You are invited to participate in http://thevoa.net, a participatory Internet radio project that reflects on the media spectacle of the 2008 US Presidential Election through the lens of the Voice of America Radio Network, the US government broadcasting service intended for an international audience.

Between now and November 4, you can: RECORD audio of election coverage on a Voices of America station; UPLOAD your recordings and tag them according to language and content; DOWNLOAD from the searchable pool of available recordings; REMIX the broadcasts and UPLOAD them back to the website; LISTEN to the recordings and remixes online anytime or to the radio broadcast at Audacity of Desperation in Los Angeles on Election Day.

The Voice of America radio service was initiated in World War Two and dramatically expanded during the Cold War to win “hearts and minds” for the new American Empire. All major Cold War players operated such “information services”, which were collectively called “The Voices” in some targeted countries. Recognizing that the broadcasting service was largely a tool of cultural and foreign policy propaganda, Congress forbade the Voice of America from broadcasting directly to American citizens in 1948. Though slightly retooled, VOA persists today: the attacks of September 11, 2001, for example, invigorated Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu broadcasting. Currently, the Voice of America radio and television networks produce more than 1,000 hours of original programming per week in 45 languages, much of it covering American politics and regional foreign policy between blocks of popular music.

The 2008 election is widely viewed as a potential turning point in US foreign policy that has become ever more militaristic and interventionist in the last decade, and the prospect of the first African American president has galvanized the hopes of people around the world. Yet those who are most affected by American military and corporate action are excluded from American electoral politics. They are, quite literally, voiceless.

“Voices of America” offers an international audience an opportunity both to monitor the United States’ self-presentation abroad by recording VOA programming and speak back to it by remixing those broadcasts. The project obliquely points out the injustice that participation in US politics is so tightly restricted and questions, in a non-polemical fashion, how much change is possible given the persistence of Cold War, now War on Terror, infrastructure. In the arena of cultural politics, the project suggests a network of global citizens offering revised image of America’s carefully-constructed image back to itself.