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 as Collaborator workshop explored the possibilities of radio as an instrument, a score, and a conversation partner in the creative process. In two-sessions, participants worked on improvisation and score-making with the radio, including both solo making and group collaboration. Starting with a series of deep listening exercises, participants then took a series of recordings of radio, exploring intuitive making, response improvisation, and “signal sweeps”. Participants brought aspects of their own practices to the workshop, in the form of instrumental music, poetry, and engineering, to name a few.

The sessions, conducted via zoom, offered the opportunity to share radio content from different parts of the country and the world, highlighting the site-specificity of radio and the possibilities of collaboration between places as well as people. Sharing and discussing recordings became a conduit for sharing listening space, hearing through new ears via the radio. Each participant’s unique relationship with time, place, and listening was manifested in their unique relationship to their radio collaborator.

The workshop culminated in a creative commons of participant’s recordings, available for all to ‘remix’. Kohl’s own remix was broadcast on Wave Farm’s The Radio Art Hour.

These recordings were made by Greg Cerveny, Eve Cavanaugh, Jack Thompson, Ginebra Raventós, Michelle Kaplan, Jillian McDonald, Eric Theise, Stevie Jones, Anton Pickard, Dawood Nadurath, Cotter Luppi, Ed Woodham, Bob Drake, Veronica Anne Salinas, Eve Madalengoita, Winslow, and Lia Kohl as part of The Radio as Collaborator workshop, facilitated by Lia Kohl in conjunction with her Wave Farm Radio Art Fellowship in Fall 2023.

Wave Farm is delighted to announce that Desiree Mwalimu-Banks will serve as Wave Farm's Radio Art Fellow December 2023 - February 2024. During her engagement, Mwalimu-Banks will make additions to the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive online resource and to the syndicated weekly radio show "The Radio Art Hour." Mwalimu-Banks will also conduct workshops and listening sessions with WGXC programmers and interested members of the public, and create original radio artworks for broadcast.

Desiree Mwalimu-Banks is a Zambian-born, East Coast-raised interdisciplinary artist and educator. Her work explores somatic relationships between indigenous identity, water ecologies, and apiary culture within the framework of the sacred feminine and the African diaspora. Her partners have included CCCADI, Movement Research, Naropa University, Stanford University, Wave Farm, among others. Her works have appeared in several magazines and her article, “Nectar of the Divine Feminine: The Ancient Bee Mothers of the Anahata Chakra,” was featured in the anthology, Harmony In Chakras. When not hunting leylines, labyrinths, or deep space objects, Desiree can be found making miracles on a budget in her kitchen. She lives in Harlem with her husband, sons, and Smith Corona Electric ‘76 typewriter.