Slowing Down to Infrastructures

by Radio Otherwise

What infrastructures do we inhabit, and how can we give attention to them in the business of our daily lives? Can sustained listening help us to slow down and notice what has been put in place to maintain urban, human life?

Radio Otherwise have implemented a live, generative, durational web radio format that plays with the musical and temporal-rhythmic qualities of infrastructural soundscapes, including rituals of conversation with many different participants around the theme of slowing down.

Beginning in May and continuing until the end of the Biennial in mid-October 2025, the work focuses on attuned and extended listening through live radio, using digital infrastructures in a self-referential manner to slow down and give attention to the various infrastructures at play in and around the urban environment of CAFx:

• Air flow (heating, cooling)
• Electromagnetic activity
• Ground vibrations
• Water movements
• Various machines (dishwashers, modems, etc)
• Sounds that occur directly outside the building (garbage removal, bird activity)

The conversations centre around slowness and often take place meanderingly; sometimes transmitted in their entirety, excerpts may also be drawn into the larger compositional trajectory. It is a work that slowly develops over time, generating aspects of flow and movement between sounds and conversations, working with elements such as:

• Speed
• Looping
• Change
• Periodicity
• Rhythm

A subtle (but perceptible) dramaturgy to the long-durational programme will include cycles and moments of intensity and activation, eventually building up to the biennial event.