radio_roohafza

https://www.thismightnotbe.online/radio_roohafza/

radio roohafza is an internet radio station that streams sound from a self-hosted server in Delhi, India. Through the project roohafza with gin
nicely lubricates a conversation, we would like to render an imagination for a yearlong occupation of radio roohafza that is grounded in our
interest in listening together while inhabiting precarious infrastructural arrangements.

radio roohafza is hosted on a low cost, low tech web server system
developed using open source networking software running on a
consumer internet line. Its physical infrastructure consists of old
laptops and single board computers that share messy tabletops with
a happy meal toy, crochet hooks and a money plant among other
things. It heats up during the summer months and goes down with
the occasional power cut. You can tell from the sound of its cooling
fan if it has got visitors, or perhaps just a botnet sniffing around. This
system is perpetually online, and shares its architecture with our
home network. We are interested in the capacity of this
infrastructure to host the world.

Network infrastructure of the home server

The radio, as opposed to stored media, has the sense of
apprehending an endless reservoir. It can invoke a liveness -
rather, a life - that is continuously churning and feeding
around it. Running a 24/7 radio station on this server system
makes us attentive to its limitations of scale and unstable
disposition. It shapes our approach to build and operate
infrastructures which can adapt to the voices it broadcasts. It
makes us question our own methods of recording, organising
and circulating streams of sound.

But more importantly, radio roohafza affects the ways in Live broadcast of a gathering and discussion with Mohit Shelare and friends, May 2022.
which we listen. Listening becomes akin to searching.
Listening also becomes a process of sharing. It pushes us to
think about ourselves as nodes that can calibrate flows of
attention, affinities and associative energies. Our home is
near the railway track, and broadcasts are often punctuated
by the whistling of trains that carry wagons of coal that
power this city. Radio roohafza is interested in the expressive
potential of acts of carrying. It wishes to percolate outward
like a criss-crossing, meandering braided stream. Imagine
rivulets of roohafza.
Radio roohafza is drawn to voices. 1 by a shift in technical relations between the radio as a tool and
those who use it. It signals the inventiveness in forming new
While meaning can be ascribed to all kinds of sounds, what is habits of listening to voices.
distinct about the voice is that it is endowed with the intent to say
something. The voice implies a subjectivity that chooses to Communication infrastructures register life as lists - phone
express itself. Voices are owned. The experience of listening to numbers connected to a mobile tower, IP addresses pinging a
voices entails a peculiar relationship with language. That which is server, receivers tuned to a particular radio frequency. But life
voiced becomes language. But the voice also has the capacity to grows around infrastructures like a vine winding around
carry much more. In This is the Voice of Algeria, Frantz Fanon powerlines, and habituates itself within their disparities and
describes the shift in the psychosocial perception of the french lacunae. Radio roohafza is interested in searching for voices that
language in Algeria in the course of the war of liberation. While express themselves in precarious infrastructural arrangements.
listening to accounts of hallucinations of mental health patients, Voices of students dealing with the lack of studio spaces, peers
he observes how the ‘voice’ of the french language goes from navigating the economies of the art field, friends collecting songs
being evil, aggressive and hostile, to being friendly and even under occupation, practitioners attentive to sounds that are
protective after 1954 - when Algerians start listening to french silenced. It listens for voices that read aloud latent prophecies to
broadcasts from radio stations operated by the revolutionaries. each other, that carry energy, that stutter, make arguments,
The voice on the radio therefore has the power to give languages claims, propositions and formulations on the world. Voices that
new meanings, by altering the ways in which they are heard think out loud and think together. Radio roohafza would like to
together. Bernard Steigler calls this ‘transindividuation’ - an listen to the voice of a milieu.
operation by which the ‘I’ of the individual and the ‘we’ of the
collective transform one another. This transformation is mediated

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1
Voices that have been broadcast on radio roohafza since December 2021:
Dr.B.R.Ambedkar, students of Ambedkar University Delhi, a group of artists interested in telephones, friends talking about violence and image,
various narendra modi impersonators, the voice of a coal train passing by, the voice of Algeria, voices of people at Wagah border waiting for the
return of Wing Commander Abhinandan, etc.
Jam sessions are conceptualised as sounds, noises, conversations and silences produced
together by protagonists inhabiting the same time.

Cripsy Minds Jam Mixed Signal Traffic Jam

June 2023 July 2023
@ First Draft project space, Delhi @ Studio LDMM, Johannesburg
 Broadcast #7 Broadcast #5

HANGING OUT WITH A POEM Ambedkar Jayanti

5:30pm Beirut time Special Broadcast #4
8pm Delhi time, 31 7 pm IST, 14 April
August 2022 2022
LISTENING PARTY
Live broadcast of Broadcast #6 recordings of 5.30 pm IST, 14th
reading aloud Etel Dr.B.R.Ambedkar’s Feb 2022
Adnan’s poem - The Arab IMAGE SYNDROME voice from various
Apocalypse. 8 pm IST, 22nd May sources on the tracks produced by
2022 internet, broadcast students responding
With Yamu Wang, Jad Ra, on the occasion of to prompts for
Kaushal Sapre. Live broadcast of a Ambedkar Jayanti. listening to the
public discussion everyday, followed
organised as part of With Mohit Shelare, by a live
an open studio by Aasma Tulika discussion.
Mohit Shelare.
With the students of
With various voices MA visual art, SCCE,
AUD(batch of 2022),
-out-of-line-
 Broadcast #3

Bedtime Reading
Broadcast
10pm, 12th February
2022
Broadcast #2
Reading Frantz
Fanon’s text about New Year’s Special
the revolutionary 9 pm IST, 1st January
potential of the 2022
radio, This is the
Voice of Algeria! A live mixed playlist Broadcast #1
over a self-hosted of songs, excerpts,
internet radio utterances from Christmas Special
station. voices negotiating 10 pm IST, 25th
with lines, queues December 2021
and waiting.
A mixtape of Youtube
tutorials that teach
you how to mimic the
voice of Narendra
Modi.