Organized in partnership with Acra-based nonprofit arts organization free103point9, Transmittal, offers Greene County residents and visitors a window into Transmission Arts. Transmittal is curated by Galen Joseph-Hunter, free103point9’s Executive Director and author of Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves (PAJ Publications: 2011.) The exhibition features an international and local roster of artists and organizations whose work celebrates the interdisciplinary nature of Transmission Arts and is made manifest in video, sound, radio, installation, performance, and work-on-paper. Please join us for an opening celebrating Transmittal on Saturday, April 28. 5-7 p.m.

In A Noospheric Atlas of New York, Brett Ian Balogh (Chicago, IL) maps the hertzian space created by the New York's mass media broadcast stations. This space is not definable in the traditional terms of the surveyed boundaries of state territories, but rather by electrical field strengths and consumer markets. Geospatial data provided by the Federal Communications Commission is rendered as translucent shapes whose color is determined by the type of service (AM/FM/TV).

With RELAY, Max Goldfarb (Hudson, NY) presents a grouping of Ambulant Transceivers, a series of handmade radio transceivers constructed from reconstituted radio-electronic components, housed inside vintage first-aid tins. The adjacent video, Locations:Relay, represents an equally hand-made security system in the form of a community-watch perimeter check. The localized security network is cobbled together by many collaborating members of an unspecified village: each voice transmission attached to aerial imagery of the territory.

Sam Sebren (Athens, NY) presents 9/11-QVC, an off-air single-channel video work. On the 10th Anniversary of the September 11 attacks in New York City, Sebren videotaped himself toggling his television dial between news coverage in memorial of the attacks and a home shopping network’s regularly scheduled programming. Here Sebren “performs” with a palette of commercial television broadcast re-presenting these transmissions in a critical and reflective light.

Fill, by Maria Papadomanolaki (New York, NY) is an interactive sound installation using low-power radio transmission. To experience Fill, attendees will borrow a small radio transceiver and move about the space. Papadomanolaki’s microcast is designed to highlight the physical properties of her site-specific transmission. Gallery goers will observe distinct changes in what they hear based on their position and movement in the GCCA exhibition space.

Phillip Stearns (Brooklyn, NY) presents his work Deluge, a sound and light installation that depicts the white noise of unoccupied radio frequencies as a showering rain of light. As digital technologies become more adept at reducing interference and noise through omission and censorship, we are quickly losing touch with unmediated white noise, that static hush in between the stations, and playground for the imagination. Many antenna like structures, LED strands are clustered together, each representing the activity of the broadband white noise being picked up by simple transistor receivers. From these discrete elements, a cloud of lights is formed, filling the space with a form activated by the absence of pre-determined content. The sculpture plays on the poetics hidden within the language of both analog and digital electronics.

Presented as listening stations, Transmittal also includes special selections from two recent international radio art exhibitions: Radio Arts Space by radioCona (Ljubljana, Slovenia), and Radio Boredcast co-commissioned by AV Festival 12 and Pixel Palace, hosted by basic.fm (Newcastle, UK).

GCCA exhibition programs are made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Transmittal will be on view at the Greene County Council for the Arts Gallery 398 Main Street, Catskill, NY 12414 April 28 – June 2, 2012. In conjunction with the exhibition, A Build Your Own Radio Synthesizer Workshop will take place on Saturday June 2, 2012. Please note that enrollment is limited, and pre-registration is required.

We are pleased to present live broadcasts from Toronto of Trans X, a symposium about Transmission Art organized by New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA). The Trans X Symposium will include two keynote lectures: "Foundations of Transmission Art" by Galen Joseph-Hunter (New York, USA), author of Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves and Executive Director of free103point9 (WGXC's parent organization) and another keynote by David Cecchetto, Assistant Professor (New Media History and Criticism) in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences at OCAD University in Toronto. The Trans X Symposium will also include workshops, panel discussions, paper presentations and performances during the final weekend of the annual Deep Wireless Festival of Radio & Transmission Art which annually explores emerging trends alongside established traditions in radio and transmission art throughout the month of May.

Specific details about the events to be broadcast live on WGXC 90.7-FM and streamed live on free103point9.org will be available soon. More information about Trans X, including registration is available here.

free103point9 Online Radio will provide a live webstream for much of the festival. On Saturday, May 26, the following will be broadcast also on WGXC 90.7-FM.:
10 a.m. Keynote: Foundations of Transmission Art by Galen Joseph-Hunter
11:30 a.m. Session 1: Transmission & Intervention Christof Migone and James Partaik
2 p.m. Session 2: Performance & Transmission in Public Places Geoffrey Shea and Alan Boulton / Jessica Thompson / Rui Chaves
8:00 pm Concert 2: Forms of Transmission


Full Schedule Friday May 25th 6:00 pm Registration / Opening reception Tour of Transmission Art installations 7:00 pm Session: Explorations in Transmission Art Jennifer Cherniack / Gintas Tirilis / Chris Myhr Amos Latteier / Alexandra Gelis 8:00 pm Concert 1: Forms of Transmission Saturday May 26th 10:00 am Keynote: Foundations of Transmission Art by Galen Joseph-Hunter 11:30 am Session 1: Transmission & Intervention Christof Migone & James Partaik 12:45 pm Lunch (not provided) 2:00 pm Session 2: Performance & Transmission in Public Places Geoffrey Shea & Alan Boulton / Jessica Thompson / Rui Chaves 3:45 pm Break-out Workshops 1/ Micro-radio Transmitter 2/ Contact Mic 3/ Sound in Digital Realm 8:00 pm Concert 2: Forms of Transmission Sunday May 27th 10:00 am Keynote: Sound as transmission: towards and away from non-cochlear sound art by David Cecchetto 11:30 am Panel: Locating the transmission & Transmitting the location Geoffrey Shea / Victoria Fenner / Kristen Roos Moderator – David Cecchetto 12:45 pm Lunch (not provided) 2:00 pm Session: Radio in Retrospect session Chris Trimmer / Magz Hall / Hethre Contant 3:45 pm Break-out Workshops 1/ Micro-radio Transmitter 2/ Contact Mic 3/ Sound in Digital Realm Location Theatre Direct's Wychwood Theatre Artscape Wychwood Barns 601 Christie Street #176, Toronto

free103point9 and WGXC 90.7-FM are pleased to present a live broadcast of "John Cage’s Empty Words," a 12-hour, overnight event during which participants will collectively experience a rare recorded performance by John Cage of "Empty Words" (1974), a marathon text drawn from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau. "Empty Words" is one of Cage’s most sustained and elaborate moves toward the “demilitarization” of language, in four parts: Part I omits sentences, Part II omits phrases, and Part III omits words. Part IV, which omits syllables, leaves us nothing but a virtual lullaby of letters and sounds. More information is available at http://johncage.org/empty_words.html.

This event is part of the worldwide celebration of John Cage’s Centennial Year. It is a co-production of the John Cage Trust, New Albion Records, and the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets for this event are extremely limited and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information, contact the John Cage Trust at (845) 835-8022 or emartin@johncage.org.