NEW AMERICAN RADIO ARCHIVE
Gregory Whitehead
Gregory Whitehead Performing at Radio Revolten. Halle, 2016.. Photo by Marcus-Andreas Mohr.
Wave Farm 1997-2017: Anna Friz, Jeff Kolar, and Gregory Whitehead. Photographed by David La Spina. (Oct 21, 2017)
Wave Farm 1997-2017: Gregory Whitehead performance. Photographed by David La Spina. (Oct 21, 2017)
Lucas Derycke and Gregory Whitehead at Japanther's "Remote Audio Outpost" at Wave Farm.. Photo by Tom Roe. (Jul 09, 2015)
Gregory Whitehead Portrait Image. Photographed by Heidrun Lohr. (Sep 01, 2010)
Great Small Works: The Fourth Radio Cabaret Flier. Courtesy Brian Dewan. (Nov 25, 2003)
Gregory Whitehead is an audio artist, radiomaker, text/sound poet, playwright and media philosopher. A key figure in the resurgence of radio art since the 1980s, he has created radio artworks, plays and experimental features for the BBC, Radio France, Deutschland Radio, Australia's ABC, NPR and other broadcasters. Often interweaving documentary and fictive materials into playfully unresolved narratives, his aesthetic is distinguished by a deep philosophical commitment to radio as a medium for poetic navigation and free association. In his voice and text-sound works, he explores the tension between a continuous pulse and the eruption of sudden discontinuities, as well as linguistic entropy and decay.
Whitehead's work has won numerous awards, including a Prix Italia for Pressures of the Unspeakable, a Prix Futura BBC Award for Shake, Rattle, Roll and a Sony Gold Academy Award for The Loneliest Road, which was described by the jury as "a master class in sound." His 2005 BBC production of Normi Noel's play No Background Music, featuring Sigourney Weaver, also received a Sony Gold Academy Award. On the Shore Dimly Seen, a "boneyard cantata;" enquiry into no-touch torture, was short-listed for the 2015 Prix Italia.
Whitehead has also experimented and collaborated within toy theatre, puppet theatre, dance theater, museum installations, live performance and mixed media cabaret. Co-editor of the pioneering anthology Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde (MIT Press), his philosophical essays and hybrid speculative fictions have appeared in a wide variety of publications. A selection of writings has been published in France, with the title Almanach de plaies insensées.
Selected Works:
Dead Letters (1985)
Display Wounds (1986)
The Pleasure of Ruins (1988)
Pressures of the Unspeakable (1992)
Shake, Rattle, Roll (1993)
The Thing About Bugs (1995)
L’indomptable (The Unconquerable) (1996)
Leave it or Double It (2012)
On the Shore Dimly Seen (2015)
What Murmurs (2019)