Engagement Period: September 2020 - May 2021
Stipend: $15,000
Location: Remote (w/ three visits to Wave Farm in Acra, NY) *
Application Deadline: June 30, 2020
Notification: July 2020

Wave Farm is delighted to announce a second year of the Radio Artist Fellowship, a nine-month, part-time engagement for a radio artist and scholar living and working in the United States. The Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow will work closely with Wave Farm’s Executive Director, Galen Joseph-Hunter, and Artistic Director, Tom Roe. The Fellowship will also include communication with Mentors: Anna Friz, Joan Schuman, and Gregory Whitehead.

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 with sounds primarily derived from gathering, generating and remixing radiophonic sources.

The Fellowship will combine remote work with three on-site visits to Wave Farm’s research library and radio studios.* Located in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, Wave Farm is a nonprofit arts organization driven by experimentation with broadcast media and the airwaves. A pioneer of the Transmission Arts genre, Wave Farm programs provide access to transmission technologies and support artists and organizations that engage with media as an art form. Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears is a full-power, creative community radio station in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley. The WGXC program schedule features original content by over one-hundred volunteer programmers, and commits significant daytime listening hours to radio art and experimental sound.

*Details of the Wave Farm visit schedule will be determined in collaboration with the selected artist, with consideration given to any ongoing travel restrictions related to COVID-19.

Duties and Responsibilities:

Research and Production: Weekly additions to the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive. The archive is an online resource and a broadcast series on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM. It aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks made by artists around the world, created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or pirate transmission. Additions take shape as prepared audio files with intro and outros for broadcast, as well as written work descriptions + artist biographies. (The goal is to add approximately 100 works during the Fellowship.)

Creation: Create original radio artworks for broadcast. Details regarding scope, number of works and duration to be confirmed in consideration of the artist's individual work.

Engagement: Two or three workshops or listening sessions with WGXC programmers and interested members of the public.

Fellowship Benchmarks:

To Apply:

1. Letter of Interest: a one-page statement introducing your work as a radio artist and scholar demonstrating your personal interest in radio broadcast as a creative medium.
2. Radio Art Archive Samples: Please prepare two examples of additions to the online archive and broadcast series (by other artists, one historical and one contemporary) Please see Research and Production above for more information. Each example submitted should include:

• a. A one or two paragraph narrative artist biography.
• b. A one or two paragraph narrative radio artwork description.
• c. A mp3 (192 kbps) audio file prepared for radio broadcast presentation that includes brief introductory remarks in your voice (identify yourself in the intro as well), the work itself, and an outro telling radio listeners what they have just heard.

Eligibility: The Radio Artist Fellowship program opportunity is open to radio artists and scholars whose primary residence is in the United States. The Fellowship stipend will appear as “Other Income” on 1099s issued in conjunction with tax years 2020 and 2021. Women and people of color are encouraged to apply.

Wave Farm’s Radio Artist Fellowship is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Greene County Legislature through the County Initiative Program, administered in Greene County by CREATE (aka the Greene County Council on the Arts.)