I'd like to intoduce you to my culture project "Radio Internationale
Stadt". This is an audio archive project in the Internet, which is
reachable under the WEB-address http://orang.orang.org/.

In 1993 the Internationale Stadt Berlin was founded. This was an
internet culture project with community character. In the meantime the
Internationale Stadt project ceased and just some projects of it are
findable on the net (www.icf.de). But one of the project of
Internationale Stadt Berlin survived the last years of internet
commercial hypes, the Radio Internationale Stadt. Radio Internationale
Stadt, ORANG.ORANG.ORG

A colaborative server to conserve and archive audio data.

The system is running into the fifth year and the first audio piece,
which was contributed on Thuesday, May the 30th in 1996 at 23:23, is
still available til now.

In 1998, Radio Internationale Stadt becomes the first server in the
network system Open Radio Archive Network Group, (short: ORANG) a
distributed archive for audio data with servers in Berlin, London and
Riga. All audio data are decentralized on the different systems, but the
describing (text-) database entries are distributed between the
different nodes - the database entries are the same on each node. This
enables visitors on each involved node to access all the audio data from
all attached servers of the network.

In 1999 the model of Radio Internationale Stadt / ORANG served as a
basis for the build up of the project "Open Video Archive", short OVA
(http://ova.zkm.de/), which is, with collaboration of the Zentrum fuer
Kunst und Medien (ZKM - http://www.zkm.de ) in Karlsruhe, up & running.

Beside this, Radio Internationale Stadt was awarded with an honory
mentioning of the Ars Electronica Jury. Moreover Radio Internationale
Stadt was involved in many little and big project, for example the
Hybrid Workspace at documenta X, Berlin Atonal 1999, the net art
projects Xchange and ConvexTV.

Until today the Radio Internationale Stadt reached a respectable
importance in the values of On-Demand-Archive Systems in cultural
context and gives a good example of a functioning community project in
the internet.

The current statistics show this with a total content of about 700 hours
(ca. 30 days) On-Demand audio content of the 175 contributors. This
content was served 20 times, this means a total reception from over
400000 users of about 600 days - an listen average of each listener of
more then 2 minutes.

The archived material is a collection of the areas of contemporary music
with emphasis of electronic music, new music, radio plays, speeches and
archived live events. The streaming technologies used are the common
standard RealAudio and MP3.

Most pieces are contributed by the producers themselves to the archive -
in every case the right owner is involved into the whole process,
therefore the legal situation is ruled by the right holder.

These days, the common streaming technologies, fitting and optimized to
small bandwith in the internet, give you a quality of the original
material wich is just able to give you a pre-listen quality and can help
the artist/right owner as a promotion utility.

For further details and information get in contact with me.