Food Radio Manifeasto
We are at a particular moment where radiomaking offers the possibility to build audience relationships that bridge the listening modes of terrestrial and net broadcasting by drawing on the diverse bodies of practice that have grown up around these technologies, and around the ways they are regulated and distributed. The forms of radio production that emerge are not the Futurist ideal where food can be centrally broadcast directly into the stomachs of the listeners, but a network of exchange, where specific and local conditions must negotiate spatial and temporal distance to be shared.
Taking food as a model for participatory activity, collaborative creation, and sonic exchange, our radio cooks explore ways to lay on splendid feasts for our listeners…
[sizzle sizzle]
We are radio cooks. Our audiences are not consumers but diners. They talk with us while we are in the kitchen. They help chop the vegetables. They comment on what we serve up. And maybe they bring some ingredients or a bottle of wine.
[pop glugluglug chink]
Cooking together as a creative activity can be a very revealing collaboration in miniature. Are you a whizz at following the nuances of complex recipes with the best ingredients? Or do you shine brightest in the kitchen when improvising with leftovers? Perhaps you are the beloved guest who pays the compliment of wanting third helpings? Whatever your appetites, this is radio that aims to nourish!
Hybrid radio cuisine distributes active performer/participants and lurking performer/participants throughout the networks in which it takes place — there is no separate location for audience. It is a networked experience both in its conception and execution. Rather than represent a network to participants, let us invite them to share food/food for thought from their own global position and local variables. We aim to provide suitable hosts and clear protocols for open participation.
We exchange recipes and we share ingredients, exploring models of open content and accessible technologies as ways to circumvent commercial and legislative gatekeepers of spectrum and net. Our recipes are in a state of constant variation as we experiment with the ingredients and utensils at hand.
[clatter clang slosh rattle crunch]
We have learned a great deal from the fine cuisines of radiophonic tradition and as we enter new territories we seek to work with what is fresh and local. Let us take our time to savor a “slow media” like “slow food” — a culinary ethos, which contends that local fresh produce prepared carefully and consumed at leisure may be more nutritious.
Everybody needs to eat and the radio experience should nourish everyone who participates in it. If the experience doesn’t provide sustenance our guests will choose to dine elsewhere and in better company.
[crackle hiss whine click beep whirr tick hum]
What is interesting about radio as a live network between remote locations is the location and not merely the fact that it is remote. Here and there have different flavors.
Food, like sound, enters the body and indexes it in place and time.
The processes of digestion and metabolism are temporal and cyclic and cannot adjust easily to sudden changes of time zone, resulting, for example, in being hungry at the wrong time when jet-lagged.
Listen globally, eat locally.
From grabbing a text-only coffee and cake in an ascii only virtual world, all the way to gourmet dinner shared across continents, the idea of food sharing as a trope for exploring remote social interactions is not a new one. But this myth of a shared eating space gives way to an engagement with local conditions of possibility for the meaningful exchange of sonic and kinaesthetic experiences based in actual eating spaces which are not shared, and which are located in very different places and spaces.
Without attending to the specificities of the places involved, the transmission of their locales collapse into indistinguishable virtual space, which can never be truly remote nor fully present. Our radio cooks explore the local motives and conditions that precipitate remote connection, particularly through an orientation to sound. Sonic experiences as indices of being in place and time, precipitate a close knit region of intertwined concerns between the interfacing of spaces and the technologies and techniques of remote connection.
[murmur shuffle scrape crunch crunch]
In the text “Where are We Eating? and What are We Eating?” John Cage brings together place, sound and motion around the trope of food by describing the practicalities of finding meals as the calorific furnaces of Merce Cunnigham’s dancers on tour metabolize time and place. Food becomes a filter of circumstance. This invites an analogy between food consumed and energy expended, between time, place and what is eaten. Nearly 30 years later the question “where are we eating?” has some different resonances and perhaps the digital kitchen engages culinary quanta in a somewhat changed economy of consumption.
Food cannot be broadcast. We cannot download food, it must make a physical journey if we are to eat it far from its origin. The Futurist vision of “nourishment by radio” is a logical extreme of the ways in which those physical journeys are backgrounded in contemporary food economies. And the fascist aesthetic of disconnecting the substance of food from its nutritional function that pervades Futurist gastronomy calls for a cuisine of olfactory and oral sensations that is as divorced from the necessity for sustenance as it is unsustainable.
To what extent does the consumption of food impact the ecology and economy of place? The availability of foods in a certain place may also have a great deal to do with the displacement of people. “Where are we eating?” can mean “where are we when we eat?” It can also mean “what place do we consume?” Broadcasting originates as a local scattering of seeds for the production of food, dependent on the immediate environment of reception in order to germinate and flourish.
What time is dinner? As dinnertime moves through different time zones, so does dinnertime conversation move through different languages and geopolitical contexts.
What are the sounds of differing food cultures? And how are our “foodscapes” changing? Does the contradiction between welcoming foreign foods, but not always foreigners, ever leave a bitter taste for those far from home in the wrong kitchen with the wrong ingredients? But also, what is local and fresh? What is in season where you are?
The audience is invited to the table, and their physical listening space considered. Whether cooking or dining or a bit of both, where they are determines their mode of reception. Of course, it is utopian to suggest there is a place at the table for everyone, even if none are turned away. Where are we eating? And which ingredients of the situation define “we”?
In a culture of media practice that frequently privileges visual modes, the preparation and consumption of food demands the extension of our sensory perception’s engagement to sound, tactility and taste. The challenges of engaging these very “present” sensations remotely provide a rich ground for investigation and experimentation as well as for exploration of the connection of motion and gesture in public space, hybrid transmission spaces and dispersed, mobile modes of exchange. Welcome to a moveable feast with its morsels of digital finger-food for sampling and digestion.
[crackle squelch whirr gurgle]
Whilst customs differ as to how the invitation is framed in different styles of cooking and eating, few need an explanation that food invites participation. With the emergence of cooking facilities that are distributed rather than centralized, passive consumption of radio can yield to the possibility of dishing up whatever we find delicious by getting in the kitchen and cooking from wherever we are.
The early histories of radio are filled with traces of possibility that resurface as the Internet has provided a vehicle for exploring radio as a networked medium in a way that the State-regulation and commercial exploitation of radio spectrum has made difficult. However, we now come to this space with a history of radio art, which has contested and negotiated its place on the dial engendering a body of practices that have nourished our ears.
Beyond being a new venue for pre-existing utopian ideas, net radio practices engage not only the specificities of the Internet as a medium for audio but also the increasing necessity to address the dwindling access audiences have to radio art on terrestrial radio.
There is a diminishing space for live practices on public radio arts programs and a proliferation of new ways to feed material into net radio practices using participatory tools or simple techniques such as podcasting. We can conserve access to our radiophonic delicacies by stocking up our online larders. But alongside sumptuous morsels of canned duration, let us also prepare fresh feasts in a proliferation of live feeds.
[clatter swoosh clang rattle scratch]
[extract from: LIVE FEEDS… hybrid cuisine from the new radio kitchen…a dinner invitation to radio cooks everywhere by Sophea Lerner in Radio Territories eds.Erik Granly Jensen and Brandon Labelle]