As Wave Farm’s Community Engagement Radio Art Fellow, Celeste Oram will conduct the workshop TERRA RADIA: the (De-)Territorialization of the Radio Spectrum. Presented in three parts, the workshop gathers radio enthusiasts to reflect on the territorialization of the electromagnetic spectrum: that is, the conceptual, legal, political, scientific, and aesthetic frames whereby radio is described as if it were space or territory. The workshop will pose and discuss questions including: But how apt are those analogies? What do they elide or misrepresent about radio properties and technology? What political mechanisms do they naturalize? By what other conceptual means might we navigate and manage electromagnetic properties?

And what is at stake in these reflections? Well, the spectrum is a proving ground for some of the most urgent political re-calibrations of our time: the rights and privileges of corporate bodies; the future of the nation-state; Indigenous sovereignty and decolonial governance; overlapping sovereignties within shared territorial environments.

Presented in a hybrid format, an introductory experimental lecture-recital will be followed by collaborative Zoom sessions open to an international audience of radionauts and anyone who wants to learn about the political underpinnings of how we apprehend natural phenomena.

Celeste Oram is a composer with equal investments in radiophonic and transmission art, as well as live musical performance in the experimental and classical realms. Oram’s work explores the histories and micro-cultures of musical practice itself, as well as its socio-political entanglements. Her radiophonic pieces employ radio technologies (sometimes DIY) as a musical instrument in the pursuit of richly contrapuntal sonic textures. Often Oram’s work engages with the histories and cultures of both public and amateur radio, and their entwined development with colonialism and nation-building—especially in her home country Aotearoa New Zealand. Recent compositions for live performance span instrumental and vocal concert music, polyphonic songs, music for period Baroque instruments, experimental music-theatre, and orchestral music for dance-theater. Much of Oram’s musical language is rooted in a studied investment in early music, revivifying historical musical languages via experimental approaches.

Three Transmissions from a Carceral State is a live performance and radio broadcast bringing together three sound archives connected to the history of imprisonment in Upstate New York. The first set of recordings derives from a practice of listening to the electromagnetic and acoustic environments of active and decommissioned prisons in Wave Farm’s vicinity. The second set draws on Wave Farm’s archive of radio programs highlighting the analysis of imprisoned people, their families, and communities. Finally, a third set of recordings engage with current abolitionist organizing in Upstate New York. The three sound archives will be mixed in real time to evoke the prison as a physical structure and a discursive site. Listening to its past, present, and future, the project seeks to contribute to the abolitionist imagining of imprisonment’s afterlife.

Hans Kuzmich is a Belarusian interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose work attends to gender as an interface between subjects and the state with the desire to unsettle their regulatory logics. Working from a trans, diasporic position, Kuzmich creates moving image and sound installations that foreground phenomena on the edges of visibility and audibility, such as infrared light and electromagnetic fields. Kuzmich is currently completing a hybrid doctoral dissertation in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, a BFA from the Cooper Union, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. Kuzmich has been awarded artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Studios at MASS MoCA, and SOMA Summer. His work has been exhibited at Art in General, the Kitchen, the 8th Floor, Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, Performance Project at University Settlement, Temporary Agency, and Not An Alternative/No-Space (New York, NY); Underground Museum, New Wight Gallery, and Pacific Design Center (Los Angeles, CA); AS220 (Providence, RI); Beirut (Cairo, Egypt); and SOMA (Mexico City), among other venues. Kuzmich’s writing has appeared in journals (Theory, Culture & Society, Art Journal, and Native Strategies) and exhibition catalogs (Imagine Freedom: Art Works for Abolition, New Wight Biennial: Compassion Fatigue, and Sharon Hayes: There’s So Much I Want to Say to You).