summary: Every last Sunday of the month the Varia library and Rotterdam Electronics Depot are open. In 2021 our Read & Repair sessions will be paired, we will take two months to explore one theme. During January and February 2021, we will be exploring the theme Wireless Imagination. The Read session for February is hosted by Agustina Woodgate and the Repair session is led by Varia group member Dennis de Bel.
Every last Sunday of the month the Varia Library and the Rotterdam Electronica Depot hold Read & Repair events. Due to current circumstances, most of them have been in an online format.
We invite you to visit our online space, make yourself comfortable, read or repair some things together, and share our thoughts and ideas.
In 2021 our Read & Repair sessions will be paired, we will take two months to explore one theme. During January and February 2021, we will be exploring the theme Wireless Imagination. Transmission, radio, resonance and orality are at play in these sessions, where we will learn from, and act on, methods used in activist radio and the polyphonous histories of radio art.
On Sunday 28th February we have a REPAIR, led by Dennis de Bel followed by a READ with Agustina Woodgate.
**REPAIR**
The Repair session of this theme is hosted by **Dennis de Bel** with the contribution of **Danny van der Kleij**.
Dennis de Bel (1984, Rotterdam, NL) is a hands-on artistic researcher, educator and radio amateur.
His practice oscillates between various configurations of collaborations focusing on collectively exploring hardware, software and a plethora of waves.
In this live soldering session (on Jitsi) Dennis and Danny will take you through the steps to recreate a simple analog television transmitter as designed by Tetsuo Kogawa. We will cover the actual construction of the transmitter, what to transmit and how to receive the signal. In the end we will take requests from the audience.
Agustina Woodgate (1981, Argentina) practice focuses on the politics of landscapes and infrastructures as public geography. She often collaborates with a team of international agents testing new ways of exploring the networked planet, developing strategies that can seize new opportunities, exposing and reprogramming tools and information technologies.
She broadcasts with radioee.net, pub.sandberg.nl and tvgov.info.
Participants can choose to read all or select any of the short texts below:
- Urban Auscultation; or, Perceiving the Action of the Heart by Shannon Mattern <https://placesjournal.org/article/urban-auscultation-or-perceiving-the-action-of-the-heart/>
- The Airocean World Town Plan -4D (pages 70 - 75) <https://vvvvvvaria.org/~ccl/read_and_repair/The%20world%20as%20an%20architectural%20project%20%281%29.pdf>
- Orban Space (pages 450-455) <https://vvvvvvaria.org/~ccl/read_and_repair/The%20world%20as%20an%20architectural%20project%20%281%29.pdf>
- The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler (pages 38-41, 131-133, 138-140) <https://vvvvvvaria.org/~ccl/read_and_repair/Arthur%20Koestler%20-%20The%20Roots%20of%20Coincidence.pdf>
- The Hidden Language of Trees by Peter Wohlleben (pages 1-30) <https://vvvvvvaria.org/~ccl/read_and_repair/The%20Hidden%20Life%20of%20Trees_%20What%20They%20Feel%2C%20How%20They%20Communicate%E2%80%94Discoveries%20from%20a%20Secret%20World%20%28%20PDFDrive%20%29.pdf>
- The first hour: Over the live stream participants will be introduced to the reading, the call and response instructions and the technicalities of what is happening. Reading will take place individually during the first hour and simultaneously the radio will be bringing us together through a broadcasted soundscape. Each time the readers/participants find something they will like to broadcast, they will send an audio clip (whispering, screaming, reading, special fxs, sounds, noises, etc.) to a telegram group.
- The second hour: Agustina and Angeliki co-stream all the sound messages in the telegram thread. Readers become listeners. Listeners can interact with the live broadcast composition by sending new audio clips to the same group. This will allow for other listeners that were not part of the reading session to interact. And to the readers, that now are listeners, to come back in a loop reacting to their reactions.
**NOTE**: This reading session will be held in English.
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There is no prior reading needed before we come together to Read, we experience the texts for the first time together and will send out a link for download during the event.
The further themes we'll be looking at in 2021 are Digital Solidarity, The Automated Body, Sense-full Pedagogy and Community Memory.
Read is alternatively guided by a Varia Library group member, the following Read (in the next month) is guided by a guest. Both sessions revolve around the same theme, with different texts and methods to read them. The guest Read session is accompanied a Repair session. The Repair session is a practical exploration of the same theme, led by a guest or a Rotterdam Eletronica Depot member. It is an active workshop you can experiment with at home, and one day in our Depot, when we can physically gather.
Our January-September 2021 programme is funded by Gemeente Rotterdam.
