Gossip Booth

The Gossip Booth of Radio Slumber is a digital project. It enables the ether of the website as a safe space for uttering secrets and whispering forms of gossip as a necessary form of leakage. Online visitors of can record themselves, and a slow fermentation script will process their recording to be added to a chat window as a safely censored text that hides all textual content. The traces of your recording emerge as speech-to-text gaps, unrecognisable utterances and the in-between. The software deletes the audio once the text has been generated, so your secrets are kept secret. The project is made with pocketsphinx, pydub, php, mp3redorder.js.

RADIO SLUMBER is a three-part aural brew and online grimoire that casts its gaze out from a closed-door coven of potluck workshops + secret societies + spa retreats + fests of slumber (ᴬᴷᴬ ...pwsssrfs...) that took place at Motel Spatie in Arnhem, Netherlands, over the winter of 2020. This turn to the ‘endotic’ (as in Perec’s spatial and anthropological turn from the ‘exotic’) makes multi-dimensional inversions of the east-west dichotomy, strategically dissecting cultural theorist Rey Chow’s ‘fascist longings in our midst’. From RADIO SLUMBER’s audio book of spells, gossip whispers leak the accidents of intersectionalism and conjure—via the foundation of friendship—other practices of care from both near and far.

[text from the website]

radio SLUMBER @ Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam