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MINI AUDIO is a sound library of readings curated by Ella Sutherland, Amy Stuart and Emily Floyd. This project is conceived in response to
Sam Petersen's text, WHY I WRITE SO LITTLE (My limited access to the print world), which appears in the recently launched issue of un Magazine 14.1: Care. In particular we couldn't stop thinking about Sam’s brilliant provocation:
“So much of the information in
our world is print based material, magazines, instructions, textbooks.
I simply cannot access it easily.
I would look at pictures for ages and divine a story from them because often I could not make sense of the text.
I would have pursued more physical things in life, but I have significant physical disability too. Partly why
I chose to study visual art was because I thought fuck what else
can I do?
You can have people read things to you, but that requires the kind of voice and kind of person that for
me has proven hard to get and their
time is limited.
This has made study even harder for me. I really need a voice actor to provide all the pauses and emphases.”1
With these words in mind, we want to pay attention to that which is already existing, reading aloud texts that bring focus to the immediate moment. This collection is a library of sorts, however, it is more usefully understood as a resource for those whose preferred mode of engaging with texts is audio-based. It's also for the exhausted cognitarians – for the students, artworkers, artists and overeducated now charged with the invisible and
often unpaid labour of preventing capitalist systems of knowledge production from de-railing. Here we have assembled sonic translations for incredible texts that we should and could be reading but may have no
such time or access to.
MINI AUDIO Library points outwards
to external links, resisting another taxonomy. Sources include: Documenta 13, MayFly books, Precarious Workers Brigade, Carrot Workers Collective, un Magazine, Libcom, Lotta Feminista, Mutual Aid Database, Coronavirus Syllabus (a crowdsourced cross-disciplinary resource), aaaarg.fail and Mute (who are ‘anti-copyright’). We’ve also sought permission to include texts by a selection of artists and writers.
MINI AUDIO Library’s texts, generously read aloud by a number of readers, will be released each day for the duration
of the project, circulating via MUMA’s social media platforms and hosted on SoundCloud.
Today we begin with WHY I WRITE SO LITTLE (My limited access to the print world) published in the current edition of un Magazine 14.1: Care, edited by Elena Gomez and Rosie Isaac.
WHY I WRITE SO LITTLE (My
limited access to the print world) is © Copyright 2020 Sam Petersen and
un Magazine and the authors, artists, designers, photographers and other contributors.
We wish to thank Sam and un
Magazine for their generosity in
sharing permission to read the text.
A PDF version of 14.1: Care is available on the un Projects website. Please subscribe here.
We also thank all artists and writers whose work appears in this project via special permissions or Open Source, anti-copyright, Utopian Copyright and Creative Commons licence; all readers who lent their voices; and Hannah Mathews, Francis Parker and staff at MUMA.
1 Sam Petersen, “WHY I WRITE SO LITTLE (My limited access to the print world),” un Magazine 14, no. 1 (2020).
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