- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -
DATE: April 5, 2016
CONTACT: Galen Joseph-Hunter, Executive Director, galen@wavefarm.org (518-622-2598)

Ten Artists Announced for Residencies at Wave Farm in Acra, NY

Acra, NY— Wave Farm announced today the ten artists and projects selected for the 2016 Wave Farm Residency Program. Each artist will live and work on-site at the Wave Farm Study Center for ten days during the residency season, which spans May through October.

The Wave Farm Residency program provides artists with a valuable opportunity to concentrate on new transmission works and conduct research about the genre using the Wave Farm Study Center resource library. In conjunction with their residencies, artists perform, are interviewed, and create playlists for broadcast on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM, a creative community radio station serving over 78,000 potential listeners in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, and international listeners online.

Wave Farm Executive Director Galen Joseph-Hunter said, “This year, an impressive pool of applications was received from nine countries and thirteen U.S. states. Artists making work with and about the airwaves, is what transmission art is all about. These projects experiment with the radio spectrum, reinvent radio theatre, or use transmission in performance, composition, and installation. The Wave Farm Residency program occupies an important place in this dynamic field internationally, and we are excited by the growth, interest, and support the Wave Farm Residency Program continues to experience.”

2016 Wave Farm Residency Program Selected Artists and Projects:

• C Lavender (Hudson, NY)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome C. Lavender (Hudson, NY). Her "Circadian Rhythm Radio" seeks to reintegrate radio as a part of the sleep/wake cycle. By utilizing pure audio frequencies known as "isochronic tones" which manipulate brain wave states through the method of "brainwave entrainment," she will create a piece which slowly wakes the listener up in the morning as well as helping them relax and eventually fall asleep at night.

Isochronic tones are rapidly pulsing tones which sound alarming on their own and are usually hidden under other soothing audio recordings. "Circadian Rhythm Radio" will utilize live radio static also known as white noise and the live audio feed from the grounds of Wave Farm to create a relaxing soundscape which the isochronic tones will be "hidden" under. This project seeks to assist those who suffer with insomnia, circadian rhythm issues, disturbing noise pollution, and other factors which keep them from falling asleep and waking up at a proper time for them to fully function during the day.

C. Lavender is a Hudson Valley, New York based sound artist, educator, and healer whose work spans through live performance, recording, installations and workshops. Her productions are drawn from an intuitive place where there is a reverence for the delicate interplay between chance-based experimentation and rigid composition. C. Lavender works with an ever-evolving structure of live instrumentation, voice, computer software, and various electronics. She seeks to create an immersive aural landscape for the listener, an experience which is intensely physical, emotional and ultimately cathartic as noted in a performance review from the Village Voice; "downright iconic, charged with meaning and transgression."

• Seth Cluett (Hoboken, NJ)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome Seth Cluett (Hoboken, NJ). Cluett's "Beating the Bounds," refers to a tradition that originated in France, England, and Wales in the 16th Century whereby members of a village or parish walked the property bounds of their territory yearly as a way to teach younger generations about the spatial limits of property ownership.

Cluett will develop a system that allows sound to mark the bounds of a physical area of outdoor space on the property of Wave Farm. The geo-spatial limits of a radio-defined landscape will be delimited by a series of transmitter-receiver pairs that send and receive a post-striking sound to a location far afield from the location of the strike and leaving a reverberated residual sound in its wake. By spatially pairing the strikes with the distanced receiver and loudspeaker the communal experience of walking the bounds marks the volume of the property rather than the borders.

American artist and composer Seth Cluett explores everyday actions at extreme magnification, examines minutae by amplifying impossible tasks, and explores the working of memory in forms that rethink the role of the senses in an increasingly technologized society. Creating work ranging from photography and drawing to installation, concert music, and critical writing, his "subtle...seductive, immersive" (Artforum) sound work has been characterized as "rigorously focused and full of detail" (e/i) and "dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature" (The Wire). The recipient of grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Fund and Meet the Composer, his work has been presented internationally at venues such as The Whitney Museum, MoMA/PS1, Palais de Tokyo, GRM, and STEIM and is documented on Line, Sedimental, Notice, and Winds Measure recordings. In the fall of 2015 he joined the Music & Technology faculty at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.

• John Dombroski (Richmond, VA)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome John Dombroski (Richmond, VA). Dombroski's "The Broadcast Project" is an ongoing series of site-specific sound performances broadcast live on local radio stations during a six month coast-to-coast road trip, across and around the USA. Sound is comprised of remixed historic music and audio from the region, where each broadcast occurs as well as field recordings, voice, and analog/digital synthesizers.

John Dombroski is a multi-discipline artist working to challenge object-based culture by shifting focus to the significance of everyday spaces and moments. In his recent installations participants are invited to explore the space and sound of a vacant bank building, play another artist’s sculpture like an instrument, and listen to their footsteps follow them across an historic chapel. Since May 2015 he has remixed local American music live on various regional radio stations during an ongoing road trip around the USA. He has exhibited internationally at venues such as Visual Centre for Contemporary Art, Ireland; Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Korea/Worldwide; Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Italy; Churner & Churner, New York; Aurora, Texas; Whitman College, Washington; MSPS New Music Festival, Louisiana; Summercamp’s ProjectProject, Los Angeles; and numerous community radio stations across the USA. He is a Skowhegan (2013), Ox-Bow (2015), and Virginia Commonwealth University (BFA 2011) alumnus. When not traveling, he lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

• David Goren (Brooklyn, NY)
David Goren's "Signal Persistence along the Greyline Path" is comprised of a shortwave radio listening post, setup to monitor and record the daily dawn/dusk long distance reception openings known “greyline” propagation during a 2016 Wave Farm Artist Residency.

The greyline is the terminator between light and darkness that wraps around the earth, briefly enhancing reception for people listening during their local sunrise or sunset. Goren’s project will focus on the ninety, sixty, and forty-nine meter tropical bands where rural stations can be heard from Africa, South America, and Asia. Numbering in the hundreds as recently as 15 years ago, only several dozen of these stations remain today.

The recordings gathered will form the basis for an online audio map; a time-based sonic snapshot of a broadcast culture that will likely fade out permanently over the next few years due to changes in technology and population. Goren’s captures will be logged and soundscapes will be selected, edited and mixed, contributing to Goren’s extended audio work about the final fadeout of tropical band domestic, stations and the experience of listening long distance.

David Goren is a radio producer, and audio archivist whose work blurs the line between audio documentary and sound art. Grounded in intensive monitoring of global broadcast culture, he examines its ability to create and support community over long distances. David has created programming for NPR’s “Lost and Found Sound” series, On the Media, Afropop Worldwide, and Jazz at Lincoln Center, as well as audio-based installations for Proteus Gowanus and The Ethnographic Terminalia Collective. In 2003, he founded the Shortwave Shindig, a multi-hour live mix incorporating spoken word, musical performance, radio tuning, and archival sound. He is also one half of the shortwave radio jam band, The Propagations, with Ned Sublette.

• Meredith Kooi (Atlanta, GA)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome Meredith Kooi (Atlanta, GA). "The ether swaddles me," is a continuation of Kooi's current artistic and theoretical explorations into transmission art as a feminine poetics with Wave Farm serving as the ground of investigation. The work attempts to map the material and immaterial contours of Wave Farm, from which Kooi will develop a zine and performative installation that incorporates radio transmission, video, and dance. Kooi's project will employ photosensitive synthesizers, theremins, along with FM transmitters and receivers throughout the landscape. Audio recordings will be coupled with drawings, psychogeographic maps, writings, citations from research, and movement scores in an effort to unveil the electromagnetic spectrum as dense and heavy with history and possibility.

Meredith Kooi is a visual and performance artist, curator, and art critic based in Atlanta, working at the intersection of philosophy, feminist science and technology studies, and embodiment using performance, radio, installation, photography, and video. Kooi is the Assistant Director and Editor for Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform based in Chicago, and the founder and Director of ALTERED MEANS, an amorphous curatorial project based in Atlanta. She was a recipient of Atlanta's Office of Cultural Affairs 2014-2015 Emerging Artist Award and is a 2015-2017 Artist-in-Residence with The Creatives Project. Her writing has been featured in “Art Papers,” “Bad at Sports,” “Temporary Art Review,” and “Wussy,” among others. She received her MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University where she teaches courses in Performance Studies and Visual Studies.

• Ralph Lewis (Urbana, IL)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome Ralph Lewis (Champaign, IL). Lewis's “Penelope's Endless Book of Magic,” is an ongoing radio opera serial that combines sequential narrative tropes from radio, 21st century operatic aesthetics, and live and fixed electroacoustic music techniques. In each episode, Penelope and her best friend explore a page in the book and try out a new spell. During his residency, Lewis will produce a nightly midnight broadcast sharing the preceding day's episodic progress.

Ralph Lewis is a composer whose work seeks meeting points between sonorous music and arresting noise, alternative tunings and timbre, and the roles of performer and audience. Exploring these intersections has led to frequent collaborations with composer/multi-instrumentalist Jacob A. Barton, bass trombonist Jack Alexander Madden, and historical performance clarinetist/conductor Thomas Carroll, as well as writing for unique and homemade instruments including Barton’s udderbot, reimagined traditional instruments, and live electronics.

Recent performances of Lewis’s work include bassoonist Annie Lyle Mason’s University of Illinois premiere of "I Was on the Side of the Highway, Drive to the Edge," a monthly series of interactive radio pieces for Wave Farm's WGXC 90.7-FM, blowviato and Thereminnards at the 17th Annual Music for People and Thingamajigs Festival, "Print-Throughs" by Standard Rep Bassoon Quartet, "Sound Seeker," a transmission work for WOBC 91.5-FM, and "YWDN," a live electronics solo, at the Berkeley Arts Festival’s Save the Frogs Benefit. This June, his work will be featured at the Fresh Inc Festival in Wisconsin.

Lewis received a B.M. at Oberlin Conservatory and a B.A. in Classical Civilization from Oberlin College. He received an M.F.A. in Electronic Music and Recording Media and an M.A. in Music Composition Mills College’s Center for Contemporary Music, and is currently is pursuing a degree of Doctor of Musical Arts in Music Composition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

• Heidi Neilson (Long Island City, NY)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome Heidi Neilson (Long Island City, NY). The Outernet (https://outernet.is/), a new and separate system outside the internet, is an expanding library collection of data files broadcast from a satellite in space. An Outernet library receive station collects transmissions and stores files locally, allowing them to be accessed by wireless devices in range of the station. The Outernet has been envisioned as an open, worldwide, collaborative platform where anyone can have a say in what is included. More at: https://wiki.outernet.is/wiki/Outernet_Wiki.

Physically the Outernet Library Branch-Wave Farm will be an outdoor area defined by a wifi signal and includes picnic-like library seating, explanation materials and signage, a power outlet, a receiving satellite dish and housing box for electronics. A library branch visitor may step into library area and, through the wireless on their cell phone, tablet, or computer, may browse, read, download, and save materials transmitted from a satellite in space.

Heidi Neilson is an artist addressing topics such as weather, fake snow, and the cultural landscape of outer space. Her work, often collaborative and publishing-based, has been supported by the Art Matters Foundation, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Center for Book Arts, the College Book Art Association, The Drawing Center, Wave Farm, Flux Factory, I-Park, the International Print Center New York, the Islip Art Museum, Kala Art Institute, LMCC, the Lower East Side Printshop, Provisions Library, the Queens Museum of Art, Visual Studies Workshop, and Women’s Studio Workshop. Neilson is a member of the ABC Artists’ Books Cooperative; she co-founded SP Weather Station, and her work is included in over 60 museum and university collections. Born in Oregon, Neilson received a BA in biology from Reed College and an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute. She lives and works in New York.

• Quintron (New Orleans, LA)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome Quintron (New Orleans, LA). Quintron's "Upstate Warlock" is a weather-controlled, analog, drone synthesizer permanently installed on the Wave Farm grounds and specifically tailored to the climate of New York's Hudson Valley. Outdoor sensors will detect wind, sun, moisture, and temperature; variables that subtly modulate a harmonic drone chord available to listeners on-site and online.

Quintron has been making genre-defying noise, soundscape, and house-rocking dance music in New Orleans for over 20 years. The majority of his fifteen full-length albums, many created with artist / puppeteer Panacea Theriac (aka Miss Pussycat), have the psychedelic soul of New Orleans party jams as filtered through tough distorted organs and a junk heap of self-made electronic instruments. In the year 1999, Quintron helped to foster a DIY analog synth revival with a patented instrument called the Drum Buddy, a light-activated analog drum machine which creates murky, low-fidelity, rhythmic patterns triggered by the rotation of recycled #10 pizza sauce cans. In 2011 the New Orleans Museum of Art presented a large scale exhibit on the evolution of the Drum Buddy as well as allowing Quintron to hole himself up in one of their galleries for three months to create the epic experiment "Sucre Du Sauvage" (Goner 2011).

Spring 2014 Quintron and Miss Pussycat resided at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida, where Quintron completed a weather controlled analog drone synthesizer called "Weather Warlock" and launched a website devoted to streaming its music called Weather For The Blind. In October 2016, Quintron will install a new iteration of this project "Upstate Warlock" at Wave Farm during an 2016 artist residency. Quintron continues to lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana as well as touring, teaching, and lecturing in this world and beyond.

• Elia Vargas (Oakland, CA)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome Elia Vargas (Oakland, CA). Vargas's "Crude Illumination" is a light projection installation. The piece consists of an acrylic container of oil (crude) and dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) placed on an overhead projector. As the room temperature oil causes the dry ice to sublimate (at -109.3ºF), the dry ice changes shape and state, and interacts with the liquid oil surface and light projection. This dynamic information exchange is projected onto a nearby wall, via an analog projection apparatus. “Crude Illumination” is a material and theoretical study of the influence of information embodiment in the anthropocene, an introduction to what Vargas calls signal flow.

Vargas writes, "The invisible yet physical state of transmission articulates the same infrastructure that enables ‘Crude Illumination’–the same mysterious causality that mystifies western humanity. With transmission, and all its acoustic ecologies and dependent infrastructure technologies (transmitters, receivers, amplifiers, etc.), a strata of meaning solidifies, yet meaning we only articulate symptomatically. Like Crude Illumination, we see the materiality, but the invisible forces carry the energy." At Wave Farm, Vargas will develop the "Crude Illumination" project further, exploring the transmission possibilities of crude oil and frozen carbon-dioxide.

Elia Vargas is an Oakland based artist and curator. He works in video, sound, projection, and situational experiences that explore mediated information embodiment. He has collaborated with a wide range of artists and musicians including Bjork and Vincent Moon. He performs and exhibits work locally and internationally. Vargas is co-founder and co-curator of the Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly salon on new media art and digital culture; half of improvisational modular synthesis duo systemritual; board member of Mediate Art Group, organizer of the Soundwave Biennial; and a PhD student in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. Vargas has a long history of community radio broadcasting and is interested in the relationship of transmission and cultural material flows. He is currently investigating the materiality of crude oil, frozen carbon dioxide, and obsolete projection technology in the anthropocene.

• Bryan Zimmerman (Jersey City, NJ)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome Bryan Zimmerman (Jersey City, NJ). Zimmerman's "Interspecies Radio Shack" is a small, collapsible, shack/lounge/audio-visual installation devoted to the mixing of sounds and images from amateur shortwave radio with sounds and images of nature (specifically insects, amphibians, and birds of the Catskill region). A series of radio works on the subject of amateur radio will be presented inside the shack as well as broadcast on Wave Farm Radio and WGXC. "Interspecies Radio Shack" is being developed for the event Lodge 2016, where it will be available to public audiences in conjunction with weekend festival activities.

Bryan Zimmerman's interdisciplinary work draws from relationships with nature, place, and the outdoors. His unconventional approach to materials and social space routinely integrates audio and visual collage, unique forms of "sculptural photography"/three-dimensional decoupage, outdoor installation, performance, analog animation, light and shadow play, sample-based audio composition, lyrics and songwriting, turntablism, ambient "remixes" of field recordings and shortwave radio transmissions, and peculiar appropriations of found urban detritus and other archival audio and visual ephemera. Born and raised in Kansas and currently based in Jersey City and the Hudson Valley, Zimmerman co-manages the photography lab and frequently teaches photography at The Cooper Union.

The Wave Farm Residency Program is supported, 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 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Greene County Legislature through the County Initiative Program, administered in Greene County by the Greene County Council on the Arts; and generous individual donors.