radio roohafza is an internet radio station that streams sound from a self-hosted server in Delhi, India. It is a way for us to render an imagination for a yearlong occupation of internet radio 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.
radio roohafza is developed and maintained by Aasma Tulika and Kaushal Sapre
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.
radio roohafza affects the ways in 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 jam sessions:
jam sessions are conceptualised as sounds, noises, conversations and silences being produced by different protagonists inhabiting the same time, broadcasted live on radio roohafza.
OTHER BROADCASTS:
