiversity, physical appearance, body size, ethnicity, nationality, race, age, religion, or other protected category; unwelcome recording or image capturing; sustained or targeted disruption of group conversations; and continued one-on-one communication following a request to cease. We want to hear from you if any situation arises that you feel jeopardizes your ability to safely participate in this workshop. You can reach Wave Farm staff at info@wavefarm.org.

Schedule overview

Mondays in February 2022, 5 p.m. EST (UTC-5:00). Sessions will run 90 min. and be conducted via Zoom.

• Remote Session 1: (Feb. 7) Overview, discussing programming in radio/media history, setting up deprogramming.
• On your own: Close listening to the Radio Deprogramming Workshop Listening Syllabus, including Radio Naked.
• Remote Session 2: (Feb. 14) Discussion of Radio Naked and working toward a definition for media deprogramming.
• On your own: Choosing a media context and drafting prompts for intervention.
• Small groups and “office hours” meetings: Discuss and revise prompts with other participants.
• Remote Session 3: (Feb. 21) Presenting prompts, discussing production ideas for audio versions.
• On your own: Producing audio versions of others’ prompts.
• Remote Session 4: (Feb. 28) Special Guest: Christof Migone. Listening to audio versions, reflecting on process, discussing ideas for staging or presenting the collective work.

Session 1: February 7, 5:00-6:30 p.m. EST

Recap

Our workshop got off to a great start thanks to 28 enthusiastic attendees. Much of the time was spent introducing ourselves and collaboratively building a list of associations with the word “programming” in a jamboard. Here’s some of what we came up with, which I’ve loosely reordered to start with the more imagistic associations, moving into the more abstract and then aspirational ideas about what programming and deprogramming could become.

• paper programs at events
• automation and clocks (in radio); constraint
• music synthesizer programming – creating patches and presets
• formats
• the sound story of a radio station
• recorded voice as material in radio
• concerts: what is played for an audience; who gets to make decisions about who + what is listened to
• web programming – creating input/output structure
• how we interface with machines on their own terms
• tennis metaphor: sending something and seeing what comes back
• straight line, linear, Terminator robots!
• centralized control of peripherals to make something specific happen
• something pre-ordained, or pre-organized
• biological processes, DNA
• organizing (thoughts and content)
• going to work
• sterile
• rationalization
• manufacturing consent
• repetition, predictability, reliability
• hospitality
• anticipating the listener experience – who is the audience?
• developing other artists’ work – listening
• developing seamless inclusivity and inspiration
• rethinking and understanding radio editing/producing
• using multimedia and found media (e.g. voicemails)
• historical exploration
• structure, order; re-thinking and interrupting that
• dechronoprogramming and morphomoving
• deprogramming to face the mass media
• deprogramming and/as decolonization

In the latter part of the session, a mini-lecture walked through five senses of “programming” to do give a historical overview of how this notion has developed in and alongside American radio. The slides from this presentation are here.

Agenda

• Welcome from Wave Farm Executive Director Galen Joseph-Hunter
• Land acknowledgement
• Session overview and introduction
• Brief participant introductions plus brainstorm
  • What do you do that you hope to develop through this workshop?
  • What’s an association that comes to your mind with the word “programming?”
• Mini-lecture: Five senses of (radio) programming
  • Controlling time in American radio’s first decade
  • The programmer as convener in Indigenous and other community radio traditions
  • Music radio formats, automation, and the roots of algorithmic media ills
  • Programmability: computational culture and Cold War anxieties
  • “Software for People,” the sonic event score, and bases for deprogramming
• Introducing listening syllabus

Session 2: February 14, 5:00-6:30 p.m. EST

Recap

We began session 2 by discussing Radio Naked, generating some great commentary on the work’s individual prompts and on its larger aims and merits.

Here is our annotation layer of sorts for Radio Naked (direct link for easy reference):

1

• Fun, direct, silly
• Audio version 3 abandons the prompt text, becomes more poetic

2

• Reminds us of the taken-for-granted yet complex chain between sender and receiver, disrupts the commonplace idea of radio as real estate
• Relates to The Joy Channel

3

• Simple, clear directive that would both break the flow and show how radio is done

8

• Very funny, and perhaps hazardous if street names overlap

11

• Touches on the broadcaster’s eagerness to pick up phone calls when they don’t know if anyone’s listening

14

• The idea of passing over control resonates, brings to mind a musical experiment where audience members would gradually replace members of a performing band

15

• An interesting exercise and a reminder of what radio is made of

16

• Nice way to stretch the definition: what is radio and what isn’t radio?

17

• The more successful you are, the more of a failure you’d become in terms of traditional programming

18

• Inverting what is content and what is format or information infrastructure

19

• Mixes the broadcasting point with the receiving point
• Doesn’t have to be bicycles; perhaps a flock of pigeons

20

• Relates to a Rare Frequency (WZBC) broadcast of sound from a subway rail
• Recalls “piano burning/drowning” performances by Annea Lockwood and others

21

• Subverts a common issue in community radio: the consantly felt need to cater to an imagined listener

22

• Appreciating the Bertolt Brecht reference

What does Radio Naked do?

• Reveals and questions our assumptions about the radio medium
• Contributes to the Radio Rethink context, provides momentum for radio art
• Taken literally/actionably, the prompts suggest ways to destabilize something that can appear as an “unscalable wall” – as a rigid institution in terms of format/technology/access
• Works through metaphor within conceptual art traditions
• Provides “poetic ruptures or disruptions of order” – even if just momentary
• Gestures back to “La Radia” (1933) in challenging commercialization of radio and commodification of the listener; stands to refresh the charter for experimentation in some community radio sectors

Questions that Radio Naked provokes

• How much does the radio listener matter? (Do these prompts envision radio as for the broadcaster rather than for the listener – and is that how more radio should be, given that we can only guess at or make assumptions about the listener?)
• Following from that question, can anyone say honestly they are broadcasting solely for themselves? Why the need for a platform/medium in that case?
  • The interpretive gap – between wanting to communicate and knowing the ideal listener doesn’t really exist – as “a fruitful place to play and a substrate to create work in”
  • An artistic mantra: “the listener is always the composer” – or are they a “co-composer”? And in a community radio context, the listener as “program-maker”
• What were the stylistic decisions in the creation of the audio versions? For instance, why more synthetic sounds than indexical/acoustic sounds (e.g. bicycles in #19)? Why (in most cases) is the text of the prompt itself spoken, rather than actuated to produce other sounds?

Preparing

Please take a listen through the works in our listening syllabus in advance of the second session. The audio player at the top of that page will automatically loop through the recorded Radio Naked prompts and some other syllabus excerpts, which might be a good way to background-listen while you wash dishes. I recommend also reading through the text version of Radio Naked.

Agenda

• Radio Naked discussion
  • Which was your favorite of the 22 prompts?
  • What was confusing?
  • What connections do we see/hear to other works?
  • What questions do we have for Christof Migone?
• Exploring the event score form
  • Sonic meditation 1 (programming): “Listening Across Distance”
  • Sonic meditation 2 (deprogramming): “Inactive Speaker”
• In breakout groups, drafting deprogramming prompts for non-radio media (see below)
• Reconvening to share prompts and build a definition for deprogramming
• Planning small group meetings in advance of next session

Deprogramming non-radio media exercise (breakout rooms)

Your task with your group is to draft at least one “deprogramming prompt,” in the style of Radio Naked, for the medium assigned to the breakout room you choose. (Choices included cable TV, Facebook, YouTube or TikTok, email, and print journalism.)

Here are some questions that may be useful to pose:

• What makes someone a “programmer” for this medium?
• What are some routines that are always followed in this medium?
• What’s a routine that would be interesting to question or disrupt? How would the programmer do that? What would it look/sound/feel like?

For next session

In advance of our third session, please draft three short deprogramming prompts. Please send these by email before noon on Monday, Feb. 21 so that we can all view each other’s work in the session.

Your prompts can address radio or any medium / combination of media you choose. Do not worry if you feel you don’t “get” the format yet: now is the time to experiment and cast a wide net as to how we want to shape this project. We’ll all have the chance to refine our drafts based on collective feedback.

Session 3: February 21, 5:00-6:30 p.m. EST

Recap

Most of the session was spent working our way through a list of 46 deprogramming prompts that we had so far generated. We heard each participant read the prompts they had drafted, after which the group offered reactions and questions.

With our remaining time, we discussed production tools and conceptual strategies as we prepared to create audio interpretations of each other’s prompts.

Preparing

In advance of our third session, please draft three short deprogramming prompts (you are welcome to draft more if inspiration strikes). Please send these by email before noon on Monday, Feb. 21 so that we can all view each other’s work in the session.

Your prompts can address radio or any medium / combination of media you choose. Do not worry if you feel you don’t “get” the format yet: now is the time to experiment and cast a wide net as to how we want to shape this project.

If you are feeling confused, would like some help in drafting your prompts, or otherwise just want to chat, I’ve set up a Calendly page to schedule one on one meetings. We’ll use the same Zoom link for these as for the workshop sessions. If you would be interested in meeting as a small group with other participants, please email me and let me know your timezone + general availability and I will try to put folks in touch.

Agenda

• Sharing and workshopping everyone’s deprogramming prompt drafts
• Brainstorming audio version ideas; identifying production skill needs and resources
• Reflecting and defining: what did we learn about “deprogramming” in the process of scripting it?

Session 4: February 28, 5:00-6:30 p.m. EST

Zoom link in email to registered participants.

Preparing

For our final session, we are producing audio versions of each other’s deprogramming prompts. Registered participants have been sent a link to a spreadsheet where we are keeping track of the prompts themselves and of who plans to produce audio for which prompts (add your name to the Audio 1/2/3 column). There is also a section of the spreadsheet where we’re adding links to interesting audio editors/tools/effects/etc.

We’re looking/listening to Radio Naked for inspiration as we make these recordings, so a typical production would be less than a minute long and might involve recording the text of the prompt, then altering the audio in some way that creatively aligns with it. But as always, departures from the form are also welcome: we’ve talked about how an audio version might actualize the prompt rather than present its text as speech, and about ideas to carry out some prompts as longer-form experiments. Our goal is to each produce at least one audio prompt, for participants who are newer to sound editing; or three audio prompts for participants with more familiarity.

Agenda

• Introducing Christof Migone
• Revisiting Radio Naked with questions for Christof
• Listening party! Airing the audio prompts, sharing reactions in text chat
• Reflecting together on the process
  • What should deprogramming mean?
  • How has this interacted with your own practice?
• Where do we go next? Brainstorming ideas for broadcast, web, and other presentations of our collective work

Listening syllabus

Radio Naked is a “manifesto that naively impels the radio programmer to dispense (or at least question) all of the conventions and expectations of what radio should sound like.” Radio artist Christof Migone composed the twenty-two prompts that make up the work in the early 1990s, and audio versions were later produced for each prompt. Radio Naked lends a key precedent to this workshop, providing form and inspiration for the deprogramming prompts we will develop together.

From its start in 1941 into the 1970s, the Indians for Indians Radio Hour was a vital presence on the airwaves of University of Oklahoma station WNAD and in the social fabric of Indigenous communities that intersected the station’s broadcast area. Whistler, a chief of the Sac and Fox Nation who also went by the name Kesh-ke-kosh, offers us a model of the radio programmer as cultural convener. His approach departed from and at times playfully critiqued the authoritative conventions of talk programming and pop music on network radio at the time. Radio historian Josh Garrett-Davis points out that Whistler’s ethos carries forward in widespread community radio practices as an anti-hierarchical mode of radio programming.

In 1966 and 1967, New York City station WBAI hosted a series of relaxed, informal, one-on-one conversations between composers John Cage and Morton Feldman. In the first of these “Radio Happenings,” Cage explains how his experience of the radio medium changed after using it as a compositional tool. He also (around 22:50 in the recording) describes an attitude toward sounds and their effects on listeners that we will consider as a type of programming. This cybernetic approach to experimental composition was expanded by other artists including Pauline Oliveros (here are some longer thoughts on Oliveros and the computational arts context), and it offers one precedent for our artistic stance of deprogramming.

In an undated aircheck, the celebrated 1970s music radio personality The Black Pope insists to listeners that he transcends the “disc jockey” category. Shelley Pope’s contributions to the Black radio community in Alabama are documented by the Birmingham Black Radio Museum. This recording has circulated, with an unfortunate degree of ironic distance, through largely white freeform radio and culture jamming scenes. Hearing Pope instead through the context of Birmingham’s intense intramural radio rivalries, we can ask what it would mean to take him literally when he declares that he is not a DJ but rather “a human radio station.” One interpretation hears Pope as a radio programmer merging with and subsuming the technical apparatus whose parts he lists off, anticipating by several decades the kind of bodily-electrical figurations that Matthew Fuller would use to comprehend pirate radio’s intermedial flows.

St.GIGA is considered the world’s first digital satellite radio station. Director Hiroshi Yokoi developed a radical broadcast methodology - St.GIGA’s broadcasts initially followed no externally fixed timetable. Rather, broadcast themes were approximately matched to the current tidal cycle throughout the 24-hour broadcasting period. Under this innovative schedule, the station broadcast a variety of primarily ambient music programs, various jazz programs, and live sound-broadcasts of the ocean shore. Between 1995 and 2000, St. GIGA partnered with Nintendo to broadcast video game-related programming to owners of the Super Famicon Satellaview peripheral – this included video games that could only be played during the live broadcast schedule.

Producer Sherre DeLys, writer Rick Moody, and performer John Lurie created Pirate Radio Station for WNYC’s The Next Big Thing. The piece presents a kind of biography for an imagined station that flees from programming conventions. As definitions dissolve into absurdity, the piece’s characters and authors all confront the question of what radio could or should be in the absence of imposed structures.

Participating in both transmission art and speculative fiction, The Joy Channel is a performance piece in which radio transmissions from various characters reveal a dystopian world and the arrival of a neural-emotional broadcasting technology. Though set more than 100 years into North America’s future, The Joy Channel heightens the stakes of an already existing clash between monolithic media corporations’ mollifying programming and the subversive or saboteurial efforts of smaller scale broadcasters.

In a short work for his audio zine U+1F60C, James T. Green performs what we might call a deprogramming of a very specific, non-radio audio medium: the Nordstrom department store phone menu. Lighthearted and direct, “Please Hold” lets us hear Green as he encounters the people in the interior of this medium – call center operators and sales clerks – and asks them to

Wave Farm is delighted to announce that Andy Stuhl will serve as the 2021/2022 Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow. During his engagement, September 2021 - May 2022, Stuhl will make additions to the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource and a syndicated weekly radio show "The Radio Art Hour." Stuhl will also create original radio artworks for broadcast, and conduct workshops and listening sessions with WGXC programmers and interested members of the public.

Andy Kelleher Stuhl is a media researcher, sound artist, and digital humanities practitioner. He is currently completing a dissertation, through the department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill, on the cultural meaning of automation in radio’s industrial and artistic contexts from the 1950s into the 21st century. His writing has appeared in Sounding Out!, the Canadian Journal of Communication, Amodern, and the Velvet Light Trap.

Stuhl got his start in radio as a show host, live sound engineer, and training director at KZSU Stanford. More recently, he appeared as a guest contributor to the Musée des ondes Emile Berliner’s Radio100 programming on CKUT Montreal. Exploring the fraught interplay of automated technology and autonomous expression in radio, his ongoing research and artistic practice both aim to amplify ways that artists have used radio transmission as a means to critique the radio medium’s industrial structures—and also to connect these moments as important precedents for critical interventions into newer media like streaming platforms. More of his work is described at akstuhl.net.

The Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellowship is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; and the Greene County Legislature through the County Initiative Program, administered in Greene County by CREATE.

What is the nature of the programming that radio programmers do? How did radio practices take shape early on under the idea that it was a programmable medium? What does the work of broadcast programming have to do with other types, namely computer programming, that today construct complex new media systems? What can we do about the growing sense that these media are trying to program us -- to track and adjust our behaviors toward commercial and political ends?

Designed and led by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2021/22 Andy Stuhl, this four-part, free workshop series took place on Monday evenings in February 2022. Participants experimented with proposals for what it might mean to deprogram media, starting from but not confined to the medium of radio.

In the mid-1990s, artist Christof Migone's Radio Naked generated a set of "tactics for community radio towards a radio without programming." Radio Naked's twenty-two prompts constitute a "manifesto that naively impels the radio programmer to dispense (or at least question) all of the conventions and expectations of what radio should sound like." If programming, at its extremes in automated commercial stations, aims to standardize and solidify schedules and formats, then deprogramming media would require us not simply to ignore those routines but to make their hidden contours audible or visible in the process of transgressing them. Drawing on Migone's work for form and inspiration, workshop participants first examined lineages in radio history and in transmission art that contribute to a definition of deprogramming radio, then developed new prompts to serve as micro-interventions either in radio and other media. The Radio Deprogramming workshop culminated in 53 collaboratively authored and recorded media-deprogramming prompts, which are shared here as related audio files, as well as the full contents of the workshop website created by Stuhl.

Workshop meeting plans

Code of conduct

Though our workshop is taking place remotely, we will all benefit from making conscientious efforts to treat each other as respectully as we would in person. This entails listening carefully, making sure criticism is invited and constructive, and setting clear expectations for how we communicate. Wave Farm is dedicated to providing a harassment-free and inclusive experience for everyone regardless of gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disabilities, neurodiversity, physical appearance, body size, ethnicity, nationality, race, age, religion, or other protected category. We do not tolerate harassment of event participants in any form. Harassment includes, but is not limited to: language that reinforces social structures of domination related to gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disabilities, neurodiversity, physical appearance, body size, ethnicity, nationality, race, age, religion, or other protected category; unwelcome recording or image capturing; sustained or targeted disruption of group conversations; and continued one-on-one communication following a request to cease. We want to hear from you if any situation arises that you feel jeopardizes your ability to safely participate in this workshop. You can reach Wave Farm staff at info@wavefarm.org.

Schedule overview

Mondays in February 2022, 5 p.m. EST (UTC-5:00). Sessions will run 90 min. and be conducted via Zoom.

• Remote Session 1: (Feb. 7) Overview, discussing programming in radio/media history, setting up deprogramming.
• On your own: Close listening to the Radio Deprogramming Workshop Listening Syllabus, including Radio Naked.
• Remote Session 2: (Feb. 14) Discussion of Radio Naked and working toward a definition for media deprogramming.
• On your own: Choosing a media context and drafting prompts for intervention.
• Small groups and “office hours” meetings: Discuss and revise prompts with other participants.
• Remote Session 3: (Feb. 21) Presenting prompts, discussing production ideas for audio versions.
• On your own: Producing audio versions of others’ prompts.
• Remote Session 4: (Feb. 28) Special Guest: Christof Migone. Listening to audio versions, reflecting on process, discussing ideas for staging or presenting the collective work.

Session 1: February 7, 5:00-6:30 p.m. EST

Recap

Our workshop got off to a great start thanks to 28 enthusiastic attendees. Much of the time was spent introducing ourselves and collaboratively building a list of associations with the word “programming” in a jamboard. Here’s some of what we came up with, which I’ve loosely reordered to start with the more imagistic associations, moving into the more abstract and then aspirational ideas about what programming and deprogramming could become.

• paper programs at events
• automation and clocks (in radio); constraint
• music synthesizer programming – creating patches and presets
• formats
• the sound story of a radio station
• recorded voice as material in radio
• concerts: what is played for an audience; who gets to make decisions about who + what is listened to
• web programming – creating input/output structure
• how we interface with machines on their own terms
• tennis metaphor: sending something and seeing what comes back
• straight line, linear, Terminator robots!
• centralized control of peripherals to make something specific happen
• something pre-ordained, or pre-organized
• biological processes, DNA
• organizing (thoughts and content)
• going to work
• sterile
• rationalization
• manufacturing consent
• repetition, predictability, reliability
• hospitality
• anticipating the listener experience – who is the audience?
• developing other artists’ work – listening
• developing seamless inclusivity and inspiration
• rethinking and understanding radio editing/producing
• using multimedia and found media (e.g. voicemails)
• historical exploration
• structure, order; re-thinking and interrupting that
• dechronoprogramming and morphomoving
• deprogramming to face the mass media
• deprogramming and/as decolonization

In the latter part of the session, a mini-lecture walked through five senses of “programming” to do give a historical overview of how this notion has developed in and alongside American radio. The slides from this presentation are here.

Agenda

• Welcome from Wave Farm Executive Director Galen Joseph-Hunter
• Land acknowledgement
• Session overview and introduction
• Brief participant introductions plus brainstorm
  • What do you do that you hope to develop through this workshop?
  • What’s an association that comes to your mind with the word “programming?”
• Mini-lecture: Five senses of (radio) programming
  • Controlling time in American radio’s first decade
  • The programmer as convener in Indigenous and other community radio traditions
  • Music radio formats, automation, and the roots of algorithmic media ills
  • Programmability: computational culture and Cold War anxieties
  • “Software for People,” the sonic event score, and bases for deprogramming
• Introducing listening syllabus

Session 2: February 14, 5:00-6:30 p.m. EST

Recap

We began session 2 by discussing Radio Naked, generating some great commentary on the work’s individual prompts and on its larger aims and merits.

Here is our annotation layer of sorts for Radio Naked (direct link for easy reference):

1

• Fun, direct, silly
• Audio version 3 abandons the prompt text, becomes more poetic

2

• Reminds us of the taken-for-granted yet complex chain between sender and receiver, disrupts the commonplace idea of radio as real estate
• Relates to The Joy Channel

3

• Simple, clear directive that would both break the flow and show how radio is done

8

• Very funny, and perhaps hazardous if street names overlap

11

• Touches on the broadcaster’s eagerness to pick up phone calls when they don’t know if anyone’s listening

14

• The idea of passing over control resonates, brings to mind a musical experiment where audience members would gradually replace members of a performing band

15

• An interesting exercise and a reminder of what radio is made of

16

• Nice way to stretch the definition: what is radio and what isn’t radio?

17

• The more successful you are, the more of a failure you’d become in terms of traditional programming

18

• Inverting what is content and what is format or information infrastructure

19

• Mixes the broadcasting point with the receiving point
• Doesn’t have to be bicycles; perhaps a flock of pigeons

20

• Relates to a Rare Frequency (WZBC) broadcast of sound from a subway rail
• Recalls “piano burning/drowning” performances by Annea Lockwood and others

21

• Subverts a common issue in community radio: the consantly felt need to cater to an imagined listener

22

• Appreciating the Bertolt Brecht reference

What does Radio Naked do?

• Reveals and questions our assumptions about the radio medium
• Contributes to the Radio Rethink context, provides momentum for radio art
• Taken literally/actionably, the prompts suggest ways to destabilize something that can appear as an “unscalable wall” – as a rigid institution in terms of format/technology/access
• Works through metaphor within conceptual art traditions
• Provides “poetic ruptures or disruptions of order” – even if just momentary
• Gestures back to “La Radia” (1933) in challenging commercialization of radio and commodification of the listener; stands to refresh the charter for experimentation in some community radio sectors

Questions that Radio Naked provokes

• How much does the radio listener matter? (Do these prompts envision radio as for the broadcaster rather than for the listener – and is that how more radio should be, given that we can only guess at or make assumptions about the listener?)
• Following from that question, can anyone say honestly they are broadcasting solely for themselves? Why the need for a platform/medium in that case?
  • The interpretive gap – between wanting to communicate and knowing the ideal listener doesn’t really exist – as “a fruitful place to play and a substrate to create work in”
  • An artistic mantra: “the listener is always the composer” – or are they a “co-composer”? And in a community radio context, the listener as “program-maker”
• What were the stylistic decisions in the creation of the audio versions? For instance, why more synthetic sounds than indexical/acoustic sounds (e.g. bicycles in #19)? Why (in most cases) is the text of the prompt itself spoken, rather than actuated to produce other sounds?

Preparing

Please take a listen through the works in our listening syllabus in advance of the second session. The audio player at the top of that page will automatically loop through the recorded Radio Naked prompts and some other syllabus excerpts, which might be a good way to background-listen while you wash dishes. I recommend also reading through the text version of Radio Naked.

Agenda

• Radio Naked discussion
  • Which was your favorite of the 22 prompts?
  • What was confusing?
  • What connections do we see/hear to other works?
  • What questions do we have for Christof Migone?
• Exploring the event score form
  • Sonic meditation 1 (programming): “Listening Across Distance”
  • Sonic meditation 2 (deprogramming): “Inactive Speaker”
• In breakout groups, drafting deprogramming prompts for non-radio media (see below)
• Reconvening to share prompts and build a definition for deprogramming
• Planning small group meetings in advance of next session

Deprogramming non-radio media exercise (breakout rooms)

Your task with your group is to draft at least one “deprogramming prompt,” in the style of Radio Naked, for the medium assigned to the breakout room you choose. (Choices included cable TV, Facebook, YouTube or TikTok, email, and print journalism.)

Here are some questions that may be useful to pose:

• What makes someone a “programmer” for this medium?
• What are some routines that are always followed in this medium?
• What’s a routine that would be interesting to question or disrupt? How would the programmer do that? What would it look/sound/feel like?

For next session

In advance of our third session, please draft three short deprogramming prompts. Please send these by email before noon on Monday, Feb. 21 so that we can all view each other’s work in the session.

Your prompts can address radio or any medium / combination of media you choose. Do not worry if you feel you don’t “get” the format yet: now is the time to experiment and cast a wide net as to how we want to shape this project. We’ll all have the chance to refine our drafts based on collective feedback.

Session 3: February 21, 5:00-6:30 p.m. EST

Recap

Most of the session was spent working our way through a list of 46 deprogramming prompts that we had so far generated. We heard each participant read the prompts they had drafted, after which the group offered reactions and questions.

With our remaining time, we discussed production tools and conceptual strategies as we prepared to create audio interpretations of each other’s prompts.

Preparing

In advance of our third session, please draft three short deprogramming prompts (you are welcome to draft more if inspiration strikes). Please send these by email before noon on Monday, Feb. 21 so that we can all view each other’s work in the session.

Your prompts can address radio or any medium / combination of media you choose. Do not worry if you feel you don’t “get” the format yet: now is the time to experiment and cast a wide net as to how we want to shape this project.

If you are feeling confused, would like some help in drafting your prompts, or otherwise just want to chat, I’ve set up a Calendly page to schedule one on one meetings. We’ll use the same Zoom link for these as for the workshop sessions. If you would be interested in meeting as a small group with other participants, please email me and let me know your timezone + general availability and I will try to put folks in touch.

Agenda

• Sharing and workshopping everyone’s deprogramming prompt drafts
• Brainstorming audio version ideas; identifying production skill needs and resources
• Reflecting and defining: what did we learn about “deprogramming” in the process of scripting it?

Session 4: February 28, 5:00-6:30 p.m. EST

Zoom link in email to registered participants.

Preparing

For our final session, we are producing audio versions of each other’s deprogramming prompts. Registered participants have been sent a link to a spreadsheet where we are keeping track of the prompts themselves and of who plans to produce audio for which prompts (add your name to the Audio 1/2/3 column). There is also a section of the spreadsheet where we’re adding links to interesting audio editors/tools/effects/etc.

We’re looking/listening to Radio Naked for inspiration as we make these recordings, so a typical production would be less than a minute long and might involve recording the text of the prompt, then altering the audio in some way that creatively aligns with it. But as always, departures from the form are also welcome: we’ve talked about how an audio version might actualize the prompt rather than present its text as speech, and about ideas to carry out some prompts as longer-form experiments. Our goal is to each produce at least one audio prompt, for participants who are newer to sound editing; or three audio prompts for participants with more familiarity.

Agenda

• Introducing Christof Migone
• Revisiting Radio Naked with questions for Christof
• Listening party! Airing the audio prompts, sharing reactions in text chat
• Reflecting together on the process
  • What should deprogramming mean?
  • How has this interacted with your own practice?
• Where do we go next? Brainstorming ideas for broadcast, web, and other presentations of our collective work

Listening syllabus

Radio Naked is a “manifesto that naively impels the radio programmer to dispense (or at least question) all of the conventions and expectations of what radio should sound like.” Radio artist Christof Migone composed the twenty-two prompts that make up the work in the early 1990s, and audio versions were later produced for each prompt. Radio Naked lends a key precedent to this workshop, providing form and inspiration for the deprogramming prompts we will develop together.

From its start in 1941 into the 1970s, the Indians for Indians Radio Hour was a vital presence on the airwaves of University of Oklahoma station WNAD and in the social fabric of Indigenous communities that intersected the station’s broadcast area. Whistler, a chief of the Sac and Fox Nation who also went by the name Kesh-ke-kosh, offers us a model of the radio programmer as cultural convener. His approach departed from and at times playfully critiqued the authoritative conventions of talk programming and pop music on network radio at the time. Radio historian Josh Garrett-Davis points out that Whistler’s ethos carries forward in widespread community radio practices as an anti-hierarchical mode of radio programming.

In 1966 and 1967, New York City station WBAI hosted a series of relaxed, informal, one-on-one conversations between composers John Cage and Morton Feldman. In the first of these “Radio Happenings,” Cage explains how his experience of the radio medium changed after using it as a compositional tool. He also (around 22:50 in the recording) describes an attitude toward sounds and their effects on listeners that we will consider as a type of programming. This cybernetic approach to experimental composition was expanded by other artists including Pauline Oliveros (here are some longer thoughts on Oliveros and the computational arts context), and it offers one precedent for our artistic stance of deprogramming.

In an undated aircheck, the celebrated 1970s music radio personality The Black Pope insists to listeners that he transcends the “disc jockey” category. Shelley Pope’s contributions to the Black radio community in Alabama are documented by the Birmingham Black Radio Museum. This recording has circulated, with an unfortunate degree of ironic distance, through largely white freeform radio and culture jamming scenes. Hearing Pope instead through the context of Birmingham’s intense intramural radio rivalries, we can ask what it would mean to take him literally when he declares that he is not a DJ but rather “a human radio station.” One interpretation hears Pope as a radio programmer merging with and subsuming the technical apparatus whose parts he lists off, anticipating by several decades the kind of bodily-electrical figurations that Matthew Fuller would use to comprehend pirate radio’s intermedial flows.

St.GIGA is considered the world’s first digital satellite radio station. Director Hiroshi Yokoi developed a radical broadcast methodology - St.GIGA’s broadcasts initially followed no externally fixed timetable. Rather, broadcast themes were approximately matched to the current tidal cycle throughout the 24-hour broadcasting period. Under this innovative schedule, the station broadcast a variety of primarily ambient music programs, various jazz programs, and live sound-broadcasts of the ocean shore. Between 1995 and 2000, St. GIGA partnered with Nintendo to broadcast video game-related programming to owners of the Super Famicon Satellaview peripheral – this included video games that could only be played during the live broadcast schedule.

Producer Sherre DeLys, writer Rick Moody, and performer John Lurie created Pirate Radio Station for WNYC’s The Next Big Thing. The piece presents a kind of biography for an imagined station that flees from programming conventions. As definitions dissolve into absurdity, the piece’s characters and authors all confront the question of what radio could or should be in the absence of imposed structures.

Participating in both transmission art and speculative fiction, The Joy Channel is a performance piece in which radio transmissions from various characters reveal a dystopian world and the arrival of a neural-emotional broadcasting technology. Though set more than 100 years into North America’s future, The Joy Channel heightens the stakes of an already existing clash between monolithic media corporations’ mollifying programming and the subversive or saboteurial efforts of smaller scale broadcasters.

In a short work for his audio zine U+1F60C, James T. Green performs what we might call a deprogramming of a very specific, non-radio audio medium: the Nordstrom department store phone menu. Lighthearted and direct, “Please Hold” lets us hear Green as he encounters the people in the interior of this medium – call center operators and sales clerks – and asks them to