Unmasking the Machinery

KDZU is an underground radio station that exists to share the excitements of music and powers of creativity with other people. In a conversational behind-the-scenes discussion with DJ Future Ghost (Rob Ray), participants will uncover the station’s operations and origins and engage with the KDZU creative ecosystem: the Dubplate Forensics Agent, the “All Is Not Lost” WiFi network, and the station’s ongoing zine-making experiments.

The Dubplate Forensics Agent (DFA) uses augmented-reality systems to visualize the hidden layers of meaning in the sound, transforming scanned markers into spectral 3D forms that hover over records. The DFA is a functioning yet mythic apparatus for uncovering hauntologies in sound, an interpretive technology that treats each music track as a vessel for multi-layered multimedia storytelling.

“All Is Not Lost” is KDZU’s self-contained wireless platform for creating a local network without internet access. This network does not link to social media. There is no ad tech. There is no cloud. It quietly shares local files or prompts, accessible only to those within WiFi range. “All is Not Lost” drifts through the building as an invisible frequency, carrying fragments of recordings, field notes, and stray transmissions from our investigations.

Participants will also decode KDZU’s tactical mythmaking, tracing how story, signal, and sound merge into acts of collective imagination and speculative design. Tactical mythmaking is KDZU’s method of using fiction as a coping infrastructure and a change agent, inventing and deploying myths to expose or complicate systems of power, technology, and communication.

4-5pm PT: KDZU’s tactical mythmaking as a storytelling framework
5-6pm PT: KDZU’s tactical artifact strategies and the “All Is Not Lost” network
6-7pm PT: Community discussion

This project is supported within the CultureHub Residency program.