Sat 20/09/25Summer of Protocols draft
Growing a minimal, repeatable instruction-score that reduces infinite expressive possibilities to a community designed grammar, as a poetic protocol for texting the sounds of the dawn.
Protocol draft V2.1 cf. Gitbook + Mesh guide zine
Visual score in progress...
Draft text
Save the date - Reveil 2026, 3rd May, dawn
You are invited to journey out with a friend before dawn to a place you’ve chosen together. To listen as part of the life of the ridge, with a community of creatures whose lives and mutual time is bound to the exacting rotations of spheres. This invitation is a simple one: listen.
All you have to do to participate in the breaking of day - along with the birds, the running creek, the distant peaks - is to come outside and listen. And, when the inspiration moves you, send a poetic fragment of your experience.
As an early riser, you walk to your listening spot with your friend(s), and send messages during a two hour window, between 6am and 8am.
We send messages as simple texts from our phones using Meshtastic devices:
The texts can play with the constraints of the 228 character limits. Think bird calls rather than long reflections. Over the Summer months, we will host workshops to learn about the valley, onboard folk to the local mesh network, and explore poetic forms, local forms across the Pacific, from Aotearoa, Vanuatu, and Japan’s Haikai no renga - flowing verses - that date back to the Edo period. Below we have some agreements to guide our signalling; prompts that can help us communicate as a chorus.
signalling protocol - 4 prompts, inspired by Tūī
see short note on the Tūī in the right column
Messages can contain:
1. Expressions of place/identity/time
︎︎︎Messages of when, where and who: markers of place, expressions of identity, feeling, sensing, perceiving. Words to carry some of what you can hear, see, smell, taste, touch. cf. perception, light and locality
2. Onomatopoeic Mimicry
︎︎︎ Participants echo or approximate something heard in their soundscape. Eg. a non-human call (ka-kaaa!), a mechanical arc of plane taking off (whoooshhhh), the sea, the wind. cf. concrete poetry
3. Non-linear fragments
︎︎︎ Dream shards still lingering from sleep, meta reflections, planetary tones cf. overtones
4. “Ultrasonic” icons
︎︎︎ Off-channel expression: the experinece in the gap, the pause, experienced not transcribed in words but noted with icons (eg. * = embodied listening). cf. visual score
So, across the hour, you might send notes about...
Guide for engagement: a summary
Summer of Protocols notes - exposition/ further questions
Protocol scope
Experiments in growing poetic planetary protocols through participation in the open radio commons.
Tech-embedded protocols Meshtastic mesh as resilient, low-power, open network for text.
Devices form a mesh network, relaying messages between nodes to extend range and coverage. Messages can hop from device to device until they reach their destination.
Cultural protocol Reveil as an annual long-running collaborative coordination for planetary listening at dawn on May Day.
Poetic protocol A designed community invitation to wake at dawn, listen in place, and transmit poetic fragments (multilingual/ multimodal) as a shared encounter of the Valley.
Aim
Grow planetary protocols by learning from nature (radio/birds) and entangling time × place × relation
collective listening ︎︎︎ transformations (text/signal) ︎︎︎ a poem authored by the communities of the valley
Why?
Research references
Telegraphy & early radio experiments; communal agreement-structures, previous project Byzantium on birdsong & collective poetry; procedural art (Oulipo, Moholy-Nagy phone pictures, Yoko Ono instructions, all referenced in Primavera De Filippi’s presentation)
Technical Definitions
Using a technical protocol (eg. the Meshtastic protocol) for artistic purposes is *not* protocol art in itself. So, the question is how the protocol guide for the poetic fragments is crafted formally to strengthen the definitional character of what emerges. Working with the protocol needs to output messages that are recognisable ie. have clear choices, constraints and aesthetics that grant definition.
After the first live test, there were two clear needs for added instruction:
1. to help reduce the uncertainty about what to do
2. to give space for taking space, so people did not feel pressurised to use all their time writing texts
Hopping over the debate about ecological protocols… we can still design protocols in a way that is informed by nature, ie. ecologically-informed protocols, in this case inspired by the native Tūī.
Further Notes
This work is conceived as a collective body of work from the valley, authored by communities of the human and the more-than-human. As such, the project is in dialogue with the community’s long-term commitment to reclaiming the site of a former rubbish tip and to lifting up the creek that once ran through the valley. The sustained community effort of decades, designing and engineering interventions that have restored habitats, and led to the return of native birds, shows how longterm mutually held aims can make repair.
The rules and prompts here are drafts, a start to thinking about what kind of eco-poetic protocols could work: they are provisional starting points for practice. The aim is to create space where protocol can evolve through community use and co-design.
The protocol borrows from concrete poetry, pushing beyond the limits of language and opening space for the body to be notated. Participants should not feel forced to translate their experience into words; silence, gesture, or symbol is welcome.
Within a simple structure of waking, listening, and signalling, there is room for interpretation and improvisation. Choices about where and how to sit, when to listen, and how to send messages are shaped by local knowledge and relations.
🐚️ For Testing
How can this work with the haiku structure?
Stress-test with community
The Tūī’s call, establishing place and identity, has started to give the framework some structured variation. The karanga, and other Maori forms of calling in Aotearoa share much in common with this structure, whether this resonance is generative can not be assumed: we need to test if this works well or feels inappropriate with collaborators.
Specificity / Complexity
How detailed is the visual key (not strictly a visual score, more properly, a map or key)? Do we agree on different icons to distinguish between Tui, Kaka birdcall, for example? Or rely on onomatopoeia as more creative? If we invoke an “*” for the pause the listener takes to full-body listening (ie. undistrupted by texting), do we try for more phenomenological specificity? (Eg. Icons that distinguish between: Awareness of the body - Awareness of the sound world and the body - Awareness of the sound world, with no sense of the body.)
Whilst words may take away from the activity of listening, grappling with a complex key is magnitudes worse than articulating in a language already known. However, this struggle could be made a critical device. The imposition of a new language; the imposed lingua franca?
Documentation
The flowing verses can be presented - a long web page that combines map, photo, & spectrum that shifts from dark to light? something more ecological?
Evolution (replicability)
Formally, this is an evolution of Soundcamp’s Reveil (with permission from Sountent). Extending the audio streaming to mesh “streaming” with text. Perhaps systemic and open protocols can evolve over time as more people participate, and we can a few months before share the invitation with collaborators/ friends in Vanuatu, Japan, Indonesia, Hawaii. A Pacific invitation to redress the lack of streamers for Reveil in the Southern hemisphere? As we grow a poetic commons, we also grow fit-for-purpose disaster comms networks.
Evolution of community creativity
The replicability may also be simply more co-designed group protocols for reflection and connection with the Valley community, to inform the Lifting the Creek project. This creative protocol follows a precedent that other artists and ecologists have made in the Valley of land art and eco-poetic work over decades.
Questions of “frictence”
Collaboration brings together folk and communities with different levels of technological tolerance, and also different sensibilities and orientations.
Who to engage -
Designing the protocol means listening, acknowledging differences, cultivating resonances rather than enforcing uniformity; some are interested in disaster tech, some are interested in creative experiments.
Summer of Protocols draft
Version 2 Meshes of the Ata Hāpara poetic protocol
Growing a minimal, repeatable instruction-score that reduces infinite expressive possibilities to a community designed grammar, as a poetic protocol for texting the sounds of the dawn.
Protocol draft V2.1 cf. Gitbook + Mesh guide zine
Visual score in progress...
Draft text
Save the date - Reveil 2026, 3rd May, dawn
You are invited to journey out with a friend before dawn to a place you’ve chosen together. To listen as part of the life of the ridge, with a community of creatures whose lives and mutual time is bound to the exacting rotations of spheres. This invitation is a simple one: listen.
All you have to do to participate in the breaking of day - along with the birds, the running creek, the distant peaks - is to come outside and listen. And, when the inspiration moves you, send a poetic fragment of your experience.
As an early riser, you walk to your listening spot with your friend(s), and send messages during a two hour window, between 6am and 8am.
We send messages as simple texts from our phones using Meshtastic devices:
- We will use the shared meshtastic channel
atahapara_mesh - Messages are short (under 228 characters)
- Messages will appear as part of a decentralised chorus, passed along node to node
- Text fragments can be written in te reo Māori, english, or in any language you speak
- Icons can be used to stand for embodied states:
The texts can play with the constraints of the 228 character limits. Think bird calls rather than long reflections. Over the Summer months, we will host workshops to learn about the valley, onboard folk to the local mesh network, and explore poetic forms, local forms across the Pacific, from Aotearoa, Vanuatu, and Japan’s Haikai no renga - flowing verses - that date back to the Edo period. Below we have some agreements to guide our signalling; prompts that can help us communicate as a chorus.
signalling protocol - 4 prompts, inspired by Tūī
see short note on the Tūī in the right column
Messages can contain:
1. Expressions of place/identity/time
︎︎︎Messages of when, where and who: markers of place, expressions of identity, feeling, sensing, perceiving. Words to carry some of what you can hear, see, smell, taste, touch. cf. perception, light and locality
2. Onomatopoeic Mimicry
︎︎︎ Participants echo or approximate something heard in their soundscape. Eg. a non-human call (ka-kaaa!), a mechanical arc of plane taking off (whoooshhhh), the sea, the wind. cf. concrete poetry
3. Non-linear fragments
︎︎︎ Dream shards still lingering from sleep, meta reflections, planetary tones cf. overtones
4. “Ultrasonic” icons
︎︎︎ Off-channel expression: the experinece in the gap, the pause, experienced not transcribed in words but noted with icons (eg. * = embodied listening). cf. visual score
So, across the hour, you might send notes about...
- A sense of where you are
- The name of the mountain or the river
- The first bird call you hear
- The sounds of the city waking up
- The quality of light or the air and wind
- A feeling or image from a dream that still lingers
- An asterix to convey you are listening with you whole-bodied attention
Guide for engagement: a summary
-
Ecological listening invitation
Listen with the valley, not to the valley.
-
Space & materials
Choose a place that you want to grow relationship with.
-
Group configuration
Many groups of two or more across the valley (and beyond). - Participation
Decentralised, no leader. Everyone contributes by turning up + sending signals.
Summer of Protocols notes - exposition/ further questions
Protocol scope
Experiments in growing poetic planetary protocols through participation in the open radio commons.
Tech-embedded protocols Meshtastic mesh as resilient, low-power, open network for text.
Devices form a mesh network, relaying messages between nodes to extend range and coverage. Messages can hop from device to device until they reach their destination.
Cultural protocol Reveil as an annual long-running collaborative coordination for planetary listening at dawn on May Day.
Poetic protocol A designed community invitation to wake at dawn, listen in place, and transmit poetic fragments (multilingual/ multimodal) as a shared encounter of the Valley.
Aim
Grow planetary protocols by learning from nature (radio/birds) and entangling time × place × relation
collective listening ︎︎︎ transformations (text/signal) ︎︎︎ a poem authored by the communities of the valley
Why?
- Eco-poetic art practice - treating the environment as a whole - the Umwelt - the musical medium.
- Media ecology/Ecological monitoring - A (mediated) oral history of a living moment rather than the individual. (ie. not asking an individual human for their many experiences across a lifetime; asking a Place and space/time for its many simultanous experiences across space.)
- Practical readiness: Practicing neighbourly communion with resilient disaster-ready comms.
- Embodied/ecological connection: A meditative, receptive flash-mob.
Research references
Telegraphy & early radio experiments; communal agreement-structures, previous project Byzantium on birdsong & collective poetry; procedural art (Oulipo, Moholy-Nagy phone pictures, Yoko Ono instructions, all referenced in Primavera De Filippi’s presentation)
Technical Definitions
Using a technical protocol (eg. the Meshtastic protocol) for artistic purposes is *not* protocol art in itself. So, the question is how the protocol guide for the poetic fragments is crafted formally to strengthen the definitional character of what emerges. Working with the protocol needs to output messages that are recognisable ie. have clear choices, constraints and aesthetics that grant definition.
After the first live test, there were two clear needs for added instruction:
1. to help reduce the uncertainty about what to do
2. to give space for taking space, so people did not feel pressurised to use all their time writing texts
Hopping over the debate about ecological protocols… we can still design protocols in a way that is informed by nature, ie. ecologically-informed protocols, in this case inspired by the native Tūī.
Further Notes
This work is conceived as a collective body of work from the valley, authored by communities of the human and the more-than-human. As such, the project is in dialogue with the community’s long-term commitment to reclaiming the site of a former rubbish tip and to lifting up the creek that once ran through the valley. The sustained community effort of decades, designing and engineering interventions that have restored habitats, and led to the return of native birds, shows how longterm mutually held aims can make repair.
The rules and prompts here are drafts, a start to thinking about what kind of eco-poetic protocols could work: they are provisional starting points for practice. The aim is to create space where protocol can evolve through community use and co-design.
The protocol borrows from concrete poetry, pushing beyond the limits of language and opening space for the body to be notated. Participants should not feel forced to translate their experience into words; silence, gesture, or symbol is welcome.
Within a simple structure of waking, listening, and signalling, there is room for interpretation and improvisation. Choices about where and how to sit, when to listen, and how to send messages are shaped by local knowledge and relations.
🐚️ For Testing
How can this work with the haiku structure?
Stress-test with community
The Tūī’s call, establishing place and identity, has started to give the framework some structured variation. The karanga, and other Maori forms of calling in Aotearoa share much in common with this structure, whether this resonance is generative can not be assumed: we need to test if this works well or feels inappropriate with collaborators.
Specificity / Complexity
How detailed is the visual key (not strictly a visual score, more properly, a map or key)? Do we agree on different icons to distinguish between Tui, Kaka birdcall, for example? Or rely on onomatopoeia as more creative? If we invoke an “*” for the pause the listener takes to full-body listening (ie. undistrupted by texting), do we try for more phenomenological specificity? (Eg. Icons that distinguish between: Awareness of the body - Awareness of the sound world and the body - Awareness of the sound world, with no sense of the body.)
Whilst words may take away from the activity of listening, grappling with a complex key is magnitudes worse than articulating in a language already known. However, this struggle could be made a critical device. The imposition of a new language; the imposed lingua franca?
Documentation
The flowing verses can be presented - a long web page that combines map, photo, & spectrum that shifts from dark to light? something more ecological?
Evolution (replicability)
Formally, this is an evolution of Soundcamp’s Reveil (with permission from Sountent). Extending the audio streaming to mesh “streaming” with text. Perhaps systemic and open protocols can evolve over time as more people participate, and we can a few months before share the invitation with collaborators/ friends in Vanuatu, Japan, Indonesia, Hawaii. A Pacific invitation to redress the lack of streamers for Reveil in the Southern hemisphere? As we grow a poetic commons, we also grow fit-for-purpose disaster comms networks.
Evolution of community creativity
The replicability may also be simply more co-designed group protocols for reflection and connection with the Valley community, to inform the Lifting the Creek project. This creative protocol follows a precedent that other artists and ecologists have made in the Valley of land art and eco-poetic work over decades.
Questions of “frictence”
Collaboration brings together folk and communities with different levels of technological tolerance, and also different sensibilities and orientations.
Who to engage -
- the Mesh crew in Welly, also the Critical Signals crew (related) - high-tech/expert
- Local town hall community (low-tech, sometims sceptical/wary of tech framing).
- Local school - interested but needs to be accessible & safety for kids planned for.
- The WGTN radio community (trained operators)
- Radio/music enthusiasts through local stations (experimental/may have no prior experience)
- Interested neighbours who may not identify with any organised community (varied, hold local knowledge)
Designing the protocol means listening, acknowledging differences, cultivating resonances rather than enforcing uniformity; some are interested in disaster tech, some are interested in creative experiments.
Research touchstones (for further study)
Haewai/Houghton Valley “Lifting the Creek” ~ Haewai / Houghton Valley once had a small creek, later buried beneath the rubbish dump of the city from the 1940s–70s. The stream, now underground, was rediscovered through community memory and research, it has inspired Lifting the Creek, a collective effort to re-establish surface water, wetlands, and ecological connection through walks, planting, and design.
Bird call of the native Tūī ~ For many years, there were no Tūī (a native New Zealand bird) in Houghton Valley. Over the last decades, local regeneration efforts, like pest control and planting abundant native trees (flax, pohutukawa, etc.), have brought them home.
The Tūī is a long-range broadcaster call mixes (1) native vocalisations such as whistles, clicks, creaks, and bell-like tones; (2) mimetic elements that imitate other species or human noises; (3) non-linear features including overtones, growls, and rapid shifts; and (4) ultrasonic notes beyond the range of human hearing.
running list of references to investigate -
Frank Chimero, Only Openings - wolf management vs. bear management