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Eyot
Aired 24 March 2022, 4pm GMT
Montez Press Radio
Duration: 1 hour

/eɪt/British noun: eyot
a small island in a river.
Old English iggath, īgeth, based on īeg ‘island’ + a diminutive suffix.

A new project by London-based Geopoetics Research Group about islands, their intensities and chaotic psychic states. This montage explores the mysteries of the archipe-logical, and considers breakaway evolution, fugitive imaginaries and the tie between erosion and sovereignty. The segment ‘Cadaver Island’ co-authored by Elaine Tam & Arthur Gouillart was extended into a piece of writing entitled ‘Filth’, published by V2_Lab for Unstable Media in 2023.

With contributions by: Eloise Bennett, Alasdair Milne, James Hendrix Elsey, Elaine Tam & Arthur Gouillart, Department of Energy, Jessica Simas, Silvia Bombardini, Giles Thackway, moreiya, Siegrun Salmanian, Angelina Radakovic, James McAleer

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Mudcast
Aired 16 July 2021, 12pm GMT
AAJA Radio & Deptford X
Duration: 30 minutes

Mud is a lowly substance; often a metaphor for worthlessness, mud’s lumpen materiality invokes that which has failed to coalesce, to become more coherent. However, in its propensity to bury things in a filthy embrace or occlude things from the light, mud also acts as a protective sheath or storage medium for remnants, artefacts and treasures of the surface world...

Mudlarkers scour these terrains for such serendipitous discoveries, and the river’s cyclical churn in turn reveals mud’s secrets. Seemingly random finds chronicle the history of settlements along the river, as commerce, warfare, navigation, agriculture and colonialism have littered the Thames with their activities and exploits since pre-Roman times.

The mud of Deptford Creek glistens as the tide recedes, and along the banks of the Thames, a community of people descend onto terra firma to access a non-linear time capsule of muddy detritus. Engaging with themes of time, history, archaeology, geography and material science, Mudcast is an interdisciplinary project centred around mudlarking activity in the locale of Deptford. The project will combine interviews, field recordings, music and poetry to create an auditory experience of the murky fringes of the mudworld.

This project was commissioned by AAJA Radio on the occasion of Deptford X Festival 2021 and produced in collaboration with James Hendrix Elsey and Alasdair Milne. Big thanks to Anna Borzello, Arthur Gouillart, Nick Harris, Esther Leslie, Ted Sandling, Nicole and the other mudlarkers at Deptford Beach for their contributions.

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David’s Transterranean Dream
Aired 24 March 2021, 8pm EST
Montez Press Radio
Duration: 1 hour

An auditory experience brought to you by Semionautics and Subtexts, two projects toeing the line between fact and fabulation to explore natural phenomena and the syncretic now.

David turns off the radio report special, suddenly recalling the mysterious USB he found, still lying at the bottom of his rucksack. An inexplicable force compels him to retrieve it, he hums to himself as he plugs it in, waiting for the computer to boot up. In its directory is a lone folder entitled “subtexts”, typed in lowercase. He double-clicks it. What begins as benign curiosity leads to a very strange discovery...

Section 1.1
Semionautics Report: Eclipse, an audio mix counterposing different eclipse readings inspired by the thought of Stanislaw Lem. Produced on the occasion of Summa Technologiae, a pedagogical investigation organized by e-flux & Adam Mickiewicz Institute. Read this article on Clot Magazine to find out how the thought of Stanislaw Lem inspired Semionautics.

Section 1.2
A sampler of readings from Subtexts, published January 2022.

Subtexts is a book about caves – a collection of speleological art writing, an earthward analytical offshoot exploring this natural phenomenon within the framework of the 'geopoetic'. Unlike the vast, unknowable underworld, the field in which human activities take place is but a thin film on the Earth’s surface. Taking this as their starting point, the writings delve towards telluric intensities and chaotic psychic states, while testifying to the impossibility of making literate the profound mysteries of deep time. Despite our technological mastery across Nature’s superficial crust layer, things below ground must be left to fate. Subtexts is the attempt of fourteen writers to interpret and interpolate sub-earthen hollows, giving silhouette to what lurks beneath.

Writings and readings by Eloise Bennett, Silvia Bombardini, Andrew Copolov, James Hendrix Elsey, Arthur Gouillart, Alasdair Milne, George Finlay Ramsay, Siegrun Salmanian and Elaine Tam.

Audio production by Andrew Copolov, James Hendrix Elsey, Alasdair Milne and Elaine Tam.