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 (but not required) to bring:

Workshop registration fee: $25
Materials fee: $35
Click here to register!

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, lives 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

This program is made possible, in part, by the The Oliver S. and Jennie R. Donaldson Charitable Trust.

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.

In this workshop at the WGXC Catskill Studio, participants will assemble their own pocket sized Community Portal transmission instruments for ancestral play and communication, inspired by ghost boxes, electronic spirit communication, and water and listening-based knowledge practices across the artist Natan Diacon-Furtado’s own Quaker, Sephardic Jewish, West African, Native Brazilian, settler, arrivant, and Indigenous ancestries. Sounds and messages received through these instruments during the workshop will be recorded and broadcast on WGXC as a collaborative sound collage.

Participants will also learn about the pcb antenna designs that receive and transmit radio waves in most of the “smart” objects in our lives and use this new knowledge to design and make tarot and oracle inspired antennas for their own pocket portals.

The pocket portal instruments and the process for making oracle antennas has been designed in collaboration with Fun Stuff Design, an industrial design studio specialized in novel sustainable materials and sustainable product development. Participants will each receive a case designed by Fun Stuff Design and Natan Diacon-Furtado to protect their pocket portals on whatever journeys come next.

Workshop registration fee: $25
Materials fee: $45

Register here.

Natan Diacon-Furtado (all pronouns) is a collaborative artist and designer of visionary engineering projects that expand notions of ancestry and self through play. Trained as an anthropologist and architect, they are currently a doctoral candidate in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, USA. They have been the subject of two solo museum shows, at the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre and Indiana University’s Wiley House Museum, with additional exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Delft Architectural Biennial, and Buenos Aires Biennale of Architecture. In addition, their design work has been named one of the ‘World’s Greatest Places’ by TIME Magazine.

Julian Goldman is a designer and artist focused on the point at which novel technology and materials touch society. Dierdre Shea is an object designer with a background in ceramics, industrial design, novel materials, and the craft of manufacturing. She is interested in using her discipline to understand and develop meaningful, sustainable relationships between humans and products to reform and replace systems of mass production and material consumption.

This program is made possible, in part, by the The Oliver S. and Jennie R. Donaldson Charitable Trust.

WAVE FARM and WFMU and ARTxFM are teaming up to bring you a weekend focused on the creative and experimental nature of radio.

We invite fellow radio makers, station staff and volunteers, engineers, and enthusiasts to join us in Jersey City for performances, workshops, and conversations around experimental potentials of radio and the ways that creativity can serve our communities and listenership. FM, LPFM, and internet stations from across the East Coast and beyond are welcome.

SCHEDULE:

Friday November 13

1:00 PM 

Opening Reception

2:00 PM

Theremin Workshop with Dorit Chrysler

2:00 PM

Update on the FCC Translator Window and LPFM Allocations with Paul Bame 

3:00 PM

College Radio Meeting

5:00 PM

Raw Power: Radio Remotes for the Masses with ART FM / WXOX

5:00 PM

Radio as Collage: From Freeform Broadcasting to Spoken-Word with Vicki Bennet

7:00 PM

Tour of WFMU

8:00 PM

Performance/Demo: Demon Box

9:00 PM

Performance: Radio Wonderland (Joshua Fried)

9:30 PM

Performance: Laenz

Saturday November 14

9:30AM

Homemade Radio Theater with Hearty White

9:30 AM

The Collaborative Ecology of Radio with Wave Farm Co-Directors Bianca Felix Biberaj and Meredith Kooi

11:00 AM

Radio Is Not A Container with Anna Friz

1:30 PM

36 Years of Experimental Comedy with Andy Breckman and Ken

1:30 PM

Screening: 40 Watts From Nowhere (Documentary Film on Pirate Radio)

3:00 PM

Inductive Listening Workshop with Zach Poff

3:00 PM

Neon Icon: Syndicating Experimental Programming with WXOX

4:00 PM

The Children of The Waves of Africa with Babette Thomas

5:00 PM 

Audience Building with WFMU 

8:00 PM 

Negativland + SUE-C: Performance and Q&A

Sunday November 15

10:00 AM

All Together Now: Activating the EAS

10:00 AM

Supplemental Media

12:00 PM

Full Group Session: Looking to the Future

More information, full schedule and descriptions, and registration here!