Engagement Periods: September - November 2023 or December 2023 - February 2024
Stipend: $5,000
Location: Remote (w/ one to two visits to Wave Farm in Acra, NY) *
Application Deadline: June 30, 2023
Notification: July 2023

Wave Farm is delighted to announce a fifth year of the Radio Art Fellowship. In fall 2023 and winter 2024 Wave Farm will host two separate three-month fellowships. This is a part-time engagement for a radio researcher and artist living and working in the United States. Each Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow will work closely with Wave Farm’s Executive Director, Galen Joseph-Hunter, and Artistic Director, Tom Roe. The Fellows will also have the opportunity to work with Mentors: Anna Friz, Joan Schuman, Neil Verma, and Gregory Whitehead.

Each Fellowship will combine remote work with one on-site research visit and one on-site live broadcast (should additional travel be possible) 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.

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.

Duties and Responsibilities:

Month 1: Radio Art Listening, Research, and Archive Contributions

The first month of the fellowship is focused on additions to the Wave Farm Radio Art Archive. (See wavefarm.org/radio/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. During their first month, the fellow will have the opportunity for focused and supported research in order to identify five to ten additions to the archive. The Fellow will prepare audio with introductions and back announcements for broadcast, as well as written work descriptions, and artist biographies. Mentors will be available for consultation, leads, and feedback.

Month 2: Community Engagement

The fellow will design and lead a workshop (or listening session) with WGXC programmers and interested members of the public. Recent Fellowship community engagement examples include: The Subliminal World: Intuitive, Stochastic, and Supernatural Sound-making with Tyler Maxin, delay, relay, feedback, loop: an Audio Exchange Network Workshop with José Alejandro Rivera, and Radio Deprogramming with Andy Stuhl.

Month 3: Radio Art Creation

The Fellow will create their own original radio artwork(s) for broadcast. Works will be included in Wave Farm's syndicated weekly program "The Radio Art Hour" which is syndicated nationally, as well as possibly included in Wave Farm's biannually contribution to the Radia network (see radia.fm).

Fellowship Benchmarks:

• Biweekly Meetings: with Wave Farm staff.
• Monthly Check-ins with Mentors for feedback on archive additions and the Fellow’s original radio artworks.
• Culminating Public Program: a live radio broadcast featuring the Fellow and mentors in conversation reflecting on works created and archive selections.

2023 Application

Eligibility: The Radio Art Fellowship program opportunity is open to individuals whose primary residence is in the United States. (Note: applications from collaborative teams are not eligible.) The Fellowship stipend will appear as “Other Income” on 1099s issued in conjunction with tax years 2022 and 2023, depending on the dates of engagement. Women, gender non-conforming people, and people of color are encouraged to apply.

Wave Farm’s Radio Art Fellowship is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor 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.