Turn out on Thursday, October 29th at 7pm Upstairs at the Avalon Lounge for the closing edition of “Breaking the Algorithm IRL"! This month’s event features a discussion with Liam Singer, proprietor of Avalon Lounge, and a DJ set. Entry by donation. See you there!

"Breaking the Algorithm IRL" is a monthly series presented by Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM as part of our Local Waves initiative and the show "Local Waves in Conversation." Part conversation led by Mike Amari of Chosen Family and part DJ set by a WGXC volunteer, the series highlights local artists, musicians, venue owners and bookers, and record label owners.

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. Register here!

SCHEDULE:

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13

12:00 PM

Opening Reception

Registration, coffee, and general hobnobbery and fist bumping with other radio heads. 

2:00 PM

Workshop: Dorit Chrysler: The Art of Playing the Theremin

Limit 20 participants, extra cost for materials ($35)

Everything you ever wanted to know about the theremin! Dorit Chrysler will guide you through tips and tricks during this workshop. You will learn technical and practical aspects of how to approach this mysterious instrument. Theremins will be provided for each session. Calibration, positioning, exercises, repertoire, woo-woo—and no touching!

2:00 PM

Paul Bame: Update on the FCC Translator and LPFM Allocations

Paul Bame of Prometheus Radio offers the latest info on the FCC's latest translator window and LPFM allocations.

3:30 PM

College Radio Convergence

Evolution is always in the hands of the youth. Avant Radio Festival is excited to welcome college broadcasters from around the nation during this opening day meeting. Student DJs are invited to gather and discuss the present and future of radio. A cross-pollination of ideas, where brains come together and friendships are made. Community guaranteed, Revolution expected. Kick off ARF the right way with the future of American radio!

Facilitated by Max Selby (WTUL, WXOX) and Jennifer Waits (Radio Survivor, KFJC).

3:30 PM

Workshop: Raw Power: Radio Remotes for the Masses

In a new era of political repression and corporate consolidation where mainstream media becomes less reliable, Democracy will depend on communities building new methods of sharing and distributing information. In this workshop, the DJs of ARTxFM will lead participants through the steps of developing their own online signal, allowing them to broadcast their voices, ideas, and musical selections live and loud from wherever they may be in the world. Includes demonstrations from WXOX DJs in their various remote locations.

5:00 PM

Radio as Collage: From Freeform Broadcasting to Spoken-Word Composition, 1990–Present 

Vicki Bennett, working as People Like Us, has been making radio since 1990, using broadcasting as a space for collage, sustained listening, experimentation, and unconventional forms of storytelling. Her practice has moved between DJing, live and improvised broadcasting, commissioned spoken-word works, and large-scale acts of radio curation. This presentation traces that history, including her long-running DO or DIY program, the 2016 WFMU residency Optimized!, and Radio Boredcast, the extraordinary 744-hour continuous online broadcast she curated for AV Festival in 2012. Vicki will also discuss her composed radio works for WDR and Deutschlandradio, including No One Is an Island, I Can Fly, and Changing Your Mind. Moving between found sound, music, speech, and archival material, these works approach radio as a durational and relational form.

Do or DIY with People Like Us: Playlists and Archives

7:00 PM

Tour of WFMU

Tour of WFMU's Magic Factory, including the massive record library and the black velvet gallery.

8:00 PM

Performance/Demo: Demon Box

Developed by Eternal Research, the Demon Box transforms the hidden electromagnetic world into sound, signal, light, and data. It captures frequencies from everyday electronics like phones, drills, and TVs, then converts them into audio signal, MIDI data, and control voltage.

9:00 PM

Performance: RADIO WONDERLAND

Joshua Fried, performing as Radio Wonderland, transforms live commercial radio into a funky electronic collage. His software creations include The Re-Shuffler, which deploys slices of radio across a rhythmic and melodic grid to create instant techno. The Re-Esser extracts the sibilance and plays those S, T, and K sounds like a drum machine, while Anything Kick morphs slowed-down radio into a bass drum to shake the dance floor.

9:30 PM

Performance: Laenz

Laenz improvises with live electromagnetic signals through software-defined radio scans and concurrent radio transmissions. The resulting soundscape recalls the distinct sensory effect of an ‘ambient-noise mall.’

Laenz is a sound artist based in Brooklyn, NY, working within radiophonic textures and caliginous dance music.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14

9:30 AM

Hearty White: Radio Theatre How To

Homemade Radio Theater or How to Make Bad TV on the Radio, with WFMU spiritual leader and master of voices, philosophy and foley, Hearty White.

9:30 AM 

The Collaborative Ecology of Radio at Wave Farm

In this presentation, Wave Farm Co-Directors Bianca Felix Biberaj and Meredith Kooi travel through a selection of projects presented by Wave Farm to explore how making radio can be a way of collaborating with nature and its fundamental forces including electromagnetism, time, and a place’s flora and fauna. 

11:00 AM

Full Group Session: Radio Is Not A Container with Anna Friz

Radio art practitioners have long sought to transform radio from an apparatus of information diffusion to an apparatus of communication, and to expand beyond the logics of the programming grid and engage with the conditions and ecologies of wirelessness in new ways. This presentation offers a brief overview of radio art from the early radio experiments and emergent stations to contemporary international practices. 

Anna Friz is a radio, sound, and media artist and scholar, who began making radio on CiTR FM Vancouver, Canada in 1993, and since then has created radiophonic works for extensive international broadcast, installation, or performance, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. Anna is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and won the Karl Sczuka Prize for Radio Art in 2024. Her radio artworks have been commissioned by national public radio in Canada, Australia, Austria, Finland, Germany, Denmark, and Spain, and heard on public and independent airwaves all over the world. Recent presentations include The Lab (San Francisco), The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (USA), Sonandes Bienal Internacional de Arte Sonoro (La Paz, Bolivia), Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro (Valparaíso, Chile), Bienal Sur (Argentina), Heroines of Sound Festival (Berlin), Donaueschinger Musiktage 2024, and Radio Art Zone (Esch-Zur-Alzette, Luxembourg). Anna is currently Professor of Sound in the Film and Digital Media Department at University of California, Santa Cruz.

1:30 PM

Ken + Andy

36 Years of Experimental Comedy: Co-hosts Andy Breckman and Ken Freedman discuss their long running comedy experiment, their greatest successes, and most hilarious failures.

1:30 PM

40 Watts From Nowhere (Documentary Film on Pirate Radio)

The cinematic tale of Sue Carpenter’s 40-watt pirate FM station, KBLT, which broadcast for four years to LA, exploiting a legal case that allowed hundreds of low-power radio operators to proliferate throughout the country, and gave birth to the legal LPFM movement. It soon took on a life of its own, drawing Mazzy Star to headline a benefit concert and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to play live in her living room. 

3:00 PM

Workshop: Inductive Listening with Zach Poff

Limit 12 participants ($30)

Zach Poff is a New York area media artist, educator, and maker-of-things. His artwork is rooted in open systems that eschew individual authorship in favor of collaborative or generative models. At ARF, Zach will facilitate a hands-on workshop titled "Inductive Listeners." We will build inductive coils to plug into sound recorders, then go on a walk around the neighborhood to listen to the radio emissions of the infrastructure. Participants should bring a laptop, wired headphones, and, if possible, a sound recorder that is not a phone.

3:00 PM

Neon Icon: Syndicating Experimental Programming

Groundbreaking and spellbinding, you have created an exceptional piece of experimental audio, and this workshop will help get it out there! Looking to platforms such as Pacifica Audioport and Public Radio Exchange, the DJs of WXOX will help you format, distribute, and publicize your program for airplay on noncommercial stations nationwide!

4:00 PM

Presentation: Babette Thomas: The Children of The Waves of Africa

In this presentation, Babette Thomas will present on their dissertation research about WAFR (Waves of Africa), a Black Power community radio station that ran from 1971 to 1976 in Durham, North Carolina. They'll be specifically focusing on The Children’s Radio Workshop, and situating it within the context of other Black Power movement social programs geared towards Black children.

Babette Thomas is a radio producer, media artist and PhD candidate in the departments of Black Studies and American Studies at Yale University. They are also the co-host of the award-winning podcast, Gender Spiral.

5:00 PM 

Audience Building

WFMU Station Manager, Ken Freedman, discusses the tools and strategies that have expanded WFMU's audience and have allowed the station's revenue to grow from $50k to $3m per year. Ken will also update the Audience Engine project and describe station opportunities for using the tool.

8:00 PM 

Negativland + SUE-C: Significantly Less Deceptive

Extra $5 for workshop registrants

Negativland + SUE-C present Significantly Less Deceptive: Legendary sound collage group Negativland and live cinema visual artist SUE-C collaborate to bring you their latest audio-visual performance about our minds, our current realities, and the evolving forms of media and technology that orchestrate our perceptions.

9:30 PM 

Negativland + SUE-C Q&A

Negativland's Mark Hosler, Jon "Wobbly" Leidecker, and SUE-C take your questions on their incredible legacy of media jamming and sampledelic art.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15

10:00 AM

All Together Now: Activating the RAS: (Radio Action Syndicate)

Gathering the contacts, ideas, and energy we have discovered at the Avant Radio Fest, this final day workshop will focus on developing a Radio Action Syndicate to help keep radio activists connected throughout the year. In this open discussion lead by ARTxFM, we will reflect upon unified radio events such as Radiophrenia, Vinylthon, Pacifica Election Coverage, and the Breonna Taylor Broadcast to develop a model for future actions—creative or political—in which community radio stations can synchronize their broadcasts and amplify one another’s signals.

10:00 AM

Supplemental Media That Plays Well With Radio

What other forms of media complement radio, in terms of listener experience, station health and audience growth. Ken Freedman discusses what has worked and what hasn't at WFMU, including print media, listener chat, social media and more.

12:00 PM

Full Group Session: Looking to the Future

This final session is meant to wrap up the weekend and create space for conference participants to bring their questions, concerns, hopes, fears, and dreams to the group. The purpose of the discussion is to address the question "where do we go from here?" with the goal to come away with concrete ideas and plans to take into the future. 

More information and registration here!

Wave Farm and CREATE IN PROCESS present Soundshare, a space for audio/sound artists to gather, share, and collaborate. Participants are invited to the WGXC Catskill Studio to share pre-recorded or live works in a welcoming and communal space. All are welcome to come listen and discuss, though sharing is limited to four participants. Come meet fellow creatives, musicians, and performers!

These gatherings are free, but RSVP is required, whether sharing work or attending as a listener. Please submit requests to present work through the RSVP form. Participants will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. Each participant will have up to five minutes to share, and fifteen minutes of questions and offerings from the group.

Please bring a prepared dish and join us for a potluck following the sharing + feedback!

If sharing prerecorded work, participants should bring audio files on a thumb drive, laptop, or phone with adapters to ⅛” cable. If sharing work live, please email meredith@wavefarm.org to discuss technical needs. Please note that whether live or prerecorded, the work needs to be 5 minutes or less.

This hands-on workshop explores soil as a medium for listening, transmission, and vibration. Participants will build simple soil microphones using piezoelectric contact microphones coupled to metal rods and plates, creating inexpensive instruments for hearing vibrations that travel through earth, plants, stones, roots, and other materials. We will also be building simple preamps for these microphones and exploring how electronics work.

Together, we will experiment with different forms of mechanical coupling, amplification, and resonance, including metal probes for listening at different depths and resonant plates that increase the surface area through which vibrations can be collected. Components will be protected with dipped latex coatings, allowing participants to experiment with temporary placement in soil and damp environments.

Alongside construction, the workshop introduces basic principles of contact microphones, impedance, vibration, amplification, and field recording. We will conclude by taking the microphones outside for a collective listening session, comparing how different materials, depths, and locations shape what can be heard. No previous electronics, soldering, or audio experience is required. Each participant will leave with a functioning soil microphone and preamp for continued experimentation and field recording.

Workshop registration fee: $25
Materials fee: $45
Click here to register!

ABOUT CHLOE ALEXANDRA THOMPSON
Chloe Alexandra Thompson is a Cree interdisciplinary artist, composer, and creative technologist whose work approaches sound as a relational and embodied medium. Her practice moves between spatial audio, field recording, synthesis, installation, performance, and experimental technologies to investigate how listening can create relationships between bodies, environments, and technical systems.

Her work considers acoustic ecology alongside Indigenous approaches to listening, attending to vibration, resonance, and environmental sound as forms of knowledge that exceed language. Through installations and participatory listening situations, Thompson creates conditions for encountering sound not simply as representation, but as a material event moving through air, water, architecture, bodies, and land.

She is a current Onassis ONX Studio member and has participated in residencies and programs with Pioneer Works, Eyebeam, MIT Open Documentary Lab with the Indigenous Screen Office of Canada, HERVISIONS x Arebyte, and Yucca Valley Material Lab.