ARCHIVE

The Radio Art Hour: Sarah Sweeney (Audio)

May 25, 2023
Produced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellows and Artistic Director Tom Roe.

Sarah Sweeney’s father died when he was forty-four and she was seventeen. When Sweeney, who teaches at Skidmore College, turned forty-four, she wanted to talk to him again. She contacted Resemble AI, a company that creates clones of voices using machine learning, and they worked together to create an AI model of her father’s voice. When this model was completed Sweeney was able to type and speak words into the interface and hear him speak. Conversations with My Deepfake Dad is a series of six conversations created through Sweeney’s interactions with this audio deepfake of her father, the first of which is broadcast here, followed by a conversation between Sweeney and WGXC's Tom Roe about the work.

Welcome to "The Radio Art Hour," a show where art is not just on the radio, but is the radio. "The Radio Art Hour" draws from the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource that 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 independent transmission. Come on a journey with us as radio artists explore broadcast radio space through poetic resuscitations and playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers in this hour of radio about radio as an art form. "The Radio Art Hour" features introductions from Philip Grant and Tom Roe, and from Wave Farm Radio Art Fellows Karen Werner, Jess Speer, Andy Stuhll, José Alejandro Rivera, Tyler Maxin, and Iru Ekpunobi. The Conet Project's recordings of numbers radio stations serve as interstitial sounds. Go to wavefarm.org for more information about "The Radio Art Hour" and Wave Farm's Radio Art Archive.