During the weekend of October 12-14 2012, corresponding with the Hudson Valley’s peak fall foliage weekend, free103point9 will host a first Transmission Arts Colloquium. This gathering includes an exciting international roster of participants with expertise regarding the issues informing the transmission arts genre. Attendees were selected so to comprise an intimate group, whose discussions during the colloquium will be shared with public audiences through broadcast and publication. Participants include:

John Anderson (DIYMedia.net/Brooklyn College, Brooklyn)
Manuel Cirauqui (Dia Art Foundation, New York)
Christoph Cox (Bard College/Hampshire College, NH)
Anna Friz (Artist, Chicago/Montreal)
Magz Hall (Canterbury Christ Church University/University of the Arts London)
Galen Joseph-Hunter (free103point9, Acra)
Jeff Kolar (Radius, Chicago)
Bonnie Marranca (PAJ Publications, New York)
Valerie Tevere (CUNY Staten Island, New York)
Tom Roe (free103point9, Acra)
Gregory Whitehead (Artist, Lenox, MA)
Jonathan Wright (Folkestone Fringe, Folkestone, UK)
Elisabeth Zimmerman (Kunstradio, Vienna)

Participants were each given one of three statements and questions to which they will respond during the Colloquium panels:

1) Transmission Arts and Contemporary Art Forms
Transmission Arts is a true form of Intermedia, developing an interface or dialogue between multiple media. If we define transmissions arts broadly as encompassing broadcast, installation, communication networks, composition and performance—in public spaces or on airwaves—what is your understanding of the potential of this mode of work for the future? What is your definition of "the contemporary" in transmission arts? Where is it pointing for the future?

2) Rethinking Transmission Media
From the early days of experimentation, electronic communication has inspired utopian aspirations among artists as a means to bring together diverse groups of people in an immersive human community. These ideals remained fervent in the digital age, where possibilities for instantaneous networks and intricate feedback circuitries offer the promise of interrelationships among unlimited numbers of participants. At the same time electronic communication may be equally described by imperfect conditions of dispersed feedback, partial and broken signal, and entropic decay.

Transmission art engages with these complex socio-technical conditions and circumstances of transmission, often as direct critique of state and/or corporate communication infrastructure and systems. How do they rethink transmission media in order to engage with the issues of power, ownership, and access to the electromagnetic spectrum? How do transmission artists approach the deep and unavoidable philosophical tension between utopian dreams of union and the status of interference and noise?

3) Ecology and Sustainability
If we think of artworks as part of an elaborate ecosystem—a community, incorporating artists and the public in cultural, economic, and political interconnectedness—how can we work toward sustainability? What tools do the different species of transmission arts have to develop creatively in this wider network of understanding? How can they evolve in the context of contemporary social and economic systems and the intermingling of art forms?

Jonathan Wright is a UK-based artist, and free103point9 Wave Farm's current artists-in-residence. This program was produced during Wright's residency.

Writes Wright, "The content of the next hour's broadcast comes form various sources. The broadcast represents an extension of a gallery show I curated in 2011 entitled The quiet and the still. All the work in the exhibition was sound based but none of the work made any sound, everything was mute. The show was inspired by a quote made by Gosta Kraken that had provoked Russell Hoban to write the remarkable book Fremder:

'Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.'

These spaces of black can be transcended by sound; sound can reach beyond the visual.

I have extended the scope of the work presented in consideration of Marcel Duchamp's Infra Thin and his assertion that the notion is impossible to define, 'one can only give examples of it.' I have also borne in mind the surreal book, Impressions of Africa of which Duchamp was so fond.

Sounds that are intuitively indulged and savoured can become more profound when attached to further layers of meaning. We hear more deeply on listening again, especially if we are offered more information to unravel these layers.

Being able to transfer this curation into a transmission is a remarkable opportunity. The running order is as follows:

Litany a work made by me as an immediate reaction to arriving at the Wave Farm using a text from Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past.

Breath, is Sian Gledhill's piece made using news footage broadcast in the build up to the Iraq War.

Bundeena Rock pool, Honey bee hive c-series and an excerpt from Sonata for clarinet & nodar are field recording works by Jez Riley French. These are very subtle recordings.

Joseph Hatch made me in 1608 by Diane Dever and Gerry Kelly is an excerpt from a work made in response to the interior of a Mediaeval clock tower.

Fierce Temper, Harm Tempts Us and All Things Are Changing were made by the Artist at Wave Farm using Tinnitus recordings.

Walk is a piece by the Artist directly inspired by the environment of the Wave Farm and the its atmosphere.

Finally, Sirensong is a work carried over from the Quiet and the still, re-presented as a transmission, based on a fresh translation by the Artist of Kafka's Silence of the Sirens Performed by Zigi Ellison.

Radius Sketchpad is an ongoing monthly program on WGXC 90.7-FM presented by the Chicago-based platform, Radius. This month features Rob Ray's Subject To Greater Uncertainties, originally produced for Radius, and is followed by a playlist of works selected by the artist.

Subject to Greater Uncertainties weaves together Rob Ray’s interests in military operations, the desert, and natural resource extraction operations as expressions of human comprehension at the fringes of the complex system we call “the world.” Rob Ray asks: How do we act upon knowledge of which we are aware is only a tiny slice of something much larger and complicated? What are the intended and unintended outcomes of those actions?

Subject to Greater Uncertainties is composed of four discrete sections: X:1 and X:2; Furnace and Swarm:

X:1 and X:2 were created in the Mojave Desert region of Southern California at the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Desert Research Station. Rob Ray used a 5-watt solar panel to voltage starve a BoardWeevil and record sonic booms emanating from the nearby the R-2508 Special Use Airspace Complex. Rob Ray thinks of this setup as a sort of “sound maquette” to investigate his interest in X-class solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections ability to destabilize global radio and low-orbit satellite electronics systems.

Furnace and Swarm were created in the abandoned Wildrose beehive charcoal kilns of Death Valley. The Wildrose beehives were constructed by the Madock Consolidated Mining Company in the 1870’s to convert wood into charcoal for the smelting of silver-lead ore extracted from their mines in the Argus Range. This operation proved fiscally unsustainable and the beehives were decommissioned only a few years after they were constructed. The beehives now serve as excellent reverb chambers and hiker desiccation prevention huts.

Rob Ray makes site-specific electronic installations, psychogeographic games and experimental sounds and videos. He has recently relocated to Los Angeles, CA from Chicago via Rensselaer’s Electronic Arts MFA Program in Troy, NY.

Rob also collaborates with Jason Soliday and Jon Satrom as a member of the Chicago-based circuit-bent multimedia noise trio I Love Presets and is the visual arts editor for the online journal Drunken Boat. From 1999 to 2008, Rob was founder and head curator of the DEADTECH electronic arts center in Chicago, IL, USA.

This Saturday Afternoon show features Baltimore-based artist Jason Sloan, and his project whiteout, a new series of live FM transmission performances exploring and questioning the aesthetic of noise on the radio. These new textural works are created live and in the moment through the use of multiple analog electronic instruments and a transmitter. The whiteout performances are currently taking place throughout cities across the United States during the summer and fall of 2012. So far the whiteout itinerary includes Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, Austin and Los Angeles with the possibility of additional cities being added. A collected set of all the performances in the whiteout series will be released as a deluxe limited edition, collectable vinyl box set available sometime in 2013.

Writes Sloan, "I was about twelve when I first became aware of how beautiful radio noise could be. I recall laying in bed and listening to my portable shortwave radio, slowly turning the dial, but allowing for long pauses on the dead spaces, as I moved from one distant broadcast to another. At times, I think I was more interested in the sounds produced by the odd interference and signal modulation than the broadcasts themselves. I would often drift to sleep listening to the ghost like voices buried beneath layers of slow and undulating static. At that age, I didn’t think much about what attracted me to the noise. I just enjoyed its sometimes violent yet mysterious and relaxing qualities. Looking back on those late night listening sessions in the early 80′s, I’ve come to realize the impact they had on my own development as a sound artist and electronic musician. The seeds for my awareness of the radio as an expressive medium were probably planted during this years. Of course, I was totally unaware that artists like Neuhaus, Stockhausen, Vostell, Cage and others had already begun exploring the possibilities of the radio as an art form decades earlier.

With this in mind, two years ago I began to include live scanner feeds in my concerts and performances. Unlike shortwave radio, scanners pull from air traffic, police, ham and other types of local broadcasts within just a few miles of the listener. The idea of incorporating live, local transmissions into the performance as a sonic fingerprint of the local geography was appealing to me. I saw it as an aural snapshot of that very moment or even an invisible, stringed instrument of sorts.

Recently, I was in my car listening to the SPK debut album Information Overload Unit from 1981. About halfway through the albums opening track Emanation Machine R. Gie 1916, I became aware of how much it sounded like some of the textures and modulating frequencies I would listen on the shortwave for hours as a kid. I began to wonder if a musical performance of pure analog electronic “noise” was broadcast on the radio, how would a listener moving through the dial know what they were hearing was an actual broadcast? And if they did, how where they able to discern synthetic, controlled noise from pure generative noise? It is my hope that the whiteout series of performances brings the very essence of noise, music and even our own environmental sonic awareness into question."

The interview features David Skal- an expert on Halloween. Host Bryan Le Beau is joined by David Skal author of "Death Makes A Holiday." They will discuss the origins and myths of Halloween. And for our commentary Andrew Bacevich reflects on "Paltry War, Paltry Politics." Andrew Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University, where he also serves as director of the university's Center for International Relations. Alex Boese, curator of the Museum of Hoaxes, joins us to recount a hoax that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century in the Nevada Territory. "Talking History" is a radio show distributed by the Pacifica Network.

Tune into this special two-hour election edition of Jason Candler's "in so many words," which focuses on the month before and after the general election of 2008. in so many words is an 18 ½ hour time capsule of news radio, composed entirely of unedited sound bites, devoid of any newscasters, commentators, editorials or analysts (and is commercial free!). It sequentially covers the time period of the last Presidential Election, and the first hundred days of the Obama Presidency (May 12, 2008 to May 12, 2009). Described as "a cocktail for social awareness and self evaluation", in so many words unfolds a mind-opening non sequitur narrative that informs you about the city, country, and world we live in, the scope of news reporting, the connections seemingly different stories have with each other, and how you relate to this reality. The longer you listen, the more the puzzle pieces fall into place.

An eight hour excerpt of in so many words was exhibited at Figment NYC on Governor’s Island on June 9-10, 2012 (figmentproject.org). There, listeners were able to draw their reactions to the audio in large sketchbooks. A different eight hour excerpt was exhibited at Figment Boston July 28-29, 2012. Excerpts of the 18 ½ hour program are posted monthly on Jason Candler's website here.

Tracklist for Vital Weekly 858, a weekly experimental new music show, formerly by folks behind Staalplaat.:
0000 Tune
0014 Piotr Kolekci & Molok Mun - Rosemary
0313 Taylor Deupree - Shutter
0621Legion - Colossus0923
0927 Minoy & PBK - In Shadow
1227 Steven Vinkenoog - Downstrokes
1527 Hatzatz - Daydream
1847 Petit & Robinson - Dinner Done
2105 Ilia Belorukov - Nudoksa
2505 (The) Solar Plexus - Gutterbeat
2752 Adega Ensemble - Third Session
3051 Holzkopf - W Botfly
3355 Tune

Part one of radio play with voices of Brian Dewan, Christine Entwisle, John Hegley, and Sir Gideon Vein. Plus vintage radio ads, including sexist coffee ads from the 1950s, and a variety of ads from KBOA Kennett, MO from the 1940s and 1950s.

Live from the Catskill Community Center. Host Matt Bua will be joined by Nan-Suli-Wah, the Catskilll resident that dreams of the "What Makes you Happy" radio show. They'll be chatting and playing gospel and uplifting hits for your weekend wake-ip. Also weather radio, solar radio, and more. Feel free to call in 518-291-WGXC. Tweet song requests @WGXC.

This edition of "framework:ephemera" features selections by Ernst Karel, including works by Peter Cusack, Gilles Aubry, John Arndt, Jed Speare, Jonty Semper, Aaron Dilloway, United States of Belt, and Walter Ruttmann. For more information see http://ek.klingt.org.

Recordings of sound works from the exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, March 22-June 10, 2001. Works by Jim O'Rourke, Marina Rosenfeld, Andrea Parkins, Pamela Z., Elliot Sharp, Gregory Whitehead, Ikue Mori, Brian Conley, and Brandon LaBelle are included.

Frédéric Acquaviva is an experimental, self taught and independent french composer born in 1967 and living in Berlin, working mainly on voice, langage, sound as idea in the form of live spatialised concerts, or sound installations, chronopolyphonic installations…., records or editions, since 1990.

He has published numerous CDs with Al Dante or Casus Belli, been programmed in Museums (such as Weserburg Museum in Bremen, Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Moderna Museet in Stockholm) or La Fenice in Venezia, art galleries (such as Peccolo Gallery in Livorno, Lara Vincy, Incognito and Archives in Paris, Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich) or underground venues (such as Les Voûtes and Le Donjon de Maîtress Cindy in Paris, The Rialto Mercato at Venezia, the Groix Island, the Hoxton Lounge and Kitchen in London, Vladicin Han Bridge, Serbia, Brio in New-York or in Iwana, Kenya).

He worked with major poets or artists such as Pierre Guyotat, Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaître, Henri Chopin, Jean-Luc Parant, Maria Faustino, FJ Ossang, Marcel Hanoun and is currently working on several projects with english mezzo-soprano Loré Lixenberg.

Acquaviva is also known for having curated the first international major exhibition on the work of Gil Wolman at MACBA, Barcelona (2010-2011). He is an expert on sound poetry and Lettrisme, has realised the 3 and only historical lettrists Symphonies by Isou, Lemaître and Pomerand and in addition to his curatorial activities (exhibitions, films, editions, lectures, radiophonies) is also working on an ambitious Archives project in this field.

"Under the Radar" concert with Frédéric Acquaviva and Lore Lixenberg. Live broadcast from Deep Listening Space, Kingston NY. An intimate and cozy evening with composer Frederic Acquaviva and mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg. Hosted by Pauline Oliveros. Live streaming broadcast at www.deeplistening.org. Presented in collaboration with free103point9. Part of Ione's 17th Annual Dream Festival.

Frédéric Acquaviva will also be a guest in person at Wave Farm in Acra on the "Saturday Afternoon Show" from 4-6 p.m., Sat., Dec. 1 on WGXC 90.7-FM and free103point9 Online Radio.

Track playlist for "Vital Weekly" 859:
0014 Ulrich Troyer - Song For Heide
0320 Bernard Falaise - Nuire
0612 Grzegorz Bojanek - Remaining Motionless
0912 BioMechanica - BM01-05
1216 Adam Beckley - Avner
1516 Tiziano Milani - Dark, Dark My Light
1822 Muennich & Esposito & Jupitter-Larsen - The Wraiths Of Flying A
2125 Star Turbine - Life Forms
2432 Ypotryll - A Blue Mantle Under The Stars
2735 Threha Sektori - Desproarehn
3037 The Infant Cycle - Pool Skin
3335 Alexandre St.Onge
3632 An Moku - Stockwerk
3934 Cremaster & Angharad Davies - Bruine
4238 Piano Interrupted - Hedi

Dziga Vertov's (1896-1954) "Enthusiasm! The Dombass Symphony (1930)." Original soundtrack excerpts, recorded in 1929-30, 26'30". Written and directed (composed): Dziga Vertov; Sound: P. Shtro; Sound-Recording Station: Timartsev, Chibisov, Khariyonov & Molchanov; Recorded: Shorin System; Additional Music: Donbassa March by Timofeyev; Produced: Ukrainfilm Kiev Film Studio, 1930.Extracts taken from the DVD Entuziazm (Sinfonia Donbassa), Osterreichisches Filmmuseum 2005 via Ubuweb. "Enthusiasm! The Dombass Symphony" (1930) is possibly Dziga Vertov's most revolutionary achievement: a symphony of abstract industrial noise for which a specially designed giant mobile recording system was constructed (it weighed over a ton) in order to capture the din of mines, furnaces and factories. For Vertov, the introduction of sound film didn't mean talkies, but the opportunity to collage, montage and splice together constructions of pure environmental noise. Denis Arkadievitch Kaufman (b. Bialyskov, Poland 1986 - d. Moscow 1954) adopted the name Dziga Vertov as an adolescent; a futurist pseudonym loosely translated as "spinning top". He studied piano, violin and psychoneurology, at the same time writing poetry and recording natural sounds with a phonograph for his Laboratory of Hearing (1916). By 1918, he had begun to work w ith cinema and - with his future wife Elisaveta Svilova - created the group Kinoks [Kino-Eye]. Concentrating on documentary films, they championed "what the eye doesn't see" . Between 1925 and 1929, he developed the idea of Radio-Pravda [Radio-Truth] and Radio-Ear (from "I hear").