Wave Farm is delighted to announce that Iru Ekpunobi will serve as a 2023 Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow. During their engagement, Ekpunobi will make additions to the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource, and to the syndicated weekly radio show "The Radio Art Hour." Ekpunobi will also conduct workshops and listening sessions with WGXC programmers and interested members of the public, and create an original radio artwork for broadcast.

Iru Ekpunobi is a deep listener, DJ, and audiofuturist. A recent graduate of New York University, Ekpunobi began their journey in FM radio as an DJ and show host at WNYU 89.1-FM, where they synthesized Black musicology, revolutionary history, and futurist transmission on a weekly, 90-minute broadcast. Culminating in their undergraduate thesis, Ekpunobi launched Third Space Radio, a digital media project and community radio station exploring sonic transmission as a ‘third place’ where community, education, and love can persist.

Currently, Ekpunobi is re-establishing their identity independent of academic institutions, researching percussion as communication throughout the Black sonic diaspora and working as a podcast producer. Connection welcomed at iruekpunobi.com, and @iruirl on instagram.

Engagement Periods: September - November 2023 or December 2023 - February 2024
Stipend: $5,000
Location: Remote (w/ one to two visits to Wave Farm in Acra, NY) *
Application Deadline: June 30, 2023
Notification: July 2023

Wave Farm is delighted to announce a fifth year of the Radio Art Fellowship. In fall 2023 and winter 2024 Wave Farm will host two separate three-month fellowships. This is a part-time engagement for a radio researcher and artist living and working in the United States. Each Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow will work closely with Wave Farm’s Executive Director, Galen Joseph-Hunter, and Artistic Director, Tom Roe. The Fellows will also have the opportunity to work with Mentors: Anna Friz, Joan Schuman, Neil Verma, and Gregory Whitehead.

Each Fellowship will combine remote work with one on-site research visit and one on-site live broadcast (should additional travel be possible) to Wave Farm’s research library and radio studios. Located in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, Wave Farm is a nonprofit arts organization driven by experimentation with broadcast media and the airwaves. A pioneer of the Transmission Arts genre, Wave Farm programs provide access to transmission technologies and support artists and organizations that engage with media as an art form. Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears is a full-power, creative community radio station in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley. The WGXC program schedule features original content by over one-hundred volunteer programmers, and commits significant daytime listening hours to radio art and experimental sound.

A definition of Radio Art: Radio artists explore broadcast radio space through a richly polyphonous mix of practices, including poetic resuscitations of conventional radio drama, documentary, interview and news formats; found and field sound compositions reframed by broadcast; performative inhabitations/embodiments of radio’s inherent qualities, such as entropy, anonymity and interference; playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers, and the potential feedback loops between hosts and layers of audience, from in-studio to listeners at home to callers-in; use of radio space to bridge widely dispersed voices (be they living or dead), subjects, environments and communities, or to migrate through them in ways that would not be possible in real time and space; electroacoustic compositions, conceived of for transmission with sounds primarily derived from gathering, generating and remixing radiophonic sources. Note: Wave Farm continues to expand this definition of radio art through engagement with contemporary practices including those revealed by Wave Farm Artists-in-residence, and this Radio Art Fellowship program.

Duties and Responsibilities:

Month 1: Radio Art Listening, Research, and Archive Contributions

The first month of the fellowship is focused on additions to the Wave Farm Radio Art Archive. (See wavefarm.org/radio/archive) The archive is an online resource and a broadcast series on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM. It 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 pirate transmission. During their first month, the fellow will have the opportunity for focused and supported research in order to identify five to ten additions to the archive. The Fellow will prepare audio with introductions and back announcements for broadcast, as well as written work descriptions, and artist biographies. Mentors will be available for consultation, leads, and feedback.

Month 2: Community Engagement

The fellow will design and lead a workshop (or listening session) with WGXC programmers and interested members of the public. Recent Fellowship community engagement examples include: The Subliminal World: Intuitive, Stochastic, and Supernatural Sound-making with Tyler Maxin, delay, relay, feedback, loop: an Audio Exchange Network Workshop with José Alejandro Rivera, and Radio Deprogramming with Andy Stuhl.

Month 3: Radio Art Creation

The Fellow will create their own original radio artwork(s) for broadcast. Works will be included in Wave Farm's syndicated weekly program "The Radio Art Hour" which is syndicated nationally, as well as possibly included in Wave Farm's biannually contribution to the Radia network (see radia.fm).

Fellowship Benchmarks:

• Biweekly Meetings: with Wave Farm staff.
• Monthly Check-ins with Mentors for feedback on archive additions and the Fellow’s original radio artworks.
• Culminating Public Program: a live radio broadcast featuring the Fellow and mentors in conversation reflecting on works created and archive selections.

2023 Application

Eligibility: The Radio Art Fellowship program opportunity is open to individuals whose primary residence is in the United States. (Note: applications from collaborative teams are not eligible.) The Fellowship stipend will appear as “Other Income” on 1099s issued in conjunction with tax years 2022 and 2023, depending on the dates of engagement. Women, gender non-conforming people, and people of color are encouraged to apply.

Wave Farm’s Radio Art Fellowship is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Greene County Legislature through the County Initiative Program, administered in Greene County by CREATE.

In this three-part workshop, Saturdays, 4 - 6 p.m. May 20, May 27, June 4 (via Zoom), participants will engage with the widening spectrum of self-broadcasting techniques and examples in the time of podcasts and social audio technology. Participants will explore the changing definition of radio, the parties invested in its creation and consumption, and scheme up a plan to stage a radio intervention.

Drawing on the history of pirate and internet radio, participants will have the opportunity to learn resources and processes for DIY-broadcasting. Group members will also contribute to a shared ‘sample-bank’, from which the group can borrow in the creation of radio segments that will be broadcast in the final session.

This workshop, hosted by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow Iru Ekpunobi, will be collaborative and modular, and designed to take form around the experiences and interests of participants.

No academic, radio or podcast experience required. Email info@wavefarm.org to register.

Wave Farm's Art Park is now open. Drop-in unannounced for guided tours on Saturdays, or book a tour in advance on other days.

Wave Farm's 29-acre campus in Acra, NY is home to our public Art Park featuring 13 installations, the Study Center including a Research Library, the WGXC 90.7-FM Acra broadcast studio, and accommodations for Wave Farm's international artist Residency Program. Visitors to Wave Farm receive a guided tour of our campus. Admission is free, and tours typically last 60-90 minutes.

The Wave Farm campus is open June 1 – October 31
Monday-Thursday: Open by appointment. Email info@wavefarm.org to schedule your visit
Friday: Open by appointment from noon to 6 p.m. Book your guided visit here
Saturday: Open for drop-in visits anytime noon to 6 p.m.
Sunday: Open by appointment from noon to 6 p.m. Book your guided visit here
To schedule a research visit to our Study Center Library, email info@wavefarm.org.

Tunnel and the Radio Sky is a video and sound work of speculative fiction, filmed in Brooklyn, Newfoundland, Colorado, California, and Arizona, which begins with a hole dug in a Brooklyn backyard. This hole is a tunnel, connecting desert, rocky coast, and mountains; and a portal, connecting them by atmospheric radio signals. The skies are created by typing passages from a ham radio manual info an Artificial Intelligence bot and animating the resulting images. To accompany the video, McDonald will generate sound from intercepted ham radio broadcasts, EVP recordings, and field recording in the wilderness.

Jillian McDonald is a Canadian artist in Brooklyn and Troy, NY. Exhibitions and performances have taken place at Undercurrent and FiveMyles in Brooklyn, The Art Gallery of Regina in Saskatchewan, The Esker Foundation in Calgary, AxeNéo7 in Québec and Lilith Performance Studio in Malmö, Sweden. A CBC IDEAS documentary profiles her videos, which were also reviewed in The New York Times and Canadian Art. Critical discussion appears in The Transatlantic Zombie by Sarah Lauro and Deconstructing Brad Pitt, edited by Christopher Schaberg and Robert Bennett. Awards include grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts and The Canada Council for the Arts, and residencies include The Headlands Center for the Arts in California, the Glenfiddich Canadian Art Prize in Scotland, and The Arctic Circle Residency in Svalbard. Jillian McDonald acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Surrounded by Colors We Could No Longer See will explore the sounds of electromagnetic waves and radio frequencies emitted by natural forces and our built environment, such as ultraviolet light, infrared light, very low frequencies, visible spectrum light, lightning phenomena, etc. At Wave Farm, Meza will engage with “colors” of sound, noise, and waves in order to compose new experimental sound works for installation and transmission.

Abinadi Meza is a Latinx-Indigenous artist and filmmaker living in the occupied ancestral territory of the Tonkawa, Lipan-Apache, Karankawa, Comanche, and Coahuiltecan people. Meza studied art, creative writing, and architecture; he primarily makes experimental films, sound works, and installations, often using transitory or precarious materials - found footage, hand-painted film, field recordings, radio waves, glass, found materials, and objects. His sound works have been presented at Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Deep Wireless Festival of Radio & Transmission Art, Toronto; Helicotrema Festival, Venice; Lisbon Architecture Triennale; MAXXI, Rome; Radio Amnion, London; Radio Kinesonus, Tokyo; Radiophrenia, Glasgow; Radius FM, Chicago; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis among other places. Meza teaches in the Interdisciplinary Practices & Emerging Forms MFA program in the School of Art at the University of Houston.

Telephone Hills irecords and documents radio communications and infrastructures of the oil industry in California, especially on Ohlone, Chumash, and Yokuts land, and remixes this documentation into new visual and aural transmissions that grapple with a future alongside climate change. As international environmental criminals and primary drivers of anthropogenic climate change, what the industry “says” across the radio waves is of great concern for bearing witness to the environmental and climate havoc they have wrought. Crucially, this work is focused on hearing from oil workers – the people risking their lives and their health out in the field while corporate profits pile up. The radio transmissions of these workers are important as another kind of witnessing and documentation – listening to the voices of the people who are needed for the dismantling of the industry and its infrastructure and for a just transition away from fossil fuels. Their voices blend with Macquarie’s own techno-genealogy into a poetic vision of energy transition on a warming planet.

Charlie Macquarie is an artist, archivist, and radio amateur (KN6HLC) who works to further smudge the already blurred lines between past and future, frequently using the landscape and built environment as a direction-finding technology for this work. He makes cultural inquiries into the historical toxins and byproducts of extractive capital through images, publications, collections of documents and sounds, and transmissions that dig into the contact zone between past and present, often engaging his family’s history as they go along. He writes scene reports, syllabi, poems, environmental impact statements, computer code, and technical documentation that further these inquiries. His work – especially the Library of Approximate Location, a series of site-specific digital and physical libraries – has been installed at missile launch facilities, cold-water geysers, bombing ranges, strip clubs, abandoned copper mines, miscellaneous holes, farms, tufa towers, rock and mineral shows, and a few art museums.

WGXC's Summer 2023 Online Pledge Drive will take place from Mon., Jul. 10 through Fri., Jul 21, 2023. Join us as we continue to build a base of monthly sustaining donors. Growing a community of sustaining supporters is vital to the station’s longevity.

To make a recurring donation, or to make a one-time gift, visit: wgxc.org/donate or call 518-697-7400 and pledge your support of Creative Community Radio for Open Ears.