CD-mixtape workshop
Automatic algorithmic shuffle, ‘recommended titles’,
official corporate-curated playlists, ‘latest release’....
Multitudes of ways in which music streaming platforms are able to control what music we discover and therefore share with our friends and the world.
How can we challenge their influence and discover music independently?
As an experiment and possible answer,
I organized and hosted a CD-mixtape-making workshop where I invited participants to pair up and create a playlist, with one rule: they couldn’t use any streaming platform and had to rely on memory to come up with songs.
Tangibly, participants had to embrace the limit of the cd, maximum 74 minutes and 99 songs.
The workshop acted itself as a space to share music, proposing an alternative to digital navigation. Materiality was also given back to music by the medium of the CD. Not only as an object that contains music and that one can hold but also by having the possibility for expression.
The participants were given tools to create artworks for their mixtapes: flyer, front cover, leaflet, song list, cd label...
Post CD-burning and before wrapping up, another moment of sharing: we gathered and listened to each other’s mixtapes, through the CD player ofc.
Through the acts of making, sharing and listening, the workshop explored alternative ways of discovering music, prioritizing personal and local music culture, and the collective experience over algorithmic recommendations.