Light Phone is an experiment in hyper-local communication. Inspired by the ‘Astro Phone’ or ‘Light Telephone’, devices developed in the 1960s that transmit sound via modulated infrared light, documented in Lori Emerson's Radical Technology Sourcebook (2025), the project repurposes disused remote controls into short-range communication devices. Interested in the distinctive grain of infrared transmission, Light Phone will create a network of low-power, DIY, line-of-sight telephones that future Wave Farm residents can use to communicate across the landscape.

During her residency, Hannah will document these transmission experiments on 16mm infrared film, exploring how analogue film might render otherwise invisible wireless signals perceptible - perhaps even allowing a telephone call to be seen as well as heard. The resulting short experimental film will capture the textures of light, transmission and landscape, hand-developed in plant-based chemistry made from foraged Wave Farm vegetation.

Hannah Kemp-Welch is a sound artist with a social practice. Since gaining her amateur radio license in 2019, she has focused on developing inclusive pedagogies and technologies for electromagnetic listening. She constructs DIY antennas to tune into natural radio, documented in the BBC Radio 4 feature All Under One Magnetosphere (2025), produced with Oliver Sanders. She recently co-curated the symposium Electromagnetic Fields: Artistic Research and Radio Waves. Her edited collection Listening Glossary will be published by Silver Press in October 2026. Hannah is an Associate Lecturer for MA Sound Arts at London College of Communication, a PhD student with Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP), and a member of feminist radio art group Shortwave Collective.

Elisa Harkins (Cherokee, Muscogee) is an artist, singer, electronic music composer, and curator whose work is concerned with the body, language revitalization, and Indigenous music. From 2020 to 2024, she created and hosted Mvhayv (Teacher) Radio on 99.1 WQRT in Indianapolis, Indiana, an all-Indigenous radio program that featured Indigenous musicians across genres, from experimental sound artists and language keepers to powwow groups and black metal artists.

Harkins has exhibited and performed at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Getty, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, MoMA, Spoleto Festival USA, and REDCAT. She is a recipient of a Creative Capital Award, and her work has been commissioned and performed by the Kronos Quartet as part of the Three Bones program at Carnegie Hall.

In addition to her artistic practice, Harkins presents lectures, artist talks, and workshops throughout the United States and Canada on Indigenous music, language revitalization, and contemporary art. Harkins is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and of Cherokee descent and lives and works on the Muscogee Reservation in Oklahoma.

In this workshop, we will use fabric, foam, and electronics to create sounding sound absorbers. These soft objects emit & absorb the sounds of their environment and can be used as cozy sounding pillows. Each participant will make their own sounding sound absorber with fabric and sound recordings of their choosing.

In 2023, workshop facilitator Cal Fish began covering discarded foam with a patchwork of used towels, clippings from a found children’s book about extreme weather, and embroidery. These objects offered sound absorption and diffusion inside installations that chronicled stories of flooding through interviews and field recordings.

In 2025 Fish introduced speakers salvaged from broken TVs, rechargeable batteries, small circuits, and sound into these objects. They have been used in installations as listening tools for immersion in archives that memorialize place, people, and ecosystems.

Participants are invited to bring:

This workshop will be held in person at the WGXC Catskill Studio from 12 - 4 p.m. on Saturday, October 10.

Workshop registration fee: $25
Materials fee: $35
Registration link coming soon

ABOUT CAL FISH
Cal Fish is a transdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn NY sharing immersive art environments of collaboration, critical play, and interactive storytelling. They combine sound sculpture, upcycled textile, song, interactive art gatherings, and archive building to share performances, installations, and workshop activities. Tools including electromagnetic fields, FM transmission, flute, capacitive instruments, and soft sculpture are used to remix time and space with sound. Cal puts oral histories, interviews, and field recordings in sculptural interactive systems like buckets and pillows and offers them in public space. Movement, sound, and memory are joined in new ways to help materialize new storytelling, community archive building, and place making.

Cal is from Sea Cliff NY, lived in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, and graduated Bard college in 2018. They have since worked as a sound designer and performer with Kyle Marshal Choreography, ran The Living Gallery, and shared extensive art and music projects and performances at venues including Light & Sound Design, Chaos Computer, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, BAM, Center for Performance Research, The Shed, The Kingsland Wildflowers Garden, Bryant Park. In recent years, Cal has shared work focused on the communities and ecologies around Newtown Creek, collecting and sharing sounds of ecological devastation & remediation, familial memory, and life in public installations. calfish.land

Qiujiang Levi Lu 卢秋江 is an experimental musician, media artist, and composer whose work explores the body as a site of sonic transformation. Through custom electroacoustic instruments, feedback systems, and cyborg-like bodily augmentations, Lu creates performances and installations that merge ritual, noise, intimacy, and embodied technology. Drawing from Chinese lineages while engaging queerness, spirituality, and body dysmorphia, Lu’s practice invites audiences into physical and unstable modes of listening. Their work has been presented internationally at MATA Festival, send + receive, High Zero, IRCAM Forum, Inkonst, Zagreb Music Academy, and Temple DongJingYuan, with commissions and support from TAK Ensemble, Popebama, Luke Helker, NEW INC, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, ISSUE Project Room, Harvestworks, The New School, and ElektronmusikStudion Stockholm. Lu is a lecturer in music at the University of Pennsylvania and holds degrees from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University and Stony Brook University.