Faraday Dream is a radio-based interactive sound installation that makes tangible the hidden but ever-present field of electromagnetism around us. It sonifies the relationship between humans and electromagnetism via custom-built partial Faraday cage radio sculptures that block radio waves unless a human (or other entity) is nearby. It also makes audible the beating between adjacent radio bands, painting an aural image of the sea of electromagnetism in which we forever swim.

Lathrop Duo consists of Dayshon Mathis (Jacksonville, FL) and Mike Mulshine (Queensbury, NY). Mathis is a theoretical physicist studying quantum gravity and black holes. Mulshine is a musician and sound artist who creates interactive intermedia and explores new ways to make musical experiences more engaging. The pair met when they became roommates by chance and since then have reflected on the world's mundane and complex problems via many late night conversations. They understand electromagnetism and waves from different angles (Mathis from physics, Mulshine from music) and have found that this unique combination yields a lot of interesting interdisciplinary insights. They are excited to explore and demonstrate this intersection at Wave Farm.

Join Rethinking Residencies in celebrating the publication of Bringing Worlds Together: A Rethinking Residencies Reader. Founded in 2014, Rethinking Residencies is a network of New York–based artist and curator residency programs. The group generates knowledge and resources, anchored together in cooperation and collaboration. Bringing Worlds Together: A Rethinking Residencies Reader is the first anthology on art residencies published in the United States. It is a companion to the Rethinking Residencies Symposium, which invited artists, curators, scholars, and residency organizations to address residency programs as critical sites of research and production within the visual arts. The eleven essays and three conversations in Bringing Worlds Together reflect on art residencies at present—at a time when residencies play a critical role in art’s ecosystem. They address a cross-section of ideas about residency programs, bound together by a deep concern for the care and ethics that go into shaping residency programs and hosting artists and curators.

Books will be available for purchase at the Launch Event, and can be pre-ordered here.

Commissioning Editor: Rethinking Residencies. Editors: Kari Conte and Susan Hapgood. Authors: Nova Benway, Eve Biddle, Jamie Blosser, Tania Candiani, Viviana Checchia, Kari Conte, Christina Daniels, Robin Everett, Dylan Gauthier, Susan Hapgood, Galen Joseph-Hunter, Jeffrey Kasper, Irmeli Kokko, Catherine Lee, Eileen Jeng Lynch, Sally Mizrachi, Howardena Pindell, Sanna Ritvanen, Nat Roe, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Nicholas Weist. Graphic Design: Esen Karol. Size: 8 ½ x 5 ½ inches. Page Count: 128. Publication Date: August 13, 2023. Edition Number: 1st edition. ISBN: 978-1-7320876-3-7. Price: 25 USD Paperback and Free Digital Version

Rethinking Residencies collaborating organizations represent a wide range of models, scales and approaches and include: Abrons Art Center, Eyebeam, Fire Island Artist Residency, Flux Factory, International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), The Laundromat Project, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), Queens Museum, Pioneer Works, Recess, Shandaken Projects, EFA Project Space’s SHIFT Residency, Triangle, Wave Farm, and Wave Hill.

Quiet, and Sometimes Silent is a participatory experience that explores proximity, intimacy, and subtle communication. Consisting of two soft head pieces equipped with flapping and buzzing mechanisms and a fabric speaker, the experience asks one participant at a time to put on the device, as does the He, from a certain distance away. The wearable pieces talk to each other through LoRa, a wireless protocol that enables small data-packet transmissions using a free, hobbyist radio frequency. As the participants approach each other, lightly touch their own head piece in different ways, the other person's piece will morph into different shapes – flapping, shrinking, producing buzzing sensations and movements. Together, two people create a unique soundscape for each other to experience while turning themselves into mutating sculptures, assisting them to communicate with nonverbal subtlety. This project draws correlation between protocols outside of heavily surveilled mass superstructures and the state of acquainted human relationships, exploring the idea that small movements and sporadic data exchange can resemble our loose social connections with the people around us.

Viola He is a Shanghai-born, Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural organizer. Their creative practices engage with DIY electronics, programming, dance/movements, and various time-based media, exploring pathways towards alternative systems, interfaces, and infrastructures. They create immersive experiences, installations, and improvisational performances using algorithmic approaches to enhance, alternate, and obfuscate audio-visual assets, investigating the contradictions of analog aesthetics and digital tools. He often dreams about computational humor, collective learning, and infiltrating digital spaces with physical bodies as tools for intervention.

Wave Farm is delighted to announce that Lia Kohl will serve as Wave Farm's Radio Art Fellow September - November 2023. During her engagement, Kohl will make additions to the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive online resource and to the syndicated weekly radio show "The Radio Art Hour." Kohl will also conduct workshops and listening sessions with WGXC programmers and interested members of the public, and create original radio artworks for broadcast.

Lia Kohl is a composer, cellist, and sound artist based in Chicago. Her wide-ranging practice includes solo composition and performance, installation, improvisation, and collaboration. Kohl tours nationally and internationally, working in theater, jazz, rock, and experimental contexts. Her work centers curiosity and patience, an exploration of the mundane and profound possibilities of sound.

The radio-frequency spectrum for human cellular phone communication has increased in frequency as we have increased the speed and capacity of information between communication points. There has been little discussion about the impact this increased frequency–and the much smaller wavelengths it travels in–might have on beyond-human species who live alongside us and along transmission pathways. Refuge System for Ants contemplates the effects wavelengths above 5 Ghz might have on ants, whose small body size makes them more susceptible to impacts of absorption of these frequencies. Many species of ants communicate acoustically, and can sense vibration through specialized organs on their legs. Humans are largely unaware of these cryptic sounds that are beyond the limits of human hearing. How does our ease of communication interact with their own communication and quality of life? Schonberg will install prototypes for “EMF refuge systems” that attempt to block cellular radio frequencies in the vicinity of ant nests at Wave Farm, giving the ants refuge from its effects at their sites of congregation, reproduction and shelter. At these sites, humans will be prompted to listen to the sounds of ants amplified through speakers, bringing our attention to insect agency and needs.

Lisa Schonberg is a composer and percussionist creating sound works based on ecological research. Informed by her background in entomology, Schonberg is interested in how listening to cryptic sound can reveal and challenge assumptions about insects and other overlooked soundmakers. She has been collaborating with Brazilian entomologists on ATTA (Amplifying the Tropical Ants), a project investigating ant bioacoustics in the Amazon. Her other recent work includes investigations of old-growth forests in Oregon, endangered Hawaiian Hylaeus bees, mushrooms, and plastics. Schonberg's compositions are performed by percussion ensembles Secret Drum Band, Antenna, & UAU, and presented as solo performance and installation. She is the author of Text Scores for Getting to Know the Invertebrates, The Hylaeus Project, and the The DIY Guide to Drums, and has presented work or performed at FILE Festival (BR), the Pompidou, the Brooklyn Museum, Bosque da Ciencia (BR), the American Museum of Natural History, and Museo Reina Sofia (SP). Schonberg has developed her work through residencies at Labverde, the Banff Centre, Pioneerworks, HJ Andrews Experimental Station, and Signal Fire.

Susie Ibarra’s Floating Gardens are sonic sculptures and sonic habitats inspired by biodiversity on earth. The work is a reflection on the extraordinary statistic that approximately 2.5 percent of the earth’s land has intact biodiverse habitats that support more than half the world’s plant species and just under half of the bird, mammal, and reptiles species as endemics, not found anywhere else. Inspired by this, Floating Gardens are sounding sculptures that are light, have movement, and resonate gently, offering an entry into a sensory experience that connects with the habitats. The project is also inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh’s recent writing about Deep Ecology in which he states “True Love Heals.” Floating Gardens are reflections of nature’s beauty in visual sculpture and sonic transmission, and also serve with functions to support natural environments. In-residence at Wave Farm, Ibarra will research and develop the first edition of her Floating Gardens: a Tamayuk Philippine conch shell made of gong metals. Beneath the flowing sound sculpture, sensors will measure plant behavior and emissions in Wave Farm’s second pond, which will be transmitted to the percussive elements of the sculpture. Above the water's surface, using SDR (software-defined radio), the sculpture will receive signals live from the Philippines further activating the Tamayuk sonically.

Susie Ibarra is a Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her interdisciplinary practice spans formats, including performance, mobile sound-mapping applications, installations, recording, and documentary. She is the founder of Susie Ibarra Studio and Sound,Health Habitat, a cultural studio and journal that focuses on sharing and supporting listening health practices, global soundwalks, acoustic ecology focused on climate and eco-friendly and sustainable global music practices. She created Drum Labs: Rhythm in Nature, a course and book through her studio that demonstrates her six part analysis of rhythms in nature. Ibarra is passionate about supporting fresh water sources, and cultural and environmental preservation for next generations.

WGXC's Fall 2023 Pledge Drive will take place from Wed., Oct. 4, through Fri., Oct. 13, 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. Check back for details on special events to take place during the drive.

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.

Tree Tapping for VLF is an audio installation and performance system featuring Very Low Frequency (VLF) radio signals, collected via the use of trees as antennas. A selection of trees located at Wave Farm will be “tapped” as sources of VLF signals for sonification and audio mixing instead of sap for syrup production. Signals will be transduced into audio as well as control voltage inputs used to shape sounds generated by radiophonic synthesizers including the Theremin. This will allow for the alteration of audio effects or textures as well as the performance of improvised duets or concertos with the VLF flows being received by the more-than-human participants. Chapman anticipates that the strongest signals will be sources of "hum" from the local power and telecommunications grid but will also strive to tune into “spherics,” or VLF activity caused by lightning in distant parts of the world. Such encounters underscore the profound yet inaudible forms of noise that humans generate. Trees manifest this reality in their sap, in their veins. Selected audio outputs from the installation will be cut to polycarbonate disc in real-time using a portable lathe-cutting recorder–resulting in unique forms of sonic documentation that mimic the visual facets of rings in a tree stump.

Owen Chapman is a composer, DJ and professor in the department of Communication Studies at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). He writes about and produces sonic media, especially in musical contexts. His audio work involves live performance and electronic composition and has been featured internationally in video soundtracks, media workshops, site-specific installations as well as solo and group performances. Chapman’s scholarly research-creation projects have been funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQ-SC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Canada Council of the Arts. He is a turntablist and beat-maker, producing music that integrates samples from used records, field recordings, radio signals and other sources.