Sound jams: infomercials from the future

_invitation

the workshop promotion visual

Workshop // Sound Jam: Infomercials Audiozine Making // part of ▶▶Zine Camp 2023. A free festival to make zines and friends @ Worm, Rotterdam, NL.

Sound Jams is a series of collective audiozines making that artist and facilitator Ål Nik hosts with the aim to inspire makers to play with the sonic format in their work. In this workshop, the group will create an audio collage of infomercials. The makers will be led through a playful process of doodling, writing and experimenting with alternative reality speculations, turning them into fun and short radio commercials.

_context

notebook notes when planning the workshop

With this sound jam, I wanted to facilitate a playful way of discussing a serious topic and addressing it with sound. For it, I decided to invite the participants to make infomercials - a format we used for our graduation radio show at XPUB. A few months ago, I got a theme as a prompt from the Zine Camp organisers - access. Thus, I was thinking what if we speculate about access to resources. I wanted to think a little but about the future and was curious how would a group of (most likely) strangers would think of it.

informercial - an advertising which promotes a product in an informative and supposedly objective style. [source: Oxford Languages]

_workshop report

during the workshop, we speculated about which resources could be somehow limited in the future

// 5-11-2023 // 11:30-13:30 // WORM, Rotterdam

_introduction ~5 min // introducing who I am and what is this workshop about

_who is in the room ~5 min // a round with everyone introducing themselves and why they joined this workshop

_introducing the theme ~5 min // a brief introduction to the topic of the workshop - "informercials from the future". We played with a scenario that it is 2044 and the access to some resources is somehow limited or regulated - this was the prompt for the participants to start working with.

_letter writing ~10 min // individually, they wrote a short letter telling someone else how are things these days in 2044 (warm up);
then, we made a round of extracting some resources from their letters; and brainstormed about what other resources can be limited in the future.

_infomercials making // ~40 min // people formed groups of 2-3 people and worked on their infomercials. The task was to record a 1-minute-max audio infomercial about 1 resource that is limited. They were invited to pick up the papers from the brainstorming; to simply use their phones or the equipment I've brought.

_listening party // ~10 min // we listened the 3 infomercials altogether; and had a short discussion about the process; getting also feedback about the workshop.

_infomercials

Scentification Clinic
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ytb3shCWtCJ72ENCLtOuUcjGswCTBZ4A/view?usp=sharing

Housing Council
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gh5zNxwLasKAINHVraZxb5ImaTOx_UpD/view?usp=drive_link

The Chair Party
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Fnx2yCCarle07CN3FlchA_3GD3LUWBIf/view?usp=drive_link

_reflections