A definition of Transmission Art: Transmission art encompasses works in which the act of transmitting or receiving is not only significant, but the fulcrum for the artist’s intention. The genre involves a multiplicity of practices that often engage aural and visual broadcast media, where in some instances works for traditional broadcast are created, and at other times artists harness preexisting broadcast signals as source material manipulated in live performance, installation, and public interactive networks and tools. Similarly interested in the synaesthetic possibilities of radio, much of contemporary transmission art values interplay with waves, informed by historical and emergent wireless technologies. These works often challenge a conventional one-to-many definition of transmitter (or artist) and receiver (or audience) in ways that celebrate Brechtian aspirations for more multi-nodal wireless interactions. Wave Farm considers Radio Art a subsection of Transmission Art.

A definition of Radio Art: Radio artists explore broadcast radio space through a richly polyphonous mix of practices, including poetic resuscitations of conventional radio drama, documentary, interview and news formats; found and field sound compositions reframed by broadcast; performative inhabitations/embodiments of radio’s inherent qualities, such as entropy, anonymity and interference; playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers, and the potential feedback loops between hosts and layers of audience, from in-studio to listeners at home to callers-in; use of radio space to bridge widely dispersed voices (be they living or dead), subjects, environments and communities, or to migrate through them in ways that would not be possible in real time and space; electroacoustic compositions, conceived of for transmission with sounds primarily derived from gathering, generating and remixing radiophonic sources. Note: Wave Farm continues to expand this definition of radio art through engagement with contemporary practices including those revealed by Wave Farm Artists-in-residence, and this Radio Art Fellowship program.