Hidden Histories

“A Hush Descended on the City…”: Hidden Histories and Radio Remembrance

admin — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:26:47 +0200

Is Hidden Histories a micro-FM station, a sound installation, an audio tour, or a local history trail? Perhaps it is none of the above, or perhaps all four. The existence of such a project in some ways exposes the lack of a critical sound-based vocabulary, especially when attempting to portray particular instances of the convergence of oral history and electronic media in their distinctiveness and social context.

The Hidden Histories project consists of ten USB-powered transmitter ‘nodes’ which continuously broadcast oral history excerpts from Southampton’s Oral History Archive (composed into mini radio ‘features’, with music and ambience, by Armin Medosch) on an FM frequency within the heart of the City Centre. The project employs what Barry Truax of the World Soundscape Project has termed “earwitness accounts” (Truax 2001¹); vernacular testimony of experiences in the city. For example, there are stories of seafaring, immigrant life (for example, a woman from India describing her first experiences of Southampton), working in the docks, hearing about the Titanic disaster, going to music hall shows or the cinema, supporting the war effort on the home front, and many others.

‘Cutting oneself off’ from the acoustic environment through portable headphone listening, or the deliberate use of radio to create one’s own environment, tends to be seen as symptomatic of a general trend away from environmental awareness and community involvement (Truax 2001), and toward technologically induced human isolation. As a freely accessible sound resource and micro-radio innovation, Hidden Histories is a small but significant example of the reversal of this trend towards ‘mobile privatisation’ (a phrase originally coined by Raymond Williams) of the electro-acoustic environment. Whilst the Hidden Histories trail can be poignantly experienced through a private mode of listening (headphones), a group of people can profitably enjoy their tour using at least one battery-powered (i.e. transistor) radio. The latter mode of listening is not ideal for large groups, due to the limitations of reception and audible range (the very weak radio transmitters have a range of about 10 metres). However, for small groups, this mode of listening may prove attractive, as group radio listening promotes discourse as well as consensus about exactly what has been heard.

It is also, in my opinion, undeniable that participation in the project actively promotes environmental awareness and community involvement, through the realisation of potential cultures of communication that exist in public spaces. The participant becomes sensitised to the contrast between the harmonious intimacy of the earwitness accounts and the often discordant noise pollution of the city streets, and engages with collective memory by listening to a cross-section of vernacular voices recalling and summoning a shared past. The participant is able to use her radio or mobile phone not as a ‘conversational avoidance device’ but instead as a means to reconnect with the grounds of her personal identity through interpersonal and community communication. To collect experiences from the audio tour via the radio dial is to find “recourse to subjective constructions of memory, and what it means to be a participant…the work of memory is in fact radiophonic” (Labelle 2006)². To be confronted by ‘difference’ or otherness in the form of these migrant voices necessitates that we apply what Arjun Apparudai terms ‘the work of the imagination’, in negotiating difference whilst realising a relation to others (if only vicariously through mediated discourse), and remodelling the present (Apparudai 1998)³ in the light of this experience.

The time-binding properties (Innis 2003)⁴ of this media form allow participants to receive communications from, and about, the past, creating cultural continuity. The project represents a re-inscription of real time, but also real space. Taking the audio tour, I was also interested in the coupling of content (the oral history) and physical context or place, to achieve site-specific localisation. The primary examples are recollections of the Titanic and shipwrecks around the Titanic memorials, and of ‘home front’ life during World War 2 near the (WW2) Cenotaph. At Node 1, as I listened to an interviewee recalling her father, a seaman and Titanic survivor, setting off on his bicycle on the anniversary of the disaster to the Titanic memorial in East Park, I gazed across at the memorial, from my standpoint at the corner of Bedford Place. The poignant testimony was followed by a short burst of what sounded like a present-day recording of the soundscape at the present-day Titanic memorial, a hubbub of traffic noise drowning out voices, an echo of the ambient background noise an ordinary pedestrian would ordinarily hear in this location. This ambient sound might have actually been a recording of ships at the docks, and this would have been equally appropriate; the important aspect here is that the transmission of oral history from the nodes begins to work on the listener’s imagination.

When creating the audio pieces, Armin Medosch was careful not to be too ‘heavy-handed’ in editing the oral history to match spaces heavily influenced and imbued with the presence of commemorative memorials (Medosch 2008). The participant is quite naturally drawn to the synthesis between past and present and between the invisible sonic memorial (which is heard) and the physical, tactile memorial (which is seen and touched). Both the node and the memorial are “apparatus that configure distance in an intensive rather than extensive way” (Chandler and Neumark 2005)⁵. The aesthetic and emotional resonance of physical memorials is not in doubt, but we can also witness the ideological dominance and institutional silences of such “contemporary organs of remembrance” (Haskins 2007)⁶.

Conversely, the participant is also able to reflect on the way in which much of the city’s history has been has hidden or crowded out of view by modern development. I recollect feeling a sense of isolation, especially listening privately on headphones to public history, in my realisation that the Titanic memorial represents little more than a landmark for many joggers or passing drivers. It also led me to wonder whether any drivers stuck in traffic have been surprised to hear a ghostly ‘locally sourced’ voice recollecting the past, momentarily supplanting the ‘imported’ metallic tones of a relentlessly present-tense radio DJ they might usually listen to at drive-time! Another interesting instance of psychogeography occurred when I was listening to the oral testimony of an elderly man recollecting the exact costs of a day’s entertainment (a meal at a café, a cinema ticket and so on) during his childhood while I was stood near a queue of young peopling waiting to use a cashpoint (ATM) machine.

Such ‘locational’ experiences and imaginative speculations are perhaps evidence of the rooted and expressive culture of oral history as embodied witness inseparable from its place of origin. ‘Listening in’ is a licence to lived encounters with, and within, the city. As someone with only a very cursory knowledge of the history of Southampton, I wonder if residents of the city might find that the audio-tour resonates “the background of meaning which a landscape suggests to those familiar with it” (Berger 1991)⁷.

This project model represents an opportunity to promote the study of communities through oral history and new media. Crucially, it also hints at the prospect of ‘self-sustaining’ media forms, as the continued functioning of the project (the project is due to end in November 2008) involves a minimal degree of remote (self-) management. Hidden Histories exploits the increasing convergence of technology, short-circuiting the route between the (oral historian’s) tape recorder and ultra-local FM transmission. Bluetooth technology also enables new or potential participants to find out about the project, as each node scans the environment for phones with the Bluetooth function on. Once permission has been granted from the mobile user to allow further information to be sent, the node sends a text message, announcing the node, the FM frequency and information about the type of content which can be heard. It has been proposed that at a later stage the audio clips may be augmented with images and film clips.

The innovative use of Bluetooth technology points to the possibility of increasing the potential communicative reciprocity of the project. The project was designed as a non-interactive format of broadcasting on an FM frequency. Yet if access point services were created and the technology and software augmented, potentially the wireless network could broadcast responses to the oral histories uploaded by participants. Through this process, Hidden Histories could emerge as a real community effort in which participants effectively ‘tag’ the environment with invisible sonic content (Rueb 2002)⁸, embedding social knowledge in the wireless network of the city, and deepening the relationship between content and physical context.

Hidden Histories is a horizontal and open system, which has participants rather than an audience. The growth of the user community of visiting participants for such a project is slow and organic, building gradually by word-of-mouth, internet discussion, local publicity, and the possibility of other media outlets ‘covering’ the story and showcasing some of the project’s content. Hidden Histories, like mini-FM stations, has the potential to be magnetic, despite being ‘radio without an audience’ (Tetsuo Kogawa, quoted in Chandler and Neumark 2005), transmitting across distances easily traversed by foot. Unlike mini-FM stations, however, Hidden Histories is not a ‘manned’ or mobile radio station, and has no studio premises or conventional broadcasting equipment. Ten lampposts in central Southampton have been mounted with weather-proof compact boxes, containing repurposed domestic wireless hardware, and software programmed to repeat soundfiles containing the aural history. The ‘mesh network’ created by the boxes exists only for maintenance reasons, so that the boxes can be viewed remotely from London, and new content uploaded (Medosch 2008).

Alexei Blinov, and others at the London-based wireless collective Hivenetworks, have, in designing Hidden Histories according to Armin Medosch’s idea of an oral history trail, created an interesting paradigm of mediated radio communication. Conventional media technologies, when interposed, allow or enforce a physical distance between the parties, which tends to distort, reduce or eliminate communicative potential (Enzensberger 1976⁹; Franklin 1999¹⁰). Hidden Histories diverts from this unidirectional, space-biased model, and represents an example of local and dialogic ‘small media’ (Spitulnik 2002¹¹), which can be seen a means of exploring the secondarily oral (Ong 1980)¹² bias of electronic communications.

There is something distinctly appealing and exciting about the idea of a modern wireless network giving voice to the voiceless through the use of oral history. A real synergy can be created when ‘custodians of lore’ such as archivists and oral historians are able to collaborate with those involved in broadcasting or wireless networks, due to a common interest in provoking access to and extending the artistic possibilities of vernacular speech and aural soundscapes. This has the function of subverting common misperceptions of the oral history movement as exclusively focused on recovering and recording vanishing traditions in static archival forms. Hidden Histories itself has already been recognized within the free software movement as proof of the “short-sighted forecast stating that oral tradition would have been wiped out by the computer society” (Campanelli 2008). Perhaps projects such as Hidden Histories thus pave the way for future collaboration between archivists, oral historians, wireless network collectives and media activists, academic groups, community radio volunteers, cultural agencies and, of course, interested citizen-participants.

Listen to the Titanic piece, node 1, Hidden Histories:

Truax Barry.
1984. Acoustic communication.
LaBelle B.
2006. Phantom Music: radio, memory, and narratives from auditory life.
ORGANISED SOUND. 11(1):19-26.
Appadurai A.
1996. Modernity at large : cultural dimensions of globalization.
Innis H.
1951. The Bias of Communication.
Chandler Annmarie, Neumark Norie.
2005. At a distance : precursors to art and activism on the Internet.
Haskins E.
2007. Between Archive and Participation: Public Memory in a Digital Age.
Rhetoric Society quarterly.. 37(4):401-422.
Berger John.
1991. Keeping a rendezvous.
Rueb T.
2002. Sonic Space-Time: Sound Installation and Secondary Orality.
Enzensberger HMagnus.
1970. Constituents of a theory of the media.
Franklin UM.
1999. The real world of technology.
Hydén G, Leslie Michael, Ogundimu FFolarin.
2002. Media and democracy in Africa.
Ong WJ.
1978. Literacy and Orality in Our Times.
ADE Bulletin. 58:1-7.

Sonic Space-Time: Sound Installation and Secondary Orality

admin — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:15:23 +0200

Hidden Histories / Street Radio

admin — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 10:50:07 +0200

In this book articles and essays get collected reflecting on projects such as Hidden Histories / Street Radio and other projects in that area.

Lost Music

Lindsay — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:58:27 +0200

My research today took a poetic wander. In thinking about the electromagnetic environment and how 'on land' we are submerged in modulated mumblings, my thoughts turned to the electromagnetically silent world of the deep, a world where radio and light don't penetrate, a world that can only be felt through other senses; the skin, the emotions, sound. Today I started looking at the Titanic. Armin's work through his and Hivenetworks Hidden Histories project, has already highlighted the community memory of this tragedy and through their early research, pinpointed one aspect that I found mesmerisingly intruiging; the music that was still being played when the ship went down.

‘What happens to music as it is played in water? On a purely physical level, of course, it simply stops since the strings would fail to produce much of a sound (it was a string sextet that played at the end, since the two pianists with the band had no instruments available on the Boat Deck). On a poetic level, however, the music, once generated in water, would continue to reverberate for long periods of time in the more sound-efficient medium of water and the music would descend with the ship to the ocean bed and remain there, repeating over and over until the ship returns to the surface and the sounds re-emerge’ Gavin Bryars

So today I spent with music, and the musings of the endless 'Last Tune' that the water surrounding the Titanic holds. I re-listened once again to 'The Sinking of the Titanic', a 1973 version of the Eno supported composition of Gavin Bryars, where the last tune of 'Autumn' is played over and over, interspersed with references to human life, quietly passing through the threshold of air to water, to continue for ever at the depth of 3,800 metres.

In looking at Bryars however, I had to listen and take into account more modern takes on this composition. One such interpretation is by London-based musician/artist Robin Rimbaud who works under the name Scanner. Whilst (for me) Bryars composition takes into account the directly quiet relationship between the music and the water, Rimbaud's seems more of an account of the entire disaster. The recent composition is certainly more dramatic, yet in some respects more obvious. Although following Bryar's lead with 'Autumn' as its intro, and some rather nice sound effects such as creaky boards, the compostion departed from the original around the central point, where the Bodhrán sounding a valiance of the third class, made sure that the celtic heart would never be forgotten. There thus followed an audio account of one of the passengers, that nicely brought the listener back round to the more mystical elements of fate. The track then started to disappear with slightly staccato but effective 'cut offs' of sound, interspersing music with the sound of a crowd, until eventually silence. The performance, which was recorded live in 2007, has the sound of the (slightly unsure) audience clapping at the end, which brings the acoustics nicely back round to rain...

Scanners performance can be downloaded for free here.

The final hymn played during those last 5 minutes of the ship's life is identified in an account by Harold Bride, the junior wireless operator, in an interview for the New York Times of April 19th 1912

"...from aft came the tunes of the band..... The ship was gradually turning on her nose - just like a duck that goes down for a dive. I had only one thing on my mind - to get away from the suction. The band was still playing. I guess all of the band went down. They were playing "Autumn" then. I swam with all my might. I suppose I was 150 feet away when the Titanic, on her nose, with her afterquarter sticking straight up in the air, began to settle slowly.... The way the band kept playing was a noble thing. I heard it first while we were still working wireless, when there was a ragtime tune for us, and the last I saw of the band, when I was floating out in the sea with my lifebelt on, it was still on deck playing "Autumn". How they ever did it I cannot imagine." Gavin Bryars

Titanic Hull

Lindsay — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:35:06 +0200

This is a picture (2004) taken of the hull of the Titanic 92 years after she sunk. The wreck lies at approximately 3,500 metres below the surface of the water, which is the same distance as the tops of some alpine peaks. This very beautiful and peaceful photograph along with a selected few other relatively hi-res images can be found at the Boat Shed

All photographs by Robert Ballard, the original diver discoverer of the Titanic wreck. The image was retrieved from the above link.

Rewriting of History - Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici

Armin Medosch — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:16:25 +0200

Thanks to Doll Yoko for making us aware of Caliban and the Witch - Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici looks at the transition from feudalism to capitalism from the point of view of 'women, the body and primitive accumulation'. Her key thesis is that the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th century were instrumental to establishing a new capitalist order through 'the development of a 'new sexual division of labour subjugating women's labour and women's reproductive function to the reproduction of the workforce.' Yet by telling the story also from Caliban's point of view, symbol of the 'trans-Atlantic' proleterian, Federici achieves what she claims: to transcend the dichotomy between "gender" and "class". This book is also a brilliant description of the process of primitive accumulation, in particular the enclosures of the common land starting at the end of the middle age and the various forms of resistance to that by renegade women and the 'motley crowd' of the working classes.

In Caliban and the witch¹ Federici looks at the 'development of capitalism from a feminist viewpoint while at the same time avoiding the limits of a "women's history" separated from that of the male part of the working class'. (Introduction, p 11) This is reflected in the title "Caliban and the Witch" inspired by the Shakespeare play The Tempest. In Federici's interpretation Caliban is not only the symbol of anti-colonial resistance, but also for the world proletariat and, "more specifically, for the proletarian body as a terrain and instrument of resistance to the logic of capitalism."

Federici puts Sycorax, the mother of Caliban and a powerful 'witch', center stage of the narration. Federici's main thesis is that the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th century were not just some strange and tragic quirk of history during the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but central to the formation of the new capitalist order. The power of women had to be broken in order for capitalism to succeed. Sycorax, the witch, is the "embodiment of a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeha woman who poisoned the master's food and inspired the slaves to revolt."

Federici rethinks the process of primitive accumulation, which is so central to Marx, as it is 'treated by Marx as a foundational process, revealing the structural conditions for the existence of capitalist society.' (p 12) She states that where she differs from Marx is that while he considers it more or less exclusively from the viewpoint of male waged proletariat, Federici examines it 'from the viewpoint of the changes it introduced in the social position of women and the production of labor power.' (p. 12) In her account she highlights 'the development of a 'new sexual division of labour subjugating women's labour and women's reproductive function to the reproduction of the workforce,' [...] 'the construction of a new patriarchal order based upon the exclusion of women from waged work and their subordination to men' [...] and 'the transformation of the female body into a machine for the production of new workers.'

Federici places the witchhunts of the 16th and 17th century at the center of her analysis of 'primitive accumulation' claiming that 'the persecution of the witches in Europe as in the New World, was as important as colonization and the expropriation of the European peasantry from its land were for the development of capitalism.' ( all quotes p. 12) Federici argues that 'primitive accumulation did not just happen in the past but was an ongoing process with new enclosures of common world on a massive scale and even the reappearance of witch hunts, which was part of the motivation for her to write this book.

Federici connects with traditions of feminist scholars who established a convincing framework regarding an explanation of the witch hunt according to which it served to 'destroy the control that women had exercised over their reproductive function and paved the way for the development of a more reppressive patriarchal regime' (p 14). Federici posits that her work goes beyond this general point -- which has been widely acknowledged -- and investigates the 'specific historical circumstances under which the persecution of the witches was unleashed and the reasons why the rise of capitalism demanded a genocidal attack on women.' (p. 14) Federici claims that her analysis allows to transcend the dichotomoy between 'gender' and 'class'; she argues that gender is not merely a cultural construct, as postmodernists have claimed, since (paraphrasing now) 'in capitalist society "femininity" has been constituted as a work-function, masking the production of the work force under the cover of a biologic destiny. If this is true then "women's" history is "class history" and 'therefore "women" is a legitimate category of analysis and the activities associated with "reproduction" remain a crucial battle ground for women now as they were in the 1970ies.' (page 14) Federici's introduction ends with a convincing critique of Focault's concept of 'bio-power' and the analysis he puts forward in his History of Sexuality (Focault 1978) as "gender-blind" (pages 15 - 16).

Heavy Theory Artillery

So far this is all quite convincing although Federici sounds sometimes a bit heavy handed on the theoretic side. When 'the logic of capitalism' in its foundational phase demanded an attack on women on a genocidal scale, which may be true, then still it is necessary to ask who is behind this, who is the historical actor? Are there identifiable people, groups, a class who perpetrated those crimes for specific interests or is there no specific historic actor as such, is it rather just the 'logic of capitalism' which is at work here? This is an important question on the metalevel of any historic explanation. Who are the players here, concrete identifiable people or historic 'forces', 'logics', 'mechanisms', 'demons'??? I am asking a bit heretically here, does the hunt for an explanation of the witch hunt produce another 'demon' in the shape of the logic of capitalism? Or 'primitive accumulation'? I think Federici is well aware of this problem of agency in historic explanation and at crucial moments in her book she admits that her evidence is sometimes 'circumstantial'. She also writes in the Introduction that more research is necessary to clarify the connections that she is making.

But luckily Federici's book is not just a theory book but primarily a history book and as such it is full of well researched facts which can be disputed or disproved or found true, but the main thing, the research is there, on the shelf, to be examined, savoured or, yes, read in one go, as in my case. There are so many interesting points of departure in this book for further research, I can hardly name them all. First of all, besides the main witch hunt thesis, the book contains a wealth of facts about the enclosures of the commons during the phase of primitive accumulation, as a necessary step to what follows.

The first chapter, "All the World Needs a Jolt" talks about Social Movements and Political Crisis in medieval Europe. I was aware of quite a bit of the heresy and more official religious madness going on at that time but not what extent that had had and particularly how this could be re-examined from a viewpoint of class struggle, resistance, uprisals and revolts which runs totally 'contrary to the schoolbook portrait of feudal society as a static world, in which each estate accepted its designated place in the social order.' (page 26) I had also not been aware that women in many areas were more 'liberated' in the middle age, in particular through access to land which allowed them a level of self-subsitency. This connects to more well known things such as that there were types of traditional knowledge about herbs and their properties which were passed on along the female line. I was particularly unaware of the fact that ion the late middle ages as women migrated to the cities they gained access to many jobs that were later considered 'male' such as 'smiths, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, hat-makers, ale-brewers, wool-carders and retailers,' (p 31), that female employment during that era between the 13 hundreds and 15 hundreds was was on a very high level and that in some places, such as for instance Frankfurt women participated in app. 200 occupations and were also members of most of the guilds (paraphrased from page 31).

However, when Federici states that during the era of the witch hunts women generally suffered a worsening of their social positions, she does not imply that during the middle ages it was all a merry may pole dance. The christian church had a long history of trying to control sexual behaviour and reducing the seductive sexual power that women have over men (paraphrased, page 37). Women played in important role in the heretic movements, some of which celebrated "free love" which could at once have been 'a male ploy designed to gain easy access to women's sexual favors' or a result of the demonisation of sexuality by the church so that women joined heretic movements because they would enjoy a better status and more freedom among them (p. 39).

Voices of anti-colonial resistance

It is a particular strength of Federici's analysis that despite the feminist viewpoint she does not separate 'women' issues from 'class' issues and narrates the stories of various forms of resistance and class struggle from a viewpoint that joins those issues together so that it becomes clear that male and femal 'underclasses' were often united in those struggles. In this regard, I am reading Caliban and the Witch together with The Many Headed Hydra: sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic². The two books are referencing each other, so one can assume the authors have been aware of each others work for a bit. In sum, those books impress because of the never ending spirit of resistence that combines classes, genders and ethnicities in the 'anti-globalisation' struggles of a past which continues till today.³

In this regard, I am interested in digging deeper to find more specific voices. The play The Tempest is one good starting point in this regard, while Ben Jonson seems to be the more interesting dramatician, and the ruthlessness of Francis Bacon is another important thread. Federici does also treat the subject matter of the 'onset' (in my interpretation) of the scientific mindset through Descartes and the formation of the scientific spirit amidst the most deadly century, from about 1580 to 1680, when wars, disease the loss of common land and colonialisation pressure led to the witch hunts. The interest in anatomic theatres and dissections of the body are further ingredients to be considered when reflecting the formation of the new 'modern' subjectivities. This relationship between science, white magic and the burning of witches ... What I have read so far only confirms that those alternative histories are not yet fully told. The colonial mindset permeating even the structuring of the sciences themselves long made impossible such a consideration of an account of globalisation from below. This is an area which I will do more follow-up work on, to develop the 'voices' thread of my PhD research. I will investigate anti-colonial struggle in music, from Mento to Choro and Samba, and other 'proto' forms of modern styles such as Ska, Reggae, Funk, etc.

Federici S.
2004. Caliban and the Witch.
:285.
Linebaugh P, Rediker MB.
2000. The many-headed hydra: sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic.
This leads Federici to a particular damning criticism of the bourgeoisie. 'While we are often told that the rise of democracy is due to a heroic struggle of the middle class against feudal aristocracy', Federici shows that 'already in the middle ages the bourgeoisie sacrificed their cherished political autonomy' and collaborated with the aristocracy to hold down the restive proletariat.' (page 50)

The many-headed hydra: sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic

Armin Medosch — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:26:40 +0200

Hidden Histories -Review on Neural.it

Armin Medosch — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:30:05 +0200

We have been reviewed by neural it
http://www.neural.it/art/2008/04/street_radio_oral_tradition_di.phtml

I particularly like the last part of the article where it says:

"The Street Radio project can then be interpreted as the nth disproof of the short-sighted forecast stating that oral tradition would have been wiped out by the computer society. Today we can notice an emergent new form of orality that should be defined as a "tertiary", in the School of Toronto tradition, that taught us to consider the electronic-era orality as a secondary one."

The author, Vito Campanelli, seems to be quite knowledgeable about the subject and I will have to investigate the School of Toronto tradition which I was unaware of.

Ewan on the Boston Sterling mast

Lindsay — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:27:27 +0200

A new public wireless interface: Hivenetworks successfully launch 'Street Radio' in Southampton

Armin Medosch — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 09:59:03 +0100

On Friday the 14th of March 2008 ten 'street radio' nodes went live in Southampton narrowcasting Hidden Histories -- stories from Southamptons Oral History Archive selected and arranged to correspond with the location of the 10 nodes.

Participants started to meet at around 11 am at the gallery cafe in Southampton's Civic Centre. There they received maps of the Hidden Histories trail and those who needed them could borrow little FM radio receivers. Here you can get a digital version of the Hidden Histories map and here you get a Hidden Histories Guide

The underlying technology has been developed by Hivenetworks over the past 3, 4 years. The technologically creative mastermind behind the project is Alexei Blinov. For many years he has supported artists by finding technical solutions for their ideas. This time it was the other way round, as the basic concept behind Hive Networks is based on ideas and research carried out by Blinov, supported by a network of collaborators and friends. Blinov conceived the idea of a network that is not just a carrier of information but one that sees hears, smells, and which automatically adds new nodes and drops them if necessary, a hive of little devices which interact with each other and the public. While similar ideas have been emanating from computer science labs such as the MIT for the past 20 years, only now, through the drop in hardware prices and the collaborative efforts of free, libre and open source software developers, it has become possible for garage inventor outfits such as Blinov's Raylabs to experiments hands on with a DIY approach to ubiquituous computing. The concept of Hivenetworks was created by the artist-engineer Alexei Blinov with the proposition that it should enable media artists to create complex public art works without having to get into the deep end of technological development. Here you find an article about the deep history of HIvenetworks.

This is where I come in. I have been involved from the very start, not as a technical developer but as a close observer of the project and as a respondent to Alexei's ideas. From the very beginning I was convinced that Alexei was on to something with huge potential which also overlapped with my own interest. When the first seeds of Hivenetworks were sown I was involved in a research residency provided by Scan networks, lead by Helen Sloan. In the course of this residency I came across the Oral History Unit of Southampton Council heritage services. Since the early 1980ies the Oral History Unit (OHU) had been collecting life interviews from the people of Southampton, many of whom had been very old and had worked in the docks and on ships between World Wars I and II, some even earlier. Knowing about Alexei's ideas about Hivenetworks, I wrote up a concept about creating an Oral History Trail in the centre of Southampton. It took 4 years and several other people to get involved to make this happen. First, independently of me Alexei's old friend and collegue of Raylab times, Cieron Edwards, had a very similar idea, which he started pitching towards Paul Grover of the Solent Centre. Still involved was Helen Sloan who supported conceptual development at an early stage. While the technology matured, supported also through an Arts Council grant in 2006, the Solent Centre's efforts to get local financial and organisational support finally succeeded in 2007 by receiving funding through SEEDA and Southampton Partnerships and in autumn of that year we could start seriously with implementing the project with the help of Rosie Danby as our project manager for the Solent Centre.

Hivebox on light pole in front of former Tyrell and Green building

On a tight budget and close deadline, we were very happy to be able to deliver. On 10 light poles in the centre of Southampton on Above Bar street weather proof little boxes have been mounted which contain repurposed commercially available hardware. The unique hard- software combination implemented by Hivenetworks is playing soundfiles in a loop on FM radio on 89.0 MHtz. The very low powered USB FM transmitters are said to have a range of about 10 to 15 meters. Thus, around each lighhtpole in a radius of 30 meters approximately you can hear one particular radio art piece created by me with excerpts from the Oral History Archive. The boxes also scan the surroundings for mobile phones with the bluetooth function on. Asking the carrier of the mobile phone to accept a message first, a short bluetooth text message is transmitted announcing the node, the frequency and its content. The Hiveware contained in the boxes also creates a mesh network based on the OLSR protocol. Currently we do not provide access point services, the mesh is only there for maintainance reasons. Via the net we can 'see' the boxes from London and check if they are working and upload new content.

Snapshot of the mesh network topology

I have been working on this project since the beginning of last autumn but the past two months in particular I was in oral history universe. I could never have finished the 10 short audio pieces on time without the support of Sheila Jemima and Padmini Broomfield from the OHU. They know the archive very well and have carried out already many projects where they made selections and put together specific excerpts of the archive, from Titanic to maritime workers, female seafarers and early memories of cinematic experiences. In the remnants of the bombed out Holyrood Church they have created a different type of oral history station, a piece of hardware with buttons to select different audio extracts from. Their advise and expertise saved me a lot of time and provided valuable guidance and inspiration. So for about 2 months continuously I spent under the headphones, listening through the archive, becoming intimate with voices and the tales that they told. After such an intense phase of work in seclusion, me and the voices from the past, spending together hours and hours, it was a particular type of joy for me to see and hear this project launched.

First of all, it worked. To be precise, 9 out of 10 nodes worked. One, the 10th and last node by chance, had a technical failure which could not be solved by means of software or frequent restarts -- the whole box has to be replaced which we will do shortly. For a pilot project with such a smalll budget 9 out of 10 was not a bad achievement. Moreover, the FM reception in the vicinity of the nodes was generally very good. Because of traffic noise it is advisable to use headphones, yet by using those the voices are coming through quite clearly and very well understandable. Some of the nodes have a slight high pitched buzz at the background, but it is not loud enough to diminish the experience and other nodes are totally clear. The bluetooth function worked but very very slowly, which is something to be addressed in the future.

But technical functioning aside, the project also worked as a whole. I simple loved drifting from one node to the other, headphones on, radio in hand, listening in to one story and then, after a while, moving on to the next. There was a specific effect that we had hoped to happen but could not count on because at the end of the day this was the first time that something like this was done. We placed the nodes in such a distance that ideally the covered areas would overlap just a bit so that you could drift from one story to the next and even have an area where both nodes were audible. And this was exactly how it turned out. Between node 6 and 5 for instance, or node 7 and 9, you could walk away from one node, its signal slowly getting weaker, while the other soundbytes would start coming in, gently interfering but not wiping out the first signal, until you were close in reach and only listened to one node again. It would be very tempting for the future to use this effect to ask sound artists to create compositions for specific areas.

When I created the pieces, I took care to chose topics which would relate to the surroundings. Thereby I tried to be not too heavy handed regarding the 'meaningfullness' of the pieces. Sometimes the spaces are very heavily connotated by memorials. Simply doubling those connotations would probably be too much. Also, the material of the Oral History Archive can be pretty hardcore. Take for instance the wars. The archive contains stories from both World Wars which are so sad that you could make everyone depressed listening to those. The same with Titanic, or with poverty, or hardship concerning the labour conditions in the dock. If you wanted to you could portray life before WWII for the working classes as endless misersy and hardship. Yet although it was tough, hard and unfair, people also found ways of entertaining themselves which maybe are lost to us nowadays and they talked about memories of good times as well. Therefore, in my selection, I tried to find a balance and mixed in some of those positive tones. I would not want to be seen to try to make things better than they were, but I also didn't try to hammer home some politically correct message about the suffering of "the people". The people are a pretty divers folk, I learned from working with the oral history archive.

Here you can listen to a Hidden Histories sound example, The Sinking of the Titanic

That said, the work creates a sort of temporal spatial narration. As you walk through the city space of Southampton, you dive into those stories from the past. The history is suspended in the air, so to speak. Sometimes the imponderabilities of the wireless medium carry a wave from a far away node unexpectedly mixing in with where you are on the trail. The chosen technological set-up makes it easy for the audience to experience the piece. I am quite aware of the genre of the audio walk, without having researched it so far in any academic sense. Most audio walks which I ever tried made it necessary for the audience to borrow quite heavy and expensive gear to experience it. Only a couple of years ago at Futuresonica that would be a aluminium rucksack containing a gps and a computer. The street radio set up deployed by Hivenetworks on the other hand uses technology which people already carry in their pocket. Most of the newer mobile phones have bluetooth and FM reception. Having headphones, even small ones, really improve the experience. But that's it, oiff you go and listen to stories from Southampton's maritime past while taking a walk through the city, smelling the air, seeing radio masts of ships in the distance, being 'disturbed' by some live seagulls. What struck me as particularly interesting is this overlapping of the visual sense with the profane ongoings of Southampton on a weekday morning and the audio sphere with the voices from the achive. It creates a new layer, a new public interface through which to experience the city.

This should not be of interest for tourists only but even more so is an experience which the people of Southampton should try to give them a sense of ownership of their own history and present. The voices of the people of Southampton telling an unfiltered version of subjectively experienced history are being trasnmitted into public space. Little squares and corners are being enriched with a civil society version of history profoundly different from the media manipulation which we have to suffer with today's electronic media landscape. For me and the Hivenetwork crew this is a beginning, not an end. The technology can still mature and improve and is capable of more and other things. But for the time being I think we can be proud a little bit.

Note: Hidden Histories on Street Radio is currently running and will remain active till November 2008.