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Water Radio (Audio)

Dec 15, 2025

Created by Audra Wolowiec (2025). Introduced by Bill Corrigan.

Water Radio is an installation and radio broadcast created for CO-OPt, an artist-run space in Lubbock, Texas, in collaboration with students from across the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Texas Tech University. Interviews with students conjured our embodied relationship with water and workshops were held to create visual scores from various literary sources.

The subject of the work was the Ogallala Aquifer, a massive body of water situated underneath the surface of the Great Plains of the United States. Since the mechanization of agricultural irrigation in this region following World War II, the aquifer has been heavily depleted through over-extraction, and its ability to provide water to drink and to grow food is uncertain, particularly towards its Southern extent in the Texas panhandle.

if not, waves (2016), say the sea (2020-ongoing), o o oo (2022), and waves (2024), and as in many of these works, gathered texts are fragmented through erasure in the creation of scores that at once expose sonorities within the text while indexing the absence of their sources. The scores were vocalized by the workshop participants, recorded, edited with interview materials and transduced through a network of speaker cones suspended within the gallery space. They were also remixed and broadcast through CO-Opt’s low-power radio station KOOPt 89.9FM.

Written by Bill Corrigan, Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2025.

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