Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

on bringing this lonely, dying robot to life

The project is finished! Though I focused a lot on last week’s journal about how much I enjoyed putting my part of the project together, I can’t help but reiterating the the pride I feel having completed the whole thing. Admittedly, the construction and installation of the radio was a bit tumultuous, but hiccups like that are to be expected when collaborating with others. Honestly, I think it’s cool that my project ended up being tacked onto a more hodge-podge radio station (a radio station of the stragglers, if you will). After all, that is what my little robot character really is: a straggler.

I guess it bears a little bit of explanation as to why and how I committed so hard to this theme of a dying robot. It’s definitely more sad and morbid than I would usually go, but I was really inspired by the thought that one day, nothing will be left of us except our ideas, if those even persist at all. I heard once that, at the end of your life, you die twice: the first, when your body dies, and the second, when it’s the last time someone speaks your name. In the case of my project, we don’t know who exactly made these entries on the data log of our little robot, and we never find out. Her ideas are simply sound waves floating out in space, which is kind of meta, now that I think about it. My project, too, is just a couple of radio waves projecting out into open air. It was pretty fun for me to play around with these multiple layers of interpretation, and I found myself often doubling back and trying to add more philosophical metaphors behind the technical descriptions of corruption and decay. I feel like that’s the main strength of the project

On the other hand, I feel like that project could reach a completely new level if the radio were set in a robot model as I had originally brainstormed with my partner. Another thing I was debating back and forth about was the length of my recording/project. Right now, it sits at almost five minutes long, but I know a lot of the feedback from my peers was that the written version felt quite short. With the addition of the sound effects and a little bit of extra revision, it definitely helped the piece feel more rounded and complete, but I can’t help wondering whether it could do with even more world-building and explanation? I struggled with this a lot, especially because I am a fan of writing more opaque, “up to the reader’s interpretation”-type pieces. Overall, I’m happy with where the piece ended, but I think there’s definitely room for me to turn it into a full-fledged narrative poem if I were to take this project further.

I’m sad to see this class come to an end, but I’m really proud of how far we’ve all come with all of our projects, and it was super fun to see how each piece manifested into a completed product.

take a listen to mine here!

-sydney 🙂