Shit Out Here Purple by Roy Claire Potter is a live performance that focuses on CB (citizens band) radio use and its culture. Potter spent time in and around Bergen, Norway to meet various local communities, while collecting, recording and editing material for the piece. The performance responds to the linguistic protocols of amateur shortwave radio cultures, and how making ‘contact’ – or QSO – is centered and differentiated from ordinary conversation.

In the sparsely arranged audio collage Potter brings new and archival radio recordings together with modular synthesised sounds, and a newly written spoken libretto that experiments with a narrative of fieldwork operations. The result is a jerky, inarticulate reflection on distressed or intense desires for communicative contact. For the premiere, Potter produced a booklet of detachable drawings that riff on the counter-cultural tradition of Eyeball Cards, made and shared at in-person meetings during the 1980s by users of the then-illegal Citizens Broadcast Radio Service in the United Kingdom.

Commissioned by BEK
Presented at BEK in Bergen, Norway (2024)

This work is available for touring.
Contact for Presentations: bek@bek.no