October 30th — Preparing for the field

Zoom H6 Handheld Recorder: Your WdKa Rental request has been approved. It is Thursday and I pick up the field recorder on the ground floor of the Wijnhaven building. I expected a small and handy box to carry it home in. Instead, I get a very. big. box. that my backpack can barely fit. A slight feeling sneaks up that this thing is way to professional for my plans to make a few little recordings of the city surroundings. (Note from later: WdKa Rental handbook knew how I was feeling and helped a lot!) For the upcoming radio show on Monday, we are planning to host a jam session with samples, tapes and records. The equipment to be used includes not only the CDJs from the worm studio, but also the live coding environment strudel, as well as a typewriter and a dot matrix printer. I have no experience with sampling, jamming or live coding and am slowly getting nervous. Trying to focus more on the experimentation and less on the outcome…

The day at school is filled with a great workshop on html and css by Robin, a lovely lunch at Boguette, a thorough but fruitless search for the right audio cables and adapters in the xperimental magic lab, as well as various talks around Special Issue #28 and the upcoming event. As the webdev team, we discuss a plan and make some collective decisions. We are now working with 11ty to build the page! Later, I try my hand (again) at strudel live coding in preparation for the jam. So far not really to my satisfaction.

In the evening, I get lost on radio aporee browsing for inspirational field recordings. Many recordings are made ten or more years ago and it feels like a journey back in time. One very fun thing I uncover: One person—going after the url of their page they are the third(!) registered user of radio aporee—uploaded lots of contributions between 2006 and 2016, many of them describing things to be seen from telephone booths in Berlin. He always follows the same pattern, or “script”, and I determine this to be a (spoken) writing machine:

radio aporee: user page henrik schröder

Münzfernsprecher Recordings

Henrik Schröder via radio aporee, Berlin, 2007

Protocol

“Telekom [description of ”Fernsprecher” telephone booth] [Street name] an radio aporee. Zu meiner derzeitigen Ausrüstung gehören [things found in and around the telephone booth]. Ansonsten keine besonderen Vorkommnisse. Ahoi.”

Output (examples)

“Telekom Fernsprecher Herfurthplatz 14, zwischen Herfurthstraße und Schillerpromenade an radio aporee. Zu meiner derzeitigen Ausrüstung gehören ein Dreierfahrradständer, an dem drei Räder angeschlossen sind; ein silbernes Damenfahrrad der Marke Fortex, ein rot-schwarzes Herrenfahrrad der Marke Turbo, sowie ein Kreidler Damenrad in silber. Außerdem ein Hinweisschild mit der Aufschrift:”Feuerwehrzufahrt - Betreten bei Eis und Schnee auf eigene Gefahr”. Ansonsten keine besonderen Vorkommnisse. Ahoi.”

“Telekom Triplefernsprecher mit Touchscreen und allem Pipapo, Hermannplatz Ecke Hasenheide an radio aporee. Zu meiner derzeitigen Ausrüstung gehören eine Imbissbude und ein großer BSR Müllcontainer. Karstadt noch geschlossen. Ansonsten keine besonderen Vorkommnisse. Ahoi.”

Another beautiful find on aporee: Mapping Happiness by user ginevragodin collects moments of joy in the area of Neukölln. Both projects relate nicely to my thoughts around mapping, walking and practicing (artistic) research in the immediate personal environment. I definitely want to share the recordings I’m making and hope that the site will be there for another 20 years.

As a last treasure of the day, I find a paper that promises to be a good read: Interventions in walking methods in political geography. I start, but it is looong. Will be added to the reader!