The aptness of electrical instruments must doubtless be regarded as, in
principle, important. But it has to be said that for the moment their
efficiency is still very problematic. The reason for this is not the
incapacity of inventors, but the misguided spirit of industry, which
does not allow inventions to mature until they are perfect from the
artistic point of view, but provides inventors with money only for
very dubious purposes -- what they are to produce is not an instrument
serving art, but something which can be mass produced and thrown on the
market cheaply, and that can be brought out at least once a year in
a new faishionable version that makes the earlier ones valueless,
until the whole world loses interest. That is a sad and hope-destroying
phenomenon.

(Arnold Schoenberg in a letter to Alban Berg, 1931)


lately after the press conference one of the two guests from
the press started to ask:

A: ahm, the matter of bandwidth is still on top of the list, isn't it?

B: yes, we want a lot of bandwidth! but not only on the internet,
a street in Berlin can take a lot of traffic too. net.radio is
a filter to the world, and has to deal with bandwidth scarcity,
the sound is AM quality, you experience gaps and delays, that's why
it is called 'radio'. the noise and the modes of production and
distribution are a feature of the sound.

A: and the guests, how do they see it?

well, we, at mikro and convex tv, are curious ourselves! there
is quite a lot to talk about, that's why we do this meeting and
there will be more meetings elsewhere, it is just 'next station'.
i would say, it doesn't hurt to have a coalition of small projects
sharing resources in a tactical way, beeing able to occupy a
central server and also switch to another one, joining forces to
not just hide at the margins, in noble distance to the flow, but
take up the fight with big media which are obviously quite clue-
less. i think the trick is to combine the decentralized and
partly automatic formats of private radio studios with the
modernist megaphone style of official state radio stations
and run along both vectors. producing and narrowcasting from
home-studios, re-distributing from fat mirror servers. this
needs of course to occupy one open channel



the trick is to
'narrowcast' from home-studios all over the world, forget about
forces for so called standards of professional state and private radio
formats, but still be able to provide your sound to a couple of
hundred listeners at once. this is a question of shared bandwidth
and starting with small & open coalitions like the x-change network.
another example are DJ radio stations with a highly specialized sound,
broadcasting club events and live mixing, having the freedom to
not care if it is 50 or 5000 listeners. another case are net.radio
artists which are exploring the sound of network topologies, loops,
stars, rings, clusters, pyramids. plus there is a whole field of
net.sound experiments  which in one or the other way interlock with
such practises.

A: can you explain in short words what does internet-radio means?

B: take the radio in radio with a grain of salt, as a drunken
metaphor. it is an reminescence of early radio coming back
before it the airwaves were regulated, and there were large gaps
within the electromagnetic spectrum were there was just cosmic
noise. the net is still wide and open and no one has a clue what
where the nuggets are hidden, not even microsoft. it is ok if
some radio stations just put their signals on the net but
our interest for these days is not to talk about boring routine
but the chances of doing something together, talking about
experiments, contexts, new ideas.

A: is mikro e.V. sponsored by a big company or the state?

we managed to get an ammount of money which is used
by larger institutions to send their postcards around.
we think a lean budget is good for the quality of content.
this is part of a new type of events, not so big, not
so official, not so expensive, and not so professional.
we are entering the third sector, not private, not state.
mikro is a grassroots thing, it is new and has no open
bills. we see us as hosts, as a platform and think that
sooner or later there will be a loose network of
such small initiatives, playing the drums in media
culture, like there is cyber-salon or backspace in london.
this is post hype pragmatism, not radical chic. but we
have quite some hope to be a bit more generous to our
guests next time, to pay the food for example.

A: can you explain in a few words what you will do?

B: it's about connecting the net to the dreamscape,
send out live-streams back into the ether, occupy a
window on FM, installing a huge juke box with public
domain music, going into clubs and bars and have
special parties, it's a very private event, no
big representation opera, no spokesmen, no
save the world movement.

A: thank you.

----

more hyped standards?
-> http://www.rezrocket.com

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