Documentation Link: http://www.zachpoff.com/site2/projects/radio-silence

Join us for an opening reception on Friday July 2, 2010 6 p.m.-10 p.m. to celebrate Zach Poff's Radio Silence.

Artist Talk: 8 p.m.
Zach Poff will introduce Radio Silence and discuss his recent work concerned with reconfiguring live broadcast feeds.

Through artwork, teaching, and free software creation, Zach Poff examines the opportunities and challenges that arise from the translation of human activity into information. His recent work has been focused on the 20th Century paradigm of broadcasting and its continued influence on contemporary digital and social networks.

Radio Silence explores the silent moments of talk-radio, combining eight AM broadcasts into a meta-conversation based on the negative spaces between words.

A pause in conversation might indicate the end of a thought, or it might be an opportunity for reflection or response. A pause in a radio broadcast offers different potentials: As radio listeners, we can’t respond but we might exercise our only form of interactivity: changing the station. On commercial radio, moments of silence are minimized to avoid losing listeners. Broadcasters often use digital time-compression to shorten their programming and leave more time for advertising.

In Radio Silence, pauses are treated as paradoxical opportunities to probe the neighboring airwaves in search of an expanded form of conversation. Eight wire-frame radio sculptures are arranged in a circle, empty except for their speakers. Each radio corresponds to a different local AM station which is being monitored by custom software. One at a time, each radio speaks while the others play a chorus of hissing residue between words. When the speaking radio shares a simultaneous moment of silence with one of its neighbors, the conversation silently shifts to the other radio before the next word begins. Over time, Radio Silence surveys the spectrum of viewpoints currently on the air, weaving them together through the intersections of a shared linguistic device.

Radio Silence is Zach Poff’s latest in a series of inquiries into reconfiguring mass media (linguistically, technically, culturally).

Also on view will be 2 related projects:

Video Silence is a live installation that discards the dialog from live TV, preserving only the moments of aural subtlety.

Radio Silence Study is a modified recording of the nightly news. The left channel is a compilation of all the words without pauses. The right channel contains only the pauses that were removed.

This exhibition is part of a series celebrating the 2009/2010 AIRtime Fellowship Recipients: Zach Poff (July 2-11), Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown (July 16-25), and Brett Balogh (July 30-August 14.)

AIRtime @ Devotion is a series celebrating free103point9’s 2009/2010 AIRtime Fellowship Recipients: Zach Poff, Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown, and Brett Balogh. AIRtime Fellowships provide assistance to artists creating new Transmission Art works. This genre is informed by works which employ an intentional use of space—often the airwaves. Transmission Art manifests in participatory live art or time-based art including radio, video, light, installation, and performance.

free103point9 is a nonprofit arts organization focused on cultivating Transmission Arts. Based in upstate New York, free103point9’s major programs include the Transmission Art Archive, a definitive resource featuring artists, works, and exhibitions and events that define the genre and place it in a historical context; WGXC: Hands-on Radio, a creative community FM radio station serving Greene and Columbia counties; and the facilitation of a NYSCA Distribution Regrant for individual artists. areyoudevoted.com

This event is the record release performance and celebration for Corpse of Discover with Bryan Zimmerman (free103point9 AD038). Bryan Zimmerman is a member of The Dust Dive, a Brooklyn band associated with free103point9, who have played in Hudson and Acra previously. Hudson's Jeremy Kelly opens the show. Live audio/video web stream at www.wgxc.org.

Corpse of Discovery with Bryan Zimmerman (free103point9 AD038) is an edition of 300, and available for $10 (plus S&H + sales tax in NY).

This 12" LP record release features the collaborative effort of Corpse of Discovery, a free-form music collective initiated by Bryan Zimmerman in Brooklyn and Queens, New York. In an effort to employ transmissions as a melodic and narrative element in music, Zimmerman samples shortwave radio transmissions, two-way radio communications from Brooklyn-based livery service dispatchers and drivers, cellphone interference, cellphone-processed voice and instrumentation, and other transmission-related sounds.

Laura Ortman, renowned multi-instrumentalist, longtime collaborator with Zimmerman in the band The Dust Dive, and Zimmerman’s “other half,” appears on all six tracks playing a range of instruments, including Hammond C3 organ, violin, electric guitar, megaphoned vocals, and Casiotone analog synth. Ortman unintentionally summed up Zimmerman’s original motivation for the project when remarking that the finished record “sounds like family music!…” “For years I’d wanted to make a door-to-door recording with friends in NYC whose music I admire,” says Zimmerman. “Then I realized what a lifelong project that is, and pared this one down to Laura, some friends from Kansas who now live in New York, and a few others. Making an album with 11 musicians was enough.”

The other constant presence on the album is acclaimed multi-instrumentalist and intrepid recording engineer Jason Loewenstein (Sebadoh, Fiery Furnaces, Circle of Buzzards). “The Dust Dive had a great time recording our last album with Jason in our apartment . I asked him if he wanted to engineer, co-produce, and play on this album using his portable recording rig, the ‘jakerock mobile unit, ’” says Zimmerman. “I presented it to him as an ‘adventure album.’ He ended up crafting fun and coherent music from all of the divergent overdub sessions and jam demos.” Aside from featuring Loewenstein’s prowess as engineer, the album also features him playing drums, guitar, as well as bass on the lively and compelling Liberty Dime Under the Linoleum, Flor de Muerto.

Prominently in the mix alongside Ortman and Loewenstein are three members of the enigmatic art-punk band Dichroics, Seth Abrames, Charlie Hines, and Darin Mickey. Drums on three of the six tracks are provided by Jeff Conaway, the stellar sticks behind cult psych-prog band The Psychic Paramount. The family tree branches ever forward and backward from there: Dichroics and The Psychic Paramount both feature members of the “criminally underheard and unrecognized” ‘90s Lawrence, Kansas-based band Panel Donor—as well as ambient-noise duo Sabers; Seth Abrames and Darin Mickey are both veterans of the punk-rock trio Gift Giver; multi-instrumentalists Shelley Burgon and (K.C. native) Shannon Fields—both bandmates with Ortman in Stars Like Fleas—join in on the shimmery instrumental track Collapse of the Magnetosphere; a mesmerizing pedal-steel guitar loop by Michael Sump—who played with Archer Prewitt in the magical yet also obscure ‘80s K.C.-based jangle-pop band Bangtails—is made into Sumptown, a moody tribute to Sump; and the lineage continues to unfold. (See below for comprehensive credits).

Guiding listeners through the urban-pastoral montage are Zimmerman’s colorful lyrics and eccentric narrative flow. The lyricist receives a “a cursive text from a scorpion” in Apache slang on his cellphone in the Mexican Day of the Dead tribute song Liberty Dime Under the Linoleum, Flor de Muerto; awkwardly requests “the latest issue of Malt Liquor Spectator” magazine in gringo, Google-translated Spanish, and discovers “a mummified cowboy in the wall on Broadway/A mummified cowboy at the mall in Reno” on Junkie Observer, Malt Liquor Spectator. With odd sincerity, the opening track, My Disco Ball, paints a swirling urban-to-rural /death-to-beauty continuum, evoking—as the album name and the other five tracks also do—the Corpse’s lively and ragged urban quest for equanimity.

Reggae Delta Car Crash… was guitarist Darin Mickey’s response to hearing a rough mix of “My Disco Ball.” Sealing this nomadic, jump-cut geographic character of the album are Zimmerman’s radio samples—including a wide variety of contemporary shortwave transmissions captured with his father’s collection of WWII-era military radios, two-way radio communications from Brooklyn livery service dispatchers and drivers, and sundry cellphone-processed sounds, including a passage featuring Zimmerman’s mother playing a J.S. Bach cantata over her cellphone from a church in Kansas City.

Join us for an opening reception on Friday July 16, 2010 6 p.m.-10 p.m. to celebrate Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown's The Bike Box.

Sabine Gruffat is an interdisciplinary artist whose work maneuvers through, manipulates, and challenges prescribed genres and codes. Bill Brown seeks to correlate geographical coordinates with conceptual ones in his work, such as uncovering the memories and histories folded up inside physical landscapes and borders.

The Bike Box is a mobile-media bicycle library and interactive installation housed in the Devotion Gallery. Bike Box allows participants to check out cheap, durable, technology-enhanced bikes and a free open source iPhone application developed especially for this project. As participants pedal around central Brooklyn, they are able to contribute site-specific audio through the iPhone application, as well as listen to a curated collection of geo-specific sounds provided by a variety of local land-use experts, historians, poets, artists, and other interpreters.

The Bike Box hopes to explore and give participants access to the layers of lived experience, personal anecdote, and history that are piled up invisibly on every street corner and city block.

The Bike Box will also host a number of performances and special events during the exhbition at Devotion Gallery:

Friday, July 16th
Sound and video performance by Jesse Stiles using the Bike Box’s locative sound database as raw material for breaking beats.

Saturday July 17, 2 p.m.
Sunday July 18, 2 p.m.
Saturday July 24, 2 p.m.
Sunday July 25, 2 p.m.
Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown will be leading bike tours through Bike Box geo-tagged sites in Brooklyn.  

Saturday, July 17th, 5 p.m.
Sound and video performance by Jonny Farrow using sounds and images from solo sound walks.

Curated contributions to Bike Box will include:

John Bennet's contact microphone recordings of audio frequencies emitted by power transformers, electric lights, and air conditioners throughout Brooklyn.

Jonny Farrow’s contact mic’d bicycle ride around the gallery neighborhood.

Cathleen Grado's field recordings drawn from locations in Ridgewood and Bushwick, focusing on the contrasting sounds of rural and urban environments. 

Stephanie Gray's ruminations on Saint Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint.

Jenifer Kaminsky's exploration of the ghosts trapped within the place names of Williamsburg and Greenpont.

Joan Linder and Stephanie Rothenberg's  "Brooklyn-Beijing-Babble," which overlays the cacophonous sounds of modernizing Beijing onto the gentrifying neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint.  

Katherin McInnis' Phantom Highway, which follows the path of the never-built Bushwick Expressway through North Brooklyn, and offers a fragmentary and poetic essay on urban planning.

Paul Sargent's Hydronym: Erie Basin Meets Erie Basin, which traces the Erie Basin, taking its name from a long history connecting Brooklyn to territories deep within the North American Midwest and ports all over the world.  

Norm Scott's field recordings from 2005 of spaces surrounding the (then) abandoned McCarren Park Pool. The sounds harken back to summertime at an abandoned magical swimming pool.

This exhibition is part of a series celebrating the 2009/2010 AIRtime Fellowship Recipients: Zach Poff (July 2-11), Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown (July 16-25), and Brett Balogh (July 30-August 14.)

AIRtime @ Devotion is a series celebrating free103point9’s 2009/2010 AIRtime Fellowship Recipients: Zach Poff, Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown, and Brett Balogh. AIRtime Fellowships provide assistance to artists creating new Transmission Art works. This genre is informed by works which employ an intentional use of space—often the airwaves. Transmission Art manifests in participatory live art or time-based art including radio, video, light, installation, and performance.

free103point9 is a nonprofit arts organization focused on cultivating Transmission Arts. Based in upstate New York, free103point9’s major programs include the Transmission Art Archive, a definitive resource featuring artists, works, and exhibitions and events that define the genre and place it in a historical context; WGXC: Hands-on Radio, a creative community FM radio station serving Greene and Columbia counties; and the facilitation of a NYSCA Distribution Regrant for individual artists. areyoudevoted.com

Join us for an opening reception on Friday July 30, 2010 6 p.m.-10 p.m. to celebrate Brett Ian Balogh's Noospherium.

Brett Ian Balogh is an artist working at the intersection of objects, sounds and spaces. His current practice employs sound, radio and digital fabrication technologies to re-imagine traditional notions of space and our placement within. Central to his practice is the idea of model making. Models represent a layer of abstraction between us and the world. This layer is a liminal space between object and image, atoms and bits, landscapes and maps, and sounds and signals. It is in this layer that sounds can become mountains, and radio broadcasts maps. The use of digital technologies in concert with traditional modes of representation and construction can afford unique cross-overs between the real and intangible that represent models of other possible worlds.

Since the inception of radio as a broadcast medium, the earth has been covered by an increasingly dense network of airborne communications. AM/FM/SW and other portions of the radio spectrum represent a medium through which a re-imaging of space is possible. This hertzian space is not defined by surveyed boundaries or geographic constraints, but rather by field strengths, mass-media service areas and consumer markets. The overlapping spaces defined by these broadcasts can be collectively referred to as an envelope of thought around the world, or Noosphere.

Noospherium aims to render this sphere of human thought as an immersive sonic environment, providing a pansonic/panoptic view of simultaneous broadcasts. The space of the installation can then be thought of as as a phrenologic observatory to this sphere of human thought where a real-time composition puts as many signals as possible into conversation within the space, allowing one to characterize the nature of our collective thoughts through chance occurrences, spurious juxtapositions and the dynamic spatialization of sound.

This exhibition is part of a series celebrating the 2009/2010 AIRtime Fellowship Recipients: Zach Poff (July 2-11), Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown (July 16-25), and Brett Balogh (July 30-August 14.)

AIRtime @ Devotion is a series celebrating free103point9’s 2009/2010 AIRtime Fellowship Recipients: Zach Poff, Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown, and Brett Balogh. AIRtime Fellowships provide assistance to artists creating new Transmission Art works. This genre is informed by works which employ an intentional use of space—often the airwaves. Transmission Art manifests in participatory live art or time-based art including radio, video, light, installation, and performance.

free103point9 is a nonprofit arts organization focused on cultivating Transmission Arts. Based in upstate New York, free103point9’s major programs include the Transmission Art Archive, a definitive resource featuring artists, works, and exhibitions and events that define the genre and place it in a historical context; WGXC: Hands-on Radio, a creative community FM radio station serving Greene and Columbia counties; and the facilitation of a NYSCA Distribution Regrant for individual artists. free103point9.org

Devotion is a new gallery in Williamsburg focusing on the presentation of art, science, design, and complexity to open up a dialogue about the evolution and connection between these disciplines. areyoudevoted.com

Poster by Jess Puglisi.
Vetiver returns to Hudson to play a benefit to bring community radio to Greene and Columbia counties. DJ Lunar Moss will also play tunes, and Nina Violet will also perform. Other special guests to be announced. Live webstream from WGXC Online Radio at www.wgxc.org, and archived recordings there too after the show.

From Wikipedia: Vetiver are an American folk band headed by songwriter Andy Cabic and often joined by Devendra Banhart, drummer Otto Hauser [who lives in Hudson], keyboardist Sarah Versprille, guitarist Daniel Hindman, and bassist Bob Parins. Their music has been described as "surreal," "lullingly pleasant," "tender and accessible," and "quirky and warm."

DJ Lunar Moss is a Hudson-based turntablist who performs Thursday nights at PM Wine Bar, and soon on WGXC.

Nina Violet, described performing at The Black Swan in Tivoli by Ammuse's blog: "Nina Violet’s vocals are comforting and warming, enveloping the listener in their heartiness. Her voice is as clear as a mountain brook, glorious as the sun, and free as the wind. In addition to singing and writing songs, Nina plays guitar and viola. Playing with her at The Black Swan were Angel Russell on trumpet, Matthew Cullen on bass and guitar, Adam Howl on guitar, and Marciana Jones on omnichord, keyboard, and vocals. Marciana has a beautiful voice as well, and when she sang with Nina the two created breathtaking harmonies. Their vocals combined are truly something extraordinary to behold — probably because they’re sisters. I’ve heard that siblings often have the most exquisite harmonies, which I’ve never thought to be particularly true. After hearing Marciana and Nina, however, I’m pretty much convinced."

To listen tune in WGXC Online Radio at www.wgxc.org and paste the following url into your computer's media player: http://comm.free103point9.org:8000/hudson.mp3.m3u