Wave Farm Newsroom

Over the course of May, 14 new releases totaling 103 tracks were submitted to Local Waves by local artists! Chief among them is the great new compilation by Kingston based Dromedary Records called Get Your Rond Out that features 17 tracks from Kingston-centric bands, including some new/unreleased material. Proceeds from CDs/Downloads via their bandcamp go entirely to support People’s Place, the largest foodbank in Ulster County.

Maine-based artist Ryan Blotnick connected with longtime Hudson Valley studio musicians Otto Hauser, Tyler Wood and others, coalescing with a improv heavy set at Hi-Lo in Catskill (RIP) in 2018. They have now released their first record, The Woods, a warm, dreamy slice of jazz-adjacent tunes that feel loose but inspired.

Released late last year on Disciple, Kingston based Ruth Mascelli (of band Special Interest) & Minneapolis saxophonist Mary Hanson Scott teamed up for a sultry left-field take on loungey trip-hop with Esoteric Lounge Music Now, and a fittingly lo-fi video. In a similar Lynchian vein, Athens based a place both wonderful and strange just dropped a noisey take on darkwave called Matter and Desire that is at times abstract and at others…danceable?

Local Waves fav Saapato, who tends to be on the slow, ambient side of things, put out a collaborative new project Saltpuppet with NYC based label Window SIll Records. Caravan is a sprawling, 33 track collection of short but impactful tunes, whose jagged and dynamic use of ambient acoustic guitars, weaving arpeggios, strums and trippy vocals cant help but recall the early releases of Animal Collective, Devendra Banhart et al. Ben Vida, who frequently experiments with spoken word and ambient sound, also just released a fantastic new album Oblivion Seekers on Shelter Press. Ben uses repetition to build walls around an idea or feeling, and like Glass and the minimalists, that tension eventually disorientates to the point where it unlocks and becomes something else entirely. Great headphone listen.

We also got Singles/EPs from Kingston indie-poppers Bird Week Jacknife (so good!), Hudson’s country-psych-tinged rock-n-rollers The Sock Cymbals debut EP, Kingston pop-punk-on-speed rippers The Snorts with first single “Fuck It Up” (and they just dropped some excellent Knicks style tees). From up north in the Capitol Region Troy’s Bear Grass has been dropping some beautiful indie-chamber-pop tracks (fans of mum, belle&sebastian etc pls check out) ahead of a new album, and Altamont’s The Parlor just released a 90s coded Brian Jonestown Massacre-esqe track “The Sacred is The Sweetest.”

Erica Dawn Lyle is a prolific, experimental guitarist based in the Hudson Valley, and she sent a few recent releases that highlight her noir-ish take on guitar noise, feedback and ambient passages. Lea Bertucci also released an incredible new piece The Days Pass Quickly… that experiments with medieval instrumentation, musique concrete, and dissonance.

-Mike Amari of Chosen Family Presents

Local Waves airs every Friday at 8PM. All local artists are encouraged to send your music into to be added to this ever growing library. Send to music@wgxc.org with ‘‘Local Waves’ in subject, mp3s (320kps) or Bandcamp download codes are preferred!

Local Waves received over 100 tracks from 15 new releases last month, here is a roundup:

NEW RELEASES

Catskill based harpist turned cosmic-country queen Mikaela Davis has a new LP Graceland Way out this month on the legendary Kill Rock Stars label. Whole thing is worth a spin, as she flexes her roots-rock range, but the standout for me is “Spring Petals In The Snow.”

Ben Seretan and John Thayer (Greene County’s finest) released the excellent, pillowy ambient record Sunbeam of No Illusion. You can basically hear the snow melting and the leaves growing

Violinist Kaethe Hostetter (under the moniker K8A) is based in Kingston NY, but spent the better part of a decade in Ethiopia, studying and playing with musicians there. Woradj Alle shows how she moves through these indigenous music ideas, often with just looped violin and effects, which Kaethe pulls off effortless live as well.

Wappingers Falls based The Schwegs make fult tilt, late 90s style emo-punk (think Yellowcard, Saves the Day), their new EP Fully Cooked sounds like a classic.

Fresh off our Local Waves at the Local series, Meg Lui just dropped a cover of the Cranberries classic “Dreams” as a follow up to the excellent “Gone Girl” from January, look for a record later this year. Her partner Keenan O’Meara also has a new record on the way (on country star Zach Bryan’s Belting Bronco Records) check out beautiful live version of new track “Gone GirlGod’s Last Hunter.”

Speaking of, New Paltz based Laura Leigh, just dropped a Gone Girlgreat EP in that classic outlaw country vein, with songs about bad relationships, bad lovers, and runaway trains. Highly recommend.

Recorded alone in a small cabin in Woodstock, Jeremy Bass’s Cabin Songs is a really beautiful collection of instrumental guitar, at times ambient, but mostly in a pastoral, americana vein.

Newburgh neo-soul artist Danny Junior’s Five Five Five record came out in January, and has that perfect blend of smooth jazz chords, harmonies, and Danny’s soulful vocals.

Kingston indie rock outfit A Whole Nother has been dripping out tracks for a few months now, and now the full length self-titled record is out. Slightly jammy tunes with a hint of 90s rock pop.

Jim Metzer’s new track “The Golden Door” comments on the importance of immigrants in our nations history, and is a collaboration with many Hudson Valley musicians, including the Ars Choralis choir based in Woodstock.

Flotstudio out of Red Hook has been releasing some really interesting, long-form, sound collage tracks on their bandcamp, which blends field records from hikes in south korea with other found sounds and even some music samples. If you’ve got the time, check ‘em out.

OLDER RELEASES

We also got a 2024 release from Kerhonkson based glam-psych rockers The Duke of Surl, Two 2025 singles from Peekskill born-and-raised Austin Kopec, the experimental folk–pop of bi-coastal group xLamas on their 2025 release.

-Mike Amari of Chosen Family Presents

Local Waves airs every Friday at 8PM. All local artists are encouraged to send your music into to be added to this ever growing library. Send to music@wgxc.org with ‘‘Local Waves’ in subject, mp3s (320kps) or Bandcamp download codes are preferred!

Acra, NY—Wave Farm is pleased to announce fifteen grantees for the 2026 NYSCA/Wave Farm: Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF) for Artists, a regrant program with the New York State Council on the Arts.

Selected through a competitive panel process from an application pool of 233 proposals, the 2026 MAAF Grantees are: Mehrnoush Alia, Zoe Beloff, Tarik Jeremiah Brown, Eva Davidova, Julie Flandreau, Erin Johnson, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Yuka Murakami, Cherry Nin, Laura Parnes, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Tina Spangler, Sara Stern, Jordan Strafer, James N. Kienitz Wilkins.

The Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF) for Artists provides New York State media artists up to $7,500 for the completion and/or public presentation of new works in all genres of sound and moving image art, including emergent technology. Grant awards assist artists in completing new work, reaching public audiences, and advancing artistic exploration and public engagement in the media arts.

Detailed information about the fifteen 2026 MAAF for Artists funded projects is available below.

GRANTEES AND PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS

Mehrnoush Alia - 1001 Frames Expanded (Kings County)
1001 Frames Expanded is a storytelling project that addresses the urgent rise of abuses of power, racism, and exclusion intensified by global right-wing politics. Set within an audition room, the film uses the film industry as a microcosm to examine how power operates in workplaces and institutions, and how storytelling and artmaking can interrupt cycles of silence and violence. Following the screenings, participants are invited to share their own stories. These personal narratives, whether written, spoken, or visual, form a collective archive of lived experience, giving voice to those often silenced in institutional and creative spaces. 1001 Frames Expanded seeks to transform spectators into storytellers, and isolation into shared understanding. The project embodies the belief that storytelling can be both an act of resistance and a step toward healing, accountability, and change within the culture of work and artmaking itself. MAAF funding will support public presentation of this film.

Mehrnoush Alia is an Iranian-American filmmaker and playwright. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Columbia University and alumna of Berlin Talent Campus. Her debut feature premiered at Berlinale 2025, played at festivals including Melbourne, AFI, Rio, Taipei Golden Horse, and won four awards including the top prizes at the Thessaloniki IFF. She previously wrote/directed two award-winning shorts, a web-documentary, several promotional videos, and is the producer of over a dozen short films and a feature film. Alia is the co-founder and managing director of Maaa Art, which produces films and plays by Middle Eastern artists.

Zoe Beloff - Life Forgotten (New York County)
Life Forgotten brings together the sewing machine and the film projector, the garment worker, and the showman at the beginning of the 20th century. A gallery installation at City Lore will recreate a real ‘nickelodeon’, Frank Seiden’s storefront cinema, that once existed a few blocks away on New York’s Lower East Side. The film, which is the centerpiece of the installation, will situate archival footage in parallel with reenactment, introducing the audience to historical characters like labor activist Clara Lemlich, as well as everyday people whose voices echo from oral histories. Young women who without money, influence or powerful friends, were determined to change their world. The installation will include artworks, drawings over photographs of fading signage, posters created with wood type, and garment patterns that reveal the labor of their creation, extending this dialog across time. MAAF funding will support public presentation of this project.

Zoe Beloff is a filmmaker and artist working across media. With a focus on social justice, her work draws timelines between past and present to imagine a more egalitarian future. Zoe's projects often involve films, drawings and archival documents organized around a theme. Two themes are central: an exploration of early film from a feminist perspective and a focus on how communities of working people come together to create change. Her work has been featured in international venues that include the Whitney Museum, MoMA, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Pompidou Center in Paris, the M HKA museum in Antwerp, IFFR and FID Marseille. She values having had the opportunity to share work in community spaces that are free and open for events and conversation, such as the NYPL, the Clemente and the Coney Island Museum.

Tarik Jeremiah Brown - Washed Up On A Black Monday (New York County)
Washed Up On A Black Monday is an experimental multi-channel film project that explores the metaphor of Black precarity as a climate by examining the convergence of financial collapse, racialized violence, and ecological upheaval between New York City and London in the 1980s. The title reflects a particular point of disruption caused by the Great Storm of 1987 and the coinciding financial crash known as Black Monday, foregrounding how “Black” is often used as a descriptor of economic catastrophe while Black communities bear the material and social consequences of these crises. The project imagines a speculative continuity between the environmental turbulence of the Great Storm and the racial violences that preceded it, including the 1980s Brixton Riots and the 1986 Howard Beach racial attack. The work is structured as a three-channel video installation combining newly shot footage between London and New York, as well as archival materials documenting these histories. MAAF funding will support completion of the project, including archival licensing, film development and scanning, and post-production in preparation for public presentation.

Tarik Jeremiah Brown works across analog film practices, collage, sculpture, sound, and digital image-making to explore “the current.” His work examines the resonance and tension that arises when past, present, and future fold into one another. Using archival materials and oral histories to construct visually represented allegory, he traces how Black life is both continuous and precarious, marked by recurrence yet always moving forward. His recent work engages Christina Sharpe’s framework of anti-Blackness as a climate, drawing sensorial connections to the metaphor of Black social conditions as weather. Brown has presented work internationally at Koppel Project Bank and Central Saint Martins in London, he will present a solo exhibition at Wave Hill, New York, in 2026. Brown is a 2026 Van Lier Fellow at Wave Hill, and a recipient of the 2024 Henry and Adeline Collins Prize. He earned a BA (Hons) from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Eva Davidova - Audience As Virus (New York County)
Audience As Virus is an interactive, immersive installation-performance that involves its audience in the possibility to break AI predictions of human movement and offers the public a clear capacity to intervene. It mis-uses ChatGPT and HMDM (Human Movement Diffusion Model) to counter the patterns of replication, mimicry, and averaging. Audience As Virus gathers practices often excluded from the Art & Technology canon—from Capoeira, Candomblé, and Circus traditions in Brazil to experimental choreography in the USA—to “counter-predict” dominant models and question which bodies and gestures are made invisible when AI decides what counts. Embracing complication and excess, the work challenges systems that privilege conformity over difference. MAAF funding will support public exhibition of this work, including a presentation at ISSUE Project Room, festival fees and outreach, and documentation of the performance for preservation and distribution.

Eva Davidova explores behavior, ecological disaster, and the political implications of technology through performative works rooted in the absurd. She works with the human gesture and expression as a way to “mix” with and disrupt technologies, and use the failures in these technologies to reclaim them. Davidova has exhibited at the Bronx Museum, the UVP at Everson Museum, the AKG Buffalo Art Museum, MACBA Barcelona, CAAC Sevilla, La Regenta, ISSUE Project Room, Harvestworks, Instituto Cervantes, and the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) in New York City.

Julie Flandreau - I Cite As Witness The Time (New York County)
I Cite As Witness The Time: The Story of Karen and Omar Askia Ali is a feature-length film telling the story of Omar Askia Ali, who passed away in prison in 2021 after serving five decades of a life sentence for a crime he did not commit. This film is made in collaboration with his widow Karen Ali, to preserve his legacy and share their story. The documentary relies on a polyphony of past and present voices, reaching across time and prison walls, weaving together the strands of the couple’s path-breaking work, damning legal saga and unswerving bond. MAAF funding will provide finishing support for the project, with the goal of sharing the project widely as a tool for education, connection and social change through community screenings, creating space for panel discussions and carrying on the Alis’ legacy as a living archive.

Julie Flandreau is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in New York. She sees the various sides of her work as distinct but complementary, offering alternative methods to understand, preserve and share human stories. Film has unique powers of poetry—a unique way to open space for collaboration and conversation. Her practice was shaped during years spent in Philadelphia. Prior to I Cite As Witness The Time, she directed and edited Infinite Loop (8 min 23 sec, 2023), an experimental short centered on Seoul’s subway Circle Line 2.

Erin Johnson - The Ferns (New York County)
In The Ferns, Erin Johnson documents a scientist’s attempt to halt the closure of Duke University’s iconic 100-year-old herbarium through recourse to a speculative connection between ancient flora and queer embodiment. Pop iconography displaces taxonomy, and a flock of botanical drag queens interpret the ferns against the backdrop of the region’s anti-LGBTQ legislation. MAAF funding will support the completion of this project, festival submissions, and the public presentation of the work as a multi-channel video installation for gallery exhibition.

​​Erin Johnson is a visual artist and filmmaker based in New York. She was recently named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film and received the Working Artist Fellowship from Pioneer Works and the Rockefeller Foundation, awarded in recognition of artists shaping social change through community-engaged practices. Johnson has participated in residencies supporting the development of new work and interdisciplinary research, including Lighthouse Works, Hidrante, Jan van Eyck Academie, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Ankara Queer Art Program, Surf Point Foundation, and Pioneer Works, among others. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally across museums, galleries, public art venues, and festivals, most recently including e‑flux (New York, NY), MOCA Toronto (Toronto, Canada) and MUNCH (Oslo, Norway). She is currently Undergraduate Director and Clinical Assistant Professor of Studio Art at New York University.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy - Crystal Films (Kings County)
Crystal Films is a new body of work that situates the contemporary screen within the longer, material history of cinema. It is a series of wall-mounted works composed of cast glass with optical elements placed directly over video screens. The glass components are produced from digitally generated 3D printed forms which translate computational structures into solid, light-bearing objects. Acting as lenses and filters, the glass bends, compresses, and fractures the moving image beneath it, recalling early cinematic moments when projection depended on the careful alignment of optics, surfaces, and light. In this way, the work treats the screen as something momentarily arrested—its flow of images held in suspension, as if cast in amber. MAAF funding will fund completion and public exhibition of this work, including support for both the physical and digital elements. The work is scheduled to be shown as work in progress in the spring of 2026 and as part of a larger exhibition in the Hudson Valley in the fall.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are media artists whose interdisciplinary practice spans moving image, software, drawing, painting, and installation. Their work combines artistic production with research into how emerging technologies shape cultural narratives, systems of knowledge, and everyday perception. Using computational tools alongside archival materials, they examine how images are organized, mediated, and transformed by technological frameworks. Early projects include database-driven sculptures composed of television clips structured through categorical and algorithmic systems, as well as diorama-like miniature film sets activated by live cameras and custom software. These works function as experimental platforms that make visible the underlying logics of classification, automation, and design. Technology in their work operates not simply as a medium, but as an active social force that mediates relationships between individuals, images, and environments. Their installations foreground these processes, encouraging audiences to critically reflect on how technological systems influence what is seen, remembered, and valued.

Yuka Murakami - In Other Words (Kings County)
In Other Words is a short documentary-essay film on translation and its relationship to performance. An investigation of how a live interpreter assumes a role akin to that of an actor, or a marionette, on stage. Through vérité footage and a choreographed puppet sequence, the film explores the grace of self-displacement needed to channel another’s voice, asking where the performance ends and the translation begins. MAAF funding will support the public exhibition of this film.

Yuka Murakami is a filmmaker and writer based in New York City. Her work uses close observation to explore systems of performance across history, linguistics, labor, and ritual. She is a graduate from the California Institute of the Arts’s MFA in Film Directing, where she was awarded the Alison Doerner Fund for Women Pioneers in Filmmaking and the Lillian Disney Critical Reader Scholarship. She was a recipient of an Emmy Award as a producer on the documentary Masters of Modern Design in 2020.

Cherry Nin - Take the Oath (Dutchess County)
A story of contemporary ennui and spiritual isolation, Take the Oath is a short narrative film following a shadowy, placeless young person struggling with grief, homelessness, and the will to live after the death of their mother. Set within a lush rural New York landscape shaped by extraction, the film evokes a contemporary search for connection on a disconnected, violent land. MAAF funding will support completion of the film, including final post-production to prepare the film for public exhibition.

Cherry Nin is a director and artist whose projects center subvert ecologies and the reification of life in defiance of capitalist death drives. Their films have been presented at Canal Projects, Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Spectacle Theater, The Kitchen, and basements, galleries, and theaters across the United States. They hold an MFA in Moving Image from Bard College, and have participated in residencies including Wexner Center for the Arts’ Film/Video Studio, KAJE, and Outpost Artist Resources. Nin is a recipient of the Leeway Foundation’s Art and Change Grant, and the Philadelphia Independent Media Fund.

Laura Parnes - Magic Thinking (Kings County)
Magic Thinking is a multi-platform film installation steeped in the current moment when climate catastrophe, the COVID pandemic, and the rise of fundamentalism combine to contribute to an apocalyptic aura. Through this aura, magical thinking can become a survival strategy, creating surprising overlaps, namely the confluence of far-right extremism and the “wellness” world. MAAF funding will support the completion and public exhibition of this work, including the fabrication of neon signs, vitrines, and handmade seating.

Laura Parnes’ multiplatform installations fuse comedy with pathos to probe social and political trauma. Informed by traditions and genres in narrative film, video art and queer theater, her work blurs the lines between conventions of storytelling and experimentation. Her works have been screened and exhibited widely in the US and internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), MoMA/PS1 (New York), Miami Museum of Contemporary Art (Florida), The Brooklyn Museum (New York), Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art (Athens), and Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid). Her recent solo exhibitions include: LAXART, LA, Participant Inc., and Pioneer Works, and solo screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and The Kitchen.

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky - The Afterlife (New York County)
The Afterlife, a performance based video, responds to “The Four Fates of Man”, a group of four sculptures attributed to Caspicara, the most renowned Indigenous sculptor of the Quito School (an 18th-century sculptural atelier). Although Caspicara’s name is synonymous with artistic excellence, he remains largely unknown outside of Ecuador. The Afterlife traces the sculptures’ provenance and explores representations of death in Catholicism—Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell—and how these concepts are figuratively Depicted. In the video, each of the sculptures is embodied by the artist who roams through the museum, pausing before Spanish paintings, staring into the portraits, and mimicking their gestures. This performance can be interpreted as a confrontation with the colonial era that sought to render mestizo and Indigenous peoples as subjects of the colony—in this case, Spain. The video further engages with issues surrounding the antiquities market and the intersection of race and gender. The Afterlife premiered at Capilla Azul in January 2026. MAAF funding will support public presentation, including exhibitions in New York City and Guayaquil, Ecuador.

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a multidisciplinary artist. In 2019, she received a grant from Creative Capital and the Anonymous Was a Woman award. Recent exhibitions include: Metamorphosis at Capilla Azul (Chiloé, CH), Dispossessions in the Americas at Wrightwood 659 Gallery (Chicago, IL) and Hors Pistes at Centre Pompidou, 2024 (Malaga, SP).

Tina Spangler - Finding Fanny (Sullivan County)
Finding Fanny is a 60-minute documentary that uncovers the life and legacy of Fanny Palmer, one of 19th-century America’s most prolific lithographers, whose imagery helped shape the nation’s visual identity through her work with Currier & Ives—while her name was nearly erased from history. Through rare archival materials, first-person investigation, and a visually driven cinematic approach, the film re-presents Palmer’s artwork for contemporary audiences while confronting the broader erasure of women artists in American art history. MAAF Funding will support completion of this project.

Tina Spangler draws on over a decade of expertise founding and running the prestigious Big Eddy Film Festival, as well as establishing trusted partnerships within the historical print community. As a writer/director for television, she has showcased her work on wide-reaching platforms including Sundance TV (1999–2005) and Sesame Street (2020–2025). Her passion and expertise are dedicated to unveiling hidden historical narratives through documentary films. Among her notable independent projects is the acclaimed historical short film Lucky Lake, (2008).

Sara Stern - MARSH (Kings County)
MARSH is an experimental plein air stop motion animation filmed in a salt marsh in Provincetown, MA. The piece responds to this place of constant change and animacy with improvised movement. Fantastical characters perform and sing on behalf of the marsh, as if performing a fragmented ecological opera for this site where human activity is metabolized but never fully digested. MAAF funding will support the completion and public presentation of the work.

Sara Stern is an interdisciplinary artist whose recent projects prod varied histories of landscape and urban development with speculative fiction. Stern works across and between moving image installation, multimedia performance, animation, architectural intervention, printmaking, and sculpture. Stern has presented her work in the US and internationally, at venues including SculptureCenter (Long Island City, NY), Anthology Film Archives (New York, NY), Essex Flowers (New York, NY), and the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (Singapore). Stern’s work has been supported by the Watermill Center Artist Residency, the Harvestworks New Works Residency, a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, the Fountainhead Fellowship in Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, and several residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Stern is currently a participant in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Arts Center Residency program on Governors Island.

Jordan Strafer - Talk Show (Kings County)
Talk Show is the third and final film in Loophole, a trilogy drawn from the 1991 nationally televised rape trial of William Kennedy Smith. The film stages a speculative trans-historical tribunal in the afterlife, formatted as a 1990s talk show hosted by an Oprah look-alike named Rosa. The work opens in a Palm Beach bar at dawn, moves through the crashing plane of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and arrives at an afterlife courtroom where cases of civilian women raped by American GIs in Normandy, Japan, and Bavaria are adjudicated as the millennium countdown begins. Operating within the aesthetics of American television and the erotic thriller, Talk Show examines how entertainment culture mediates trauma and what it might mean to imagine legal institutions outside of patriarchal and white supremacist frameworks. An installation version of this film premiered at the 2026 Whitney Biennial. MAAF funding will support final post-production, including sound design, color grading, DCP creation, and festival submissions for the festival distribution version.

Jordan Strafer is an American artist and filmmaker. Through her multidisciplinary work, Strafer uncovers apparatuses of power and societal dysfunction. Her work has been exhibited at Fluentum (Berlin), the Renaissance Society (Chicago), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Secession (Vienna), Index (Stockholm), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, PARTICIPANT INC (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the New Museum (New York), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and SculptureCenter (New York). Her films have screened at the New York Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. In 2025, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She earned her MFA from Bard College and her BFA from The New School.

James N. Kienitz Wilkins - THE MISCONCEIVED (Queens County)
THE MISCONCEIVED is a feature-length satire about the creative class rendered entirely with a video game engine utilizing motion capture performances. Co-written by James N. Kienitz Wilkins and Robin Schavoir, it is a thematic follow-up to their feature, The Plagiarists (2019). Through its handmade digital assembly, THE MISCONCEIVED argues for the possibility of a type of filmmaking freed from the constraints of the physical world (and demands of the film industry), while remaining rooted in the economic and social concerns of the world, bringing together the tools and techniques of cinema’s past and future.

James N. Kienitz Wilkins is a filmmaker, writer and artist based in New York City. In addition to THE MISCONCIEVED (2026), his feature-length movies include Still Film (Visions du Réel, MoMA Doc Fortnight ‘23), The Plagiarists (Berlinale, New Directors/New Films '19), Common Carrier (BAMcinemaFest '17) and Public Hearing (CPH:DOX ‘12). In 2017, he was included in the Whitney Biennial. His writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, The Metrograph magazine, Filmmaker Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and MUBI Notebook, among other publications. He currently teaches in the Screen Studies program at Eugene Lang College (The New School).

About the New York State Council on the Arts
The mission of the New York State Council on the Arts is to foster and advance the full breadth of New York State’s arts, culture, and creativity for all. To support the ongoing recovery of the arts across New York State, the Council on the Arts will award over $161 million in FY 2026, serving organizations and artists across all 10 state regions. The Council on the Arts further advances New York's creative culture by convening leaders in the field and providing organizational and professional development opportunities and informational resources. Created by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1960 and continued with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, the Council is an agency that is part of the Executive Branch. For more information on NYSCA, please visit www.arts.ny.gov, and follow NYSCA's Facebook page, on X @NYSCArts and Instagram @NYSCouncilontheArts.

About Wave Farm
Wave Farm is a transmission arts organization driven by experimentation with the electromagnetic spectrum. We cultivate creative practices in radio and support artists and nonprofits in their cultural endeavors.

Based in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, Wave Farm is a media arts center, media platform, and arts service organization. Wave Farm offers interdisciplinary outdoor installations, residencies and fellowships, and a research library. We operate FM radio station WGXC and host many online radio channels. Wave Farm provides fiscal sponsorship, consultation, and grants to artists and organizations. For more information, please visit https://wavefarm.org.

This Month we received new releases from 15 local artists, adding to the 500+ artists and 4k+ tracks in the Local Waves Library! 33 new tracks were added to on-air rotation, with a few notable releases from late 2025 including one of the biggest local releases of last year Hannah Cohen’s Earthstar Mountain (Woodstock) which ended up on many year end lists and has her opening for everyone from CAAMP to Alabama Shakes this summer. Similarly, someone who has been slowly honing their songwriting the last decade, Kingston’s Spero released her first full-length of original material Self-Titled in Nov, with touches of neo-soul and intricate finger-picking guitar. We also added tracks from 2025 releases by Albany based DJ Scotia (“Human Host” is a freaky treat, released on Berlin label Delft), Kingston based J. Ashdown’s sound exploding and mesmerizing "Shape Unto Itself " (on Crude Tapes), and Catskill’s Fascinating Chimera Project Little Wooden Boat which includes a Yo La Tengo-esque take on Madonna’s “Beautiful Stranger.”

But onto more fresh releases, this month saw tracks from Catskill’s Kendra McKinley keeping her run of funky, art-pop going with a guest vocal on Brooklyn producer Homer’s “New Wellness”. An exciting new local label called Sandy Rock Poetry has just launched out of Tivoli, and with a focus on spoken word and experimentation, they have released something truly special from local-legend Brian Dewan (Catskill) with his Curious Sealife album. Speaking of legends, Poughkeepsie Free Jazz pioneer Joe McPhee features on classical guitarist Ayman Fanous forthcoming record, hear one of two tracks “Duo with Joe McPhee” now. Another experimental release that really jumped out at me is this compilation-cum-album from Oneonta based artist Simple, with the sprawling but very engagingly sequenced album “L B”, collaging lo-fi punk rock textures with ambient passages and dark mantra-like lyrics. And finally we added some great singer-songwriter tracks from Allie Chip (Saugerties) with the goofy self-aware lilt of “Not That Cool”, and Mark Donato’s (West Shokan) nerdy and abstract take on folk-rock (think They Might Be Giants unplugged) with last year’s Community Theater release (no relation to the recently re-opened movie house on Main St. in Catskil lof the same name). Oh and I (under moniker LOVESICK) even got the pleasure of adding my own track to the Library for the first time, with a cover I just self-produced of Norma Tanega’s mystical call to action “Now Is The Time.”

-Mike Amari of Chosen Family Presents

Local Waves airs every Friday at 8PM. All local artists are encouraged to send your music into to be added to this ever growing library. Send to music@wgxc.org with ‘‘Local Waves’ in subject, mp3s (320kps) or Bandcamp download codes are preferred!

This month in Local Waves news, we had 10+ new submissions from local artists to add to the Library! Peekskill’s TJ Douglas released a short but sweet lament called “Glory to Change” that they specifically dedicate to “all those killed by ICE” with proceeds benefitting NYLAG. Ulster County’s Two Dark Birds have released their new LP Dreamers of the Golden Dream Vol. 1 (celebrating at Bearsville Theater tonight) and if you’re familiar with their whispery indie-folk you might be surprised to hear the giant drums and electronic fuzz that gives songs like “Girl of Summer” a slightly unhinged vibe. One of my favorite new bands, Kingston’s Bird Week, have dropped another EP of summery, Elephant 6 Collective-y beauts called Rose Marsh, and a new project out of Athens called FlotStudio sent in a track based on some nervy voicemails and their own heartbeat run through effects, called xvoicemail.”

Mikaela Davis (Catskill) / Officially announced new LP on the legendary Kill Rock Stars label, first single, the cosmic country tinged “(Looking Through) Rose Colored Glasses”

Nic Panken (Kingston) / lush, dreamy folk rock track “Dear Companion” from upcoming LP

Zed Star Seven (Beacon) / electro-punk, freelance anthem “Get It In Writing” just in time for 1099 season

Lunar Figurines (Kingston) / genre-defying indie sounds on their debut LP Cracked In Two

Mona Freaka (Woodstock) / new track “Last Song” with major 90s alt-rock vibes

-Mike Amari of Chosen Family Presents

Local Waves airs every Friday at 8PM. All local artists are encouraged to send your music into to be added to this ever growing library. Send to music@wgxc.org with ‘‘Local Waves’ in subject, mp3s (320kps) or Bandcamp download codes are preferred!

Acra, NY–Wave Farm is pleased to announce Lateral Lines, a work led by multimedia artist Marina Zurkow, animal welfare scientist Becca Franks, and Wave Farm’s Executive Director Emeritus Galen Joseph-Hunter, as part of the Simons Foundation’s Triangle Program . This new iteration of the foundation’s Triangle Program is part of their “Infinite Sums” initiative. 

Lateral Lines is an algorithmic radio work that enters the sensory world of carp fish through their lateral line, the sensory organ through which they experience vibration, current and pressure and functions as a sense akin to both human hearing and proprioception. How can we honor and appreciate their perceptual capacities without reducing them to metaphor or generic fish behavior? Built from a database of modular text and sound, each broadcast recombines into a new, tidal iteration. The work treats carp as sensing subjects living within the planet’s thin freshwater film and uses generative audio to explore symmetry, vulnerability and interspecies attention. Lateral Lines will air through Wave Farm’s WGXC, online platforms and the Radia art-radio network.

“Wave Farm is so grateful to the Simons Foundation for supporting this ambitious and multi-faceted project.” said Wave Farm’s Executive Director Emeritus Galen Joseph-Hunter. “Presented as a series of 28-minute radio artworks that take form as a generative Hörspiel, or radio drama, Zurkow’s Lateral Lines wonderfully embodies our organizational mission and vision. Lateral Lines explores radio and transmission as artistic space, and will engage audiences in individual, intimate, and collective experiences via terrestrial radio broadcasts, in-person listening events; and online streaming.”

This work is supported by the Simons Foundation and is part of its “Infinite Sums” initiative. For more information, visit infinitesums.simonsfoundation.org.

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About the Simons Foundation
The Simons Foundation’s mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences. Since its founding in 1994 by Jim and Marilyn Simons, the foundation has been a champion of basic science through grant funding, support for research, and public engagement. The Simons Foundation believes in asking big questions and providing sustained support to researchers working to unravel the mysteries of the universe. 

The Simons Foundation’s Science, Society & Culture division seeks to provide opportunities for people to forge a connection to science — whether for the first time or a lifetime. Through their initiatives, they work to inspire a feeling of awe and wonder, foster connections between people and science, and support environments that provide a sense of belonging. 

About Marina Zurkow
Marina Zurkow engages with research, speculation, and diverse media (software, animation, food, etc.) to foster intimate multispecies and geophysical connections for viewers and participants. Zurkow works as a founding member of the collaborative initiatives More&More, Dear Climate, The Iceberg, and Climoji. Her solo show Parting Worlds, including the 2025 Hyundai Terrace Commission The River is a Circle, was most recently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Zurkow was part of the Simons Foundation’s 2025 Open Interval Cohort, in development for the Lateral Lines project as part of the 2026 “Infinite Sums” initiative. She was a 2022 fellow at Princeton University’s Blue Lab, and received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Rice University, NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She lives in the Hudson Valley, New York, is represented by bitforms gallery, and teaches at NYU.

About Becca Franks
Becca Franks is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at New York University, where she is the Director of WATR-lab and Co-director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program. Bringing an environmental studies lens to questions of animal welfare, her research and teaching explore how science can improve the lives of animals and human-animal relations. She has published over 70 scholarly articles, chapters, and commentaries, specializing in animal behavior, quantitative methods, and aquatic animals.

About Wave Farm
Wave Farm is an international transmission arts organization driven by experimentation with the electromagnetic spectrum. We cultivate creative practices in radio and support artists and nonprofits in their cultural endeavors. Based in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, Wave Farm is a media arts center, media platform, and arts service organization. Wave Farm offers interdisciplinary outdoor installations, residencies and fellowships, and a research library. We operate FM radio station WGXC and host many online radio channels. Wave Farm provides fiscal sponsorship, consultation, and grants to artists and organizations. For more information, please visit wavefarm.org.

Submissions this month included the very cool and vibey new tracks from Newburgh based Hudson Lorde (fans of Jeff Parker / Tortoise check this out), slacker-tinged indie rock from Kingston’s James Kwapisz (formerly of Grampfather), and Poughkeepsie’s Handcastle who is dropping their first track later this week called “Plastic Heart” which is a bit like Tim Buckley singing over Dirty Three about microplastics. Released in 2025, Kingston indie lo-fi outfit $500 sent in their very excellent debut Twelve Eyes, which has a sort of classic college radio sound.

A number of well established local acts are ramping up for exciting album releases this year. Kingston based indie-pop songwriter Al Olender is releasing her long awaited 2nd album The Worrier in February, and just dropped the 3rd lead-in single “Welcome To The Show" (aptly named as she has become known for her ‘Alentine’s’ Day performances at the Old Dutch Church in Kingston, happeing release day 2/13). Local fav Ben Seretan is teaming up with fellow sonic scuba diver John Thayer for a dreamy duo album collab Sunbeam of No Illusion out in March, first single "Watermelon Well” is as gentle as melting snow. And Catskill’s Nate Henricks released two new tracks in January, "Dramaturgy" is available to download for the low low price of $1,000. Times are tough.

And, I’d be remiss if I didnt mention that we have a very special Local Waves In Conversation live taping 2/26 at Avalon Lounge in Catskill (7PM) with WGXC/Wave Farm co-founder Galen Joseph-Hunter as part of the town-wide 15th Anniversary of WGXC celebration!

-Mike Amari of Chosen Family Presents

Local Waves airs every Friday at 8PM. All local artists are encouraged to send your music into to be added to this ever growing library. Send to music@wgxc.org with ‘‘Local Waves’ in subject, mp3s (320kps) or Bandcamp download codes are preferred!

Acra, NY—Wave Farm announced today fifteen grantees for the Fall 2025 round of the Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF) for Organizations, a regrant program with the New York State Council on the Arts. MAAF for Organizations grantees are: Adirondack Film, CultureHub, EMPAC at RPI, Film Forum, Harvestworks, Institute for Electronic Arts (iea) at Alfred University, The Flaherty, LiberArte, Life Stories, Maysles Documentary Center, MITU, New York International Children's Film Festival, Roulette Intermedium, The New Festival, and UnionDocs.

The Media Arts Assistance Fund supports electronic media and film organizations, as well as individual artists, in all regions of New York State. For organizations, MAAF provides funds to support technical strategies for online development as well as to hire outside consultants to support organizational and professional development. MAAF prioritizes organizations that have missions specific to the media arts or dedicate the majority of their programming to technology as an art form. Multi-disciplinary organizations are considered on a case-by-case basis. All applicants must be current NYSCA grantees. Organizations are eligible to receive a maximum of $2,500 for each application opportunity. The biannual application due dates are May 1 and October 1.

FALL 2025 GRANTEES AND PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS
Adirondack Film (Essex County) - Solidifying CRM Technology
Adirondack Film will use MAAF funding for DonorPerfect, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform to build upon donor relationships, attain multi-year gifts, and diversify their fundraising portfolio in order to make a greater impact on the lives of their remote Adirondack community through the media arts.

CultureHub (New York County) - Interface Design for Live Broadcasting
CultureHub will use MAAF funding to support development of LiveLab Broadcaster, an open-source platform for interactive digital performance created in collaboration with creative coders at NYU/ITP. The platform allows an online audience to creatively intervene in the live environment, in a way that brings their presence into the physical space. MAAF support will allow CultureHub to work on designing solutions for edge cases, unexpected limitations, browser compatibility, and bugs that emerge in the testing phase.

EMPAC at RPI (Rensselaer County) - Venue Camera System development in 2025-26
EMPAC will use MAAF funding to support technical development toward online programming and public outreach goals as the organization shifts to a festival model. EMPAC’s goal is to maximize resources for diverse audiences, and to optimize their calendar and expand reach, increasing engagement across all programming. This project will prepare EMPAC for the implementation of a venue camera system, media production, and online publication in order to foster a more inclusive learning community of artists, academics, technologists, and enthusiasts.

Film Forum (New York County) - Capacity Interactive Boot Camp 2025
Film Forum will use MAAF funding to support members of their marketing team in attending the annual boot camp hosted by Capacity Interactive, a digital marketing and consulting firm for the arts. This engagement will help Film Forum continue to guide audience engagement strategy, clarify digital accessibility needs, and keep pace with changing audience expectations and new digital marketing strategies.

Harvestworks (New York County) - Rebranding and Digital Identity Initiative
Harvestworks will use MAAF funding to engage professional designers in the creation of a new brand identity for the organization. Harvestworks will work with outside consultants to develop a comprehensive set of branding assets that will serve as the foundation for public-facing communications. This updated visual identity will better align with their mission of supporting innovative work at the intersection of art and technology, while also attracting the next generation of artists who seek connection, mentorship, and opportunities in emerging media.

Institute for Electronic Arts (iea) (Allegany County) - Experimental Media Arts Guidance & Future Planning
Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University will use MAAF funding to support an engagement with Signal Culture, an organization dedicated to experimental media, tool-building, and artist support structures. The consultation will contribute to organizational and professional development, training for staff, improvements to IEA’s residency program structure, and guidance for the curation, collection, and physical layout of new media technology.

The Flaherty (New York County) - Development of Interactive Hybrid Global Programming
The Flaherty will use MAAF funding to engage an outside consultant in planning the online and hybrid aspects of future Flaherty Film Seminars. Through their hybrid model, the Film Seminars have so far enabled access to programs for people in 48 different countries in total. This technical consultation will help create sustainable, scalable solutions for an expanding global community while maintaining the intimate and impactful aspects of the program.

LiberArte (Queens County) - Strategic Planning Consulting
LiberArte will use MAAF funding to engage Evolution Management Consultants (EMC) to guide a pivotal strategic planning process that will strengthen capacity to create and present time-based and moving-image media art. EMC is a BIPOC-led consulting firm specializing in arts-centered strategic planning and organizational design. EMC will support LiberArte’s organizational and professional development by aligning leadership and infrastructure with an expanding media-arts mission.

Life Stories (New York County) - Consulting for Organizational Development and Expanding Educational Resources
Life Stories will use MAAF funding to engage an outside consultant to strengthen the Life Stories Learning (LSL) platform and expand its capacity to reach diverse audiences. This process will help Life Stories to build internal systems and workflows that enhance how staff curate, organize, and present collections as structured modules of documentary interviews designed for classrooms, researchers, and public audiences.

Maysles Documentary Center (New York County) - Marketing and Design Development Consulting
Maysles Documentary Center will use MAAF funding to support a development plan to improve marketing materials, branding, and overall public presentation. An outside consultant will help ensure consistency across the organization’s multiple platforms, focusing on brand assessment and recommendations, and the development of a style guide to support internal alignment and serve as a key resource as the organization continues to grow and bring on new staff and collaborators.

MITU (Kings County) - Digital Archive Support
MAAF funding will support technical infrastructure of a digital archive project which will allow MITU to preserve their 30-year history of physical texts, images, videos, and other source materials of creative work. Funding will support digitization, and the establishment of robust storage protocols for collection organization.

NewFest (Kings County) - Enhancing Digital Platforms for Virtual Screenings and Access
NewFest will use MAAF funding to enhance their digital infrastructure for online screenings, hybrid programs, and national access initiatives. In recent years, NewFest has launched robust digital programming to complement in-person events, including the Arizona Queer Film Access Initiative, which provided complimentary online access to LGBTQ+ films. NewFest will invest in technical strategies to improve both the artistic and audience experience of digital screenings, beginning with platform optimization, strengthened digital security, and archival infrastructure.

New York International Children’s Film Festival (New York County) - Sensory Inclusive Training and Accessibility Tools
New York International Children’s Film Festival will use MAAF funding to engage an outside consultant to help expand the Festival’s offerings to audiences with disabilities as well as heighten awareness of these offerings. The consultant will provide sensory inclusive training for staff, interns, and volunteers that support the annual Festival. The consultant will also assist NYICFF in creating a written and visual guide centered on accessibility offerings and devising a sensory station on-site at the Festival where accessibility information and sensory toolkits will be available for audience members.

Roulette Intermedium (New York County) - Improving Roulette Media Online
Roulette Intermedium will use MAAF funding to engage Other Means, a digital design firm to help redesign ROULETTE MEDIA. The outlined work will include a website analytics audit, updated user experience and visual design, and an eventual redevelopment of both the front and back end of Roulette’s website.

UnionDocs (Queens County) - Consulting for Organizational Development and Fundraising
UnionDocs will use MAAF funding to engage an outside consultant to guide fundraising strategies to support organizational growth and sustainability. Through research and analysis, professional development, and strategic planning, the consultancy will help UnionDocs engage more deeply with their community of artists and supporters to strengthen the organization’s long-term capacity.

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About the New York State Council on the Arts
The mission of the New York State Council on the Arts is to foster and advance the full breadth of New York State’s arts, culture, and creativity for all. To support the ongoing recovery of the arts across New York State, the Council on the Arts will award over $161 million in FY 2026, serving organizations and artists across all 10 state regions. The Council on the Arts further advances New York's creative culture by convening leaders in the field and providing organizational and professional development opportunities and informational resources. Created by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1960 and continued with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, the Council is an agency that is part of the Executive Branch. For more information on NYSCA, please visit www.arts.ny.gov, and follow NYSCA's Facebook page, on X @NYSCArts and Instagram @NYSCouncilontheArts.

About Wave Farm
Wave Farm is an international transmission arts organization driven by experimentation with the electromagnetic spectrum. We cultivate creative practices in radio and support artists and nonprofits in their cultural endeavors.

Based in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, Wave Farm is a media arts center, media platform, and arts service organization. Wave Farm offers interdisciplinary outdoor installations, residencies and fellowships, and a research library. We operate FM radio station WGXC and host many online radio channels. Wave Farm provides fiscal sponsorship, consultation, and grants to artists and organizations. For more information, please visit https://wavefarm.org.

Arts in Corrections NYS Online Archive Launches
www.artsincorrectionsnys.org

Acra - Wave Farm is pleased to announce the launch of an online archive of artwork created through Arts in Corrections NYS, a program to facilitate and support arts programming inside New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (NYS DOCCS) facilities across New York State. Arts in Corrections NYS is a regrant program of The New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), facilitated by Wave Farm working closely with DOCCS.

The Arts in Corrections website is a dedicated archive for documentation of artworks produced in workshops in 2023 and 2024. The archive showcases a selection of work across multiple genres including songwriting, storytelling, printmaking, sculpture, and writing. Audio and transcripts from interviews between students in AIC workshops are additionally available on the website, and were produced as a collaboration of California Lawyers for the Arts (CLA) and Wave Farm.

Project management of the development of this website was provided by Nicholas Weist, Shandaken Projects Executive Director. Weist has served as an AIC teaching artist at Sullivan and Coxsackie Correctional Facilities since 2023. Weist said, “Shandaken Projects is fortunate to have participated in AIC NYS since its inception. The incarcerated individuals we have worked with through this program have demonstrated immense resiliency, creativity, and vulnerability in the classroom. This website honors their imagination and intelligence. Viewers will be able to listen to interviews with the incarcerated participants, hearing from them directly that there is a critical need for this program in New York State and beyond."

Wave Farm Executive Director Galen Joseph-Hunter said, “We are so pleased to be able to share the work created as part of the Arts in Corrections NYS program with public audiences. This website celebrates the talent and efforts of the individuals participating in AIC workshops, and wouldn’t be possible without the dedication of the program’s teaching artists, the collaboration of DOCCS staff, and the support of NYSCA.”

“Not only does this website document a wonderful portfolio of artwork, but we can also hear the participants themselves speak about the skills and insights they have gained from their artmaking,” said Erika Mallin, Executive Director of NYSCA. “This new website offers the public an opportunity to learn more about this critical program. NYSCA is so proud to support this initiative and commends Wave Farm and DOCCS for their incredible work”

New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision Commissioner Daniel F. Martuscello III said, “Rehabilitation and successful reintegration into the community have long been central to the mission of the Department. In 2023, New York State Council On The Arts (NYSCA) and DOCCS partnered to introduce the Arts in Corrections project to the incarcerated population across a number of New York State correctional facilities. Wave Farm has played a key role as NYSCA’s grant partner, helping to bring music production, storytelling, body movement, painting, and other creative and impactful arts-based programming to those in our care.

The Department is proud of the enrichment these programs have offered participants as they navigate the rehabilitation process. The artwork created not only reflects the depth and individuality of those in our custody, but also offers the public a powerful glimpse into their talents and potential.”

In 2023 and 2024, Arts in Corrections supported arts programming inside approximately 10 New York State facilities. In 2025, Arts in Corrections plans to expand to 15 facilities across New York State, supporting in-person workshops that provide system-impacted individuals with once-a-week programming led by teaching artists in a variety of disciplines including the visual arts, electronic media/film, music, movement, and literature.

About the New York State Council on the Arts
The mission of the New York State Council on the Arts is to foster and advance the full breadth of New York State’s arts, culture and creativity for all. In FY 2026, the Council on the Arts will award over $161 million, serving organizations and artists across all 10 state regions. The Council on the Arts further advances New York's creative culture by convening leaders in the field and providing organizational and professional development opportunities and informational resources. Created by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1960 and continued with the support of Governor Hochul and the New York State Legislature, the Council is an agency that is part of the Executive Branch. For more information on NYSCA, please visit arts.ny.gov, and follow NYSCA's Facebook page, on X @NYSCArts and Instagram @NYSCouncilontheArts.

About NYS DOCCS
DOCCS’ mission is to improve public safety by providing a continuity of appropriate treatment services in safe and secure facilities where the needs of the incarcerated population are addressed and where individuals under its' custody are successfully prepared for release and parolees under community supervision receive supportive services that facilitate the successful completion of their sentence. DOCCS recognizes the therapeutic value of offering arts-based programming to individuals in enhancing communication skills, supporting healthy forms of expression and increasing self-awareness. DOCCS’ vision is to enhance public safety by having incarcerated persons return home under supportive supervision less likely to revert to criminal behavior. By affording individuals the opportunity to participate in creative and expressive programming, DOCCS is seeking to enrich the incarceration experience and bolster the success rates of those returning to the community.

About Wave Farm
Wave Farm is an international transmission arts organization driven by experimentation with the electromagnetic spectrum. Wave Farm cultivates creative practices in radio and supports artists and nonprofits in their cultural endeavors. Based in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, Wave Farm is a media arts center, media platform, and arts service organization. Wave Farm offers interdisciplinary outdoor installations, residencies and fellowships, and a research library. Wave Farm operates FM radio station WGXC and hosts many online radio channels. Wave Farm provides fiscal sponsorship, consultation, and grants to artists and organizations.

For more information about Arts in Corrections NYS, click here.

Acra, NY—Wave Farm announced today eighteen grantees for the Spring 2025 round of the Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF) for Organizations, a regrant program with the New York State Council on the Arts. MAAF for Organizations grantees are: Adirondack Film, American Documentary, Buffalo International Film Festival, Chicken & Egg Films, CultureHub, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Firelight Media, HUDSY, Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA), Jacob Burns Film Center, Maysles Documentary Center, Millennium Film Workshop, Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center, Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center, Third World Newsreel, Upstate Films, Women Make Movies, and Woodstock Film Festival.

The Media Arts Assistance Fund supports electronic media and film organizations, as well as individual artists, in all regions of New York State. For organizations, MAAF provides funds to support technical strategies for online development as well as to hire outside consultants to support organizational and professional development. MAAF prioritizes organizations that have missions specific to the media arts or dedicate the majority of their programming to technology as an art form. Multi-disciplinary organizations are considered on a case-by-case basis. All applicants must be current NYSCA grantees. Organizations are eligible to receive a maximum of $2,500 for each application opportunity. The biannual application deadlines are May 1 and October 1.

SPRING 2025 GRANTEES AND PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS
Adirondack Film (Essex County) - Strategic Planning and Fundraising Consulting
Adirondack Film will use MAAF funding to work with consultants in order to build and implement a new CRM database, expanding the capacity of the organization to modernize and professionalize fundraising strategies. Adirondack Film strives to build upon donor relationships, attain multi-year gifts, and diversify their fundraising portfolio in order to make a greater impact on the lives of their remote Adirondack community through the media arts.

American Documentary (Kings County) - Website Enhancement and Digital Strategy Consulting
American Documentary will use MAAF funding to complete a comprehensive redesign of its website. This design will modernize the website’s interface, enhance the user experience, and provide the AmDoc team with greater functionality and autonomy in managing content. This new design will improve communication and marketing of AmDoc’s mission, films, and impact initiatives to the public, showcase AmDoc’s 38-year legacy by highlighting archival footage and making it available to the public, and strengthen fundraising efforts.

Buffalo International Film Festival (Erie County) - Fundraising and Development Consulting
Buffalo International Film Festival will use MAAF funding to support organizational development through the engagement of an experienced fundraising and development consultant who will help assess and analyze BIFF’s budget, needs, and funding ecosystems in order to create a three-year Fundraising and Development Plan. The plan will improve and increase organization-wide fundraising efforts to help to strengthen BIFF's infrastructure and expand the impact of its mission-driven programming, improve efficiency, and deepen engagement with and support for the communities that BIFF serves.

Chicken & Egg Films (Kings County) - Organizational Development Consulting
Chicken & Egg Films will use MAAF funding to support the development of their first Theory of Change (TOC), a strategic internal project aimed at both deepening the equity vision for the organization and providing alignment and clarity for program staff. Chicken & Egg Films will hire a consultant to collaboratively refine the TOC draft with program staff and board members, in order to align Chicken & Egg’s organizational strategy to ensure an elevation of underrepresented voices in documentary filmmaking with intentionality and integrity.

CultureHub (New York) - Technical Strategies for Online Development
CultureHub will use MAAF funding to support the redesign of their website, including a transition from Squarespace to an open-source Content Management System (CMS). The project’s aim is to better communicate the organization’s mission and strengths to their audience, by using a platform with more design flexibility. CultureHub’s goal is to ensure that their 10+ year digital archive of past projects (including text, photos, and video) remains affordable to maintain in the long term. This project will also enable more creative, browser-based work on the site, integrating with their live streaming platform.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) (New York) - Strategy and Fundraising Consulting
Electronic Arts Intermix will use MAAF funding to support long-term strategy and fundraising efforts as they further develop the institutional reach and technological capabilities of their Educational Streaming Service (ESS), a pioneering digital resource for students and library users in the United States and worldwide that provides direct streaming access to EAI’s collection initially launched in 2013. Along with new UX and infrastructural developments, this plan includes a pilot project with the City University of New York (CUNY) educational system.

Firelight Media (New York) - Online Strategy and Engagement Consulting
Firelight Media will use MAAF funding to support a strategic initiative to strengthen digital infrastructure and audience engagement systems. As a leading nonprofit supporting nonfiction filmmakers of color, Firelight Media has experienced significant growth in recent years, expanding a suite of programs and community of artists. This project is an investment in expert-led technical development to keep pace with this growth—and to ensure that their online platforms serve both the organization’s mission and audiences effectively.

HUDSY (Ulster County) - Organizational Development and Cultural Sensitivity Training
HUDSY Community Project Inc will use MAAF funding to work with consultants to build organizational capacity to strengthen core competencies, support an environment that holds a diverse team of employees, and boost team cohesion, focusing on a comprehensive cultural sensitivity training for staff.

Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA) (Allegany County) - Experimental Media Arts Guidance & Future Planning, in partnership with Signal Culture
Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University will use MAAF funding to engage Signal Culture, an organization dedicated to experimental media, tool-building, and artist support structures. The consultation will contribute to organizational and professional development, training for staff, and guidance for the curation, collection, and physical layout of new media technology.

Jacob Burns Film Center (Westchester County) - Strategic Brand Identity Development
Jacob Burns Film Center will use MAAF funding to support a brand identity development initiative. As JBFC approaches its 25th anniversary, this project aims to more closely align the organization’s public image with the goals and values of their strategic plan.

Maysles Documentary Center (New York County) - Marketing and Design Development Consulting
Maysles Documentary Center will use MAAF funding to support Phase One of a development plan to improve marketing materials, branding, and overall public presentation. The consultant will help ensure consistency across the organization’s multiple platforms.

Millennium Film Workshop (Kings County) - Development of a Monthly Experimental A/V Performance Series
Millennium Film Workshop will use MAAF funding to support technical development in support of web and live streaming infrastructure and towards establishing a subscription with restream.io, which will expand their distribution network for live streamed programs.

Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center (Suffolk County) - Maintenance and Revisions of New Website Development
Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center will use MAAF funding to support a new phase of development for its website, to improve functionality, accessibility, and user experience, as well as communication and promotion of the organization’s special film programs and fundraising events.

Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center (Erie County) - Technical Strategies for Online Development
Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center will use MAAF funding to hire a consultant who will propose options and plans for a new website for Squeaky Wheel based on research and interviews with staff and stakeholders. This process will help the organization move forward with a redevelopment of their website, improving functionality and expanding capacity for Squeaky Wheel’s wide range of programs.

Third World Newsreel (New York County) - Consultant for Organizational Development
Third World Newsreel will use MAAF funding to support organizational development by integrating their new website with a digital marketing strategy. Third World Newsreel will engage an outside consultant for a two-phase project, first evaluating the website and digital marketing channels to prioritize which channels to connect and interact with their website, and then implementing the resulting new digital marketing strategy.

Upstate Films (Dutchess and Ulster Counties) - Stronger Online Marketing Strategies
Upstate Films will use MAAF funding to support the creation of stronger online marketing to strengthen search-engine optimization practices. A consultant will review, reconfigure, and improve their website in terms of its interface with search engines. The intention of this work is to help inform the public about Upstate Films’ programs and to increase participation in programs.

Women Make Movies (New York County) - Organizational Capacity and Strategy for 2025 and Beyond
Women Make Movies will use MAAF funding to hire a consultant organization to assist with developing a fundraising strategy, locate and secure new grants, and advise on how to best diversify revenue streams and build capacity as an organization in order to integrate new revenue streams into their overall organizational plan.

Woodstock Film Festival (Ulster County) - Unifying Organizational Technology for Greater Efficiency and Impact
Woodstock Film Festival will use MAAF funding to engage a consultant to optimize the use of the project management platform Monday.com, further integrating and connecting various software systems into a cohesive, user-friendly platform. WFF’s goal is to improve efficiency across departments, ensure smoother onboarding for seasonal staff and volunteers, eliminate redundancies, and enable more accurate, real-time tracking of metrics, engagement, and donations.

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About the New York State Council on the Arts
The mission of the New York State Council on the Arts is to foster and advance the full breadth of New York State’s arts, culture and creativity for all. To support the ongoing recovery of the arts across New York State, the Council on the Arts will award $162 million in FY2025, serving organizations and artists across all 10 of the state’s regions. The Council on the Arts further advances New York's creative culture by convening leaders in the field and providing organizational and professional development opportunities and informational resources. Created by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1960 and continued with the support of Governor Hochul and the New York State Legislature, the Council is an agency that is part of the Executive Branch. For more information on NYSCA, please visit www.arts.ny.gov, and follow NYSCA's Facebook page, on X @NYSCArts and Instagram @NYSCouncilontheArts.

About Wave Farm
Wave Farm is an international transmission arts organization driven by experimentation with the electromagnetic spectrum. We cultivate creative practices in radio and support artists and nonprofits in their cultural endeavors.

Based in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, Wave Farm is a media arts center, media platform, and arts service organization. Wave Farm offers interdisciplinary outdoor installations, residencies and fellowships, and a research library. We operate FM radio station WGXC and host many online radio channels. Wave Farm provides fiscal sponsorship, consultation, and grants to artists and organizations. For more information, please visit https://wavefarm.org.

Acra, NY—Wave Farm is pleased to announce eighteen grantees for the 2025 Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF) for Artists, a regrant program with the New York State Council on the Arts.

Selected through a competitive panel process from an application pool of 135 proposals, the 2025 MAAF Grantees are: James Autery, Lea Bertucci, Janet Biggs, AC Diamond, Sarah Drury, Tamar Ettun, JDSH, Gregory Kalliche, Victoria Keddie, Carolyn Lambert, Chico MacMurtrie, Keli Safia Maksud, Caroline Voagen Nelson, Brydie O'Connor, Will Rawls, Nimco Sheikhaden, Nina Sobell, and Elia Vargas.

The Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF) for Artists provides New York State media artists up to $7,500 for the completion and/or public presentation of new works in all genres of sound and moving image art, including emergent technology. Grant awards assist artists in completing new work, reaching public audiences, and advancing artistic exploration and public engagement in the media arts.

Detailed information about the eighteen 2025 MAAF for Artists funded projects is available below.

GRANTEES AND PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS

James Autery - Agnosia (Columbia County)
Agnosia is an experimental narrative short film about a young woman named Neva, who was born blind and has surgery to see for the first time in her life. Despite her courage and being very observant, she has a difficult time coming to terms with an overwhelming new sense that was far from what she expected while blind. A visiting psychologist studying her case helps her come to appreciate the beauty of her new sense and overcome the fear of her new, unknown world. Shot from a first person perspective, Agnosia attempts to show what it might look like to see for the first time. MAAF funding will cover submission fees to film festivals and assist in the public presentation of this film.

James Autery began photographing and printing in the darkroom in high school. He attended the University of Missouri-Columbia to study photojournalism, becoming a finalist in the Gordon Parks International Photo Competition in 2006. After dropping out of college, he started documenting train hoppers. In 2014 he became a full-time freelance photographer and video artist and made a mini documentary with the organization Project Prakash on their work studying the ability of prediction among children with autism. In 2017 he started filming for TIME. In 2018 he exhibited alongside Carolee Schneemann for the Hudson Winter Walk and filmed her in 2019. He has had exhibitions with Tanja Grunert Gallery, Second Ward Foundation, Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Private Public Gallery, Areté Venue and Gallery, Next to Nothing, Hudson Eye, Hudson Hall, Minneapolis Photo Center, Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, and has had work listed on Paddle8. He has been an artist in residence with Second Ward Foundation for 6 years, during which he completed a 46 minute film, Mantra, an experimental documentary about the meditation of making art. Autery was a 2020 Media Arts Assistance Fund grantee and was a recipient of the Baer Faxt 2020 Artist Relief Fund.

Lea Bertucci - The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity (Ulster County)

Crystalline, minimal and dissonant, The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity is a new sound artwork and installation for multichannel speakers, electronics, and sampled early flutes. Featuring renowned flutist, early music scholar, and member of the medieval group Sequentia, Norbert Rodenkirchen, this work reaches back through the spans of history and catapults ancient music into an immersive present. A haunting contemplation of time, duration and memory that explores the phenomena of human hearing and evokes the primeval and futuristic simultaneously, in these waning days of the Anthropocene. MAAF Funding will support completion of this project, including documentation of the performance for preservation and distribution.

Lea Bertucci is an experimental musician whose works revolve around electronic and spatial extensions of instrument and voice. In addition to her longstanding practice performing with woodwinds, she has created compositions for strings, brass, percussion and other instruments, often incorporating electronics and multichannel sound. With an ear toward site-responsiveness and acoustics, her work has expanded toward installation and non-linear presentations of her music. Her discography spans over a decade, with a number of full-length solo works and collaborative projects, most recently with Lawrence English, Olivia Block, and Ben Vida. She has performed and exhibited extensively within the US and internationally with presenters such as The Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art New York, The Metropolitan Museum, Blank Forms, Gagosian Gallery, Pioneer Works, The Kitchen, The Walker Museum, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Tempo Reale in Florence, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, ReWire Festival and Unsound Festival Krakow.

Janet Biggs - Eclipse (Amazon, Sept. 7, 1858) (Kings County)
Eclipse (Amazon, Sept. 7, 1858) is an immersive multi-channel video installation of sights and sounds that takes the viewer deep into the Amazonian rainforest, full of strangler figs and howler monkeys struggling for survival. Imagery follows the path of a total solar eclipse that occurred in 1858, one hundred years before Biggs was conceived. The work originates in Biggs’ memories of her mother’s struggles with Sundowning Syndrome, a symptom of dementia that interferes with the ability to distinguish day for night. After her mother’s death, Biggs began a four year journey, placing herself in multiple paths of totality as she sought to reconnect with her mother. The path of totality has been described as a time when the entire biome reverses day for night. The installation concludes in a cloud forest, where expectations are inverted and otherworldly connections made possible. MAAF funding will support completion and public exhibition of this work, including video/audio editing and sound spatialization.

Janet Biggs is a research-based, interdisciplinary artist working in video, film and performance. She is recognized for her immersive and multidisciplinary approach, often incorporating sound, moving images, and language to create new perspectives and possibilities. Biggs’ work focuses on individuals in extreme landscapes or situations, navigating the territory between art, science and new technologies. She has worked with institutions from NOAA to NASA and CERN. Biggs’ work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and exhibited at museums and institutions worldwide. Biggs works with Cristin Tierney Gallery, NYC; Galerie Analix Forever, Geneva; CONNERSMITH, Washington, D. C., and Hyphen Hub, NYC.

AC Diamond - Radio Oracle– Governors Island (Kings County)
Governors Island, historically known as “Paggank” to the Lenape people, is a former military base and current cultural site in New York Harbor that hosts a range of ecological, artistic, and civic programs. AC Diamond’s Radio Oracle — Governors Island is a site-specific sound installation that draws on recorded radio signals captured around the island—from marine, aviation, and transit transmissions—as source material for a generative sound installation. These recordings are analyzed using feature extraction techniques that drive machine learning-driven behaviors. Ceramic resonators, created in collaboration with sculptor Halo Linn, serve as both sculptural objects and acoustic filters, diffusing sound across a dispersed array of handmade speaker enclosures. The installation responds to the electromagnetic, material, and political layers of the island. MAAF funding will support the presentation of the work as part of the Morphologies exhibition curated by Ana Anu + AC Diamond for Forest for Trees Collective in Nolan Park House 7B on Governors Island, open from May 17 - June 22, 2025.

AC Diamond is an intermedia artist whose work sonifies the unheard and unseen—giving voice to the ephemeral, the invisible, and the easily overlooked. Their practice unfolds across galleries, theaters, DIY venues, and public spaces, and spans sound, performance, interactive technology, archival systems, and creative direction. An archivist for over a decade, AC is the founder of Critical Interval, an archival consultancy focused on developing workflows for media-rich art collections. They also teach computer music and interactive media as Adjunct Faculty in Music Technology at NYU Steinhardt. Their creative work has been supported by the Media Arts Assistance Fund (2025), a NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Music/Sound (2022–23), and a Van Lier Fellowship at Roulette Intermedium (2020). AC holds an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College (2018) and a BA from Bennington College (2010).

Sarah Drury - The Gowanus Augmented Reality Walking Tour (Kings County)
Sarah Drury's current project, The Gowanus Augmented Reality Walking Tour App, is a hybrid virtual-physical form of situated storytelling for smart devices. Gowanus AR uses mixed reality to invite the visitor to make connections between vivid representations of the past and the current moment of their sensory experiences. The Gowanus Canal is a famous post-industrial Superfund site, now re-zoned for high rise development as Brooklyn's newest high rent district. The Tour includes the Underground Water Ways Soundwalk, where voices from the past murmur and sing from underground springs that still run beneath our feet. The Tour leads visitors through this contested location, exploring watery thinking and watery embodiment as a new urbanist paradigm. MAAF Funding will support the completion of the work for the production of a downloadable app, as well as funding guided tour events for community audiences.

Sarah Drury is a media artist working in video art and installation, projection design for theater, sensor-based interactive projects, curatorial practice and augmented reality storytelling. Her projects often explore feminist and posthumanist embodiment via media technologies, devising critical narrative approaches using layered visual, sonic and/or textual forms. Drury's works have been presented nationally and internationally, including The Walking Project, a collaborative performance project on non-normative embodiment using wearable devices (with support from the National Endowment for the Arts) and interactive video design for Violet Fire: a Multimedia Opera About Nikola Tesla, presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival and the National Theater of Belgrade. She has presented her work and writing at new media exhibition sites and conferences including the International Symposium for Electronic Arts (ISEA), the Stanford Meaningful XR Conference, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, the Cornell Sound Cultures Symposium, SIGGRAPH, the Brooklyn Museum, The Kitchen, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the Worldwide Video Festival and Hallwalls. Drury is an associate professor in the Temple University Film & Media Arts Department.

Tamar Ettun - IVF Documents (Kings County)
IVF Documents is a personal reimagining of an ancient healing ritual, addressing the somatic, emotional, and physical realities of In Vitro Fertilization. The piece features a group of people undergoing IVF or who are postmenopausal. In the video, people move with large bags filled with natural dyes in an empty pool in Fort Greene, referring to the derivation of IVF medications from hormones found in the urine of postmenopausal people. The video also incorporates animations using frames from the footage, alongside printed genetic testing results and medical bills. Ultimately, this work aims to establish a visual language for an experience that our culture continues to find difficult to articulate. MAAF funding will support completion expenses including color corrections, animation, and audio mix, in preparation for public presentation in 2026.

Tamar Ettun (she/they) creates immersive textile installations, sculptures, drawings, videos, and performances that reflect on somatic empathy––the process of responding to others through sensory-based, embodied experiences––in relation to trauma healing rituals. Ettun’s research-based and community engaged work was exhibited and performed at The Ford Foundation, The Walker Art Center, Pioneer Works, The Chinati Foundation, The Shelburne Museum, Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, The Watermill Center, Art Omi Sculpture Garden, PERFORMA, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Jewish Museum, and Sculpture Center. Ettun has received many awards and fellowships including support from The Pollock Krasner Foundation, Interlude Artist Residency, Fountainhead, Moca Tucson, Stoneleaf Retreat, MacDowell Fellowship, Franklin Furnace, Iaspis, Art Production Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Triangle Arts Association, Abrons Art Center and RECESS. Ettun is the founder of The Moving Company, an artist collective that created performance art with sculpture in public spaces, and a social engagement project with Brooklyn teens hosted by The Brooklyn Museum. Amongst other long term projects, Ettun’s multidisciplinary work Lilit the Empathic Demon has since 2020 explored the insidious side of empathy, empathy fatigue, trauma-healing modalities, and astrology as storytelling through text messages to a growing community. Ettun’s work has most recently been included in the new sculpture anthology “Great Women Sculptors” published by Phaidon Press (2024). She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University.

JDSH - Co/lapse ​​(New York County)
Part essay, part documentary, Co/lapse adopts image-making processes tasked with the recognition of their subjects (like mugshots or some religious painting) in order to consider the formal and political entanglements of such practices. Conceptually, the work is made by exploring three interpretations of the concept of “recognition.” Each of these interpretations takes shape through the voice of a different person: a translator, a photography historian, and a migrant living and working in New York City. The voices and presences of these characters are braided throughout the film in order to form a layered image/discourse. In the end, Co/lapse attempts to use forms of image-making to consider the making (and most importantly, the potential unmaking) of social forms. MAAF funding will support final post-production in preparation for public presentation.

JDSH is an artist and wannabe translator. He works with the entanglement of narrative and image-making processes. Using photography, film, installation, and writing, he engages with practices of erratic positionality operating inside seemingly closed representation systems. The portrayal of these engagements often takes place at the intersection of the camera’s contradictory condition: between its purported objectivity and its propensity for deceit. Informed by photography’s history as a tool to regulate citizens and their movement, his work muddles established modes of identification by considering them against unmeasurable forms: fiction, memory, translation, and magical realism hinder those devices tasked with supervising self and belonging—such as passport photographs, migration regulations, biographical information, or national borders.

Gregory Kalliche - Anvil (Kings County)
Anvil is an exhibition centered around a 3D-modeled and animated video exploring the friction between simulated digital material and the principles of physics which govern them. The video is accompanied by a synchronized lighting program and multi-channel sound component, as well as a group of layered animation cels. The exhibition's architecture reflects digital rigging concepts: skeletal exterior walls display composited fragments as cells, while the fully-skinned interior serves as a container for rendered video. MAAF funding will support fabrication and supplies costs related to the installation as well as a public outreach event that will take place during the run of the exhibition.

Gregory Kalliche is an artist living in Queens, New York, working in Brooklyn. His work extends digital media into spatial arrangements of interconnected components featuring sculpture, sound, light, and electricity. This exchange between modes of image-making and image-presentation offers a way to explore how ideas are consumed both subliminally and explicitly in physical space. Recent exhibitions include Riddles, USA; Hangar Y, Meudon; Fall River MOCA, Massachusetts; PWA, Brooklyn; Exo Exo, Paris; and FRAC Grand Large, Dunkirk.

Victoria Keddie - Drift Choir (Kings County)
Drift Choir is a transmission-based system connecting Athens, New York, Berlin, and Bogotá in a month-long exchange of sound and image, running from May 1–30, 2025. It forms a closed-circuit network where listening, response, and acoustic presence constitute the core of participation. Rather than privileging clarity, efficiency, or reach, Drift Choir explores presence and human connection through a polyphonic play of space—where signal and noise, voice and place, dissolve into one another. The system amplifies involuntary gestures, ambient interference, and environmental resonance as expressive forms of communication. Through real-time, two-way channels, participants across cities engage in shared live programming and informal, drifting exchanges, forming a distributed intimacy that resists simplification. Here, interruption and distortion are not errors, but vital textures—carrying not just messages, but atmospheres. MAAF funding will support the post-production and public presentation of this work.

Victoria Keddie is an artist working with sound, video, and performance, examining acoustic phenomena and language. Her current projects focus on the complexities of phonology and the sonic dimensions of speculative architecture. She co-directed E.S.P. TV for over a decade, exploring televisual performance. Her work has been presented internationally, with recent fellowships from NYSCA/NYFA for Music/Sound (2022), the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (2023), and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Sound Art, and Experimental Music (2024). Keddie was a highlighted speaker and performer at the Salon Sophie Charlotte, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften in January 2025. She is a guest composer at EMS, Stockholm, in June and will be part of Biennale Son, Switzerland, in September 2025. Video works are distributed through Lightcone (FR) and The Filmmakers Co-op (US). Sound work is released with Raster Media (DE), Chaikin Records (US), and Fridman Gallery (NYC/US).

Carolyn Lambert - the trees, the brook, the air, the work (Ulster County)
the trees, the brook, the air, the work is a multi-channel video essay centered on the conditions of scientific research in this present moment. Recordings of lab technicians collecting samples, monitoring lab equipment, and traversing the watershed form the backbone of this piece set in Hubbard Brook in New Hampshire's White Mountains, an experimental forest known for its collection of ecological data and contributions to public policy. MAAF Funding will support completion expenses and installation development.

Carolyn Lambert is an artist working in video, installation and performance. Her work focuses on the increasing precarity of ecological and social relations in the wake of capitalist exploitation. Lambert has exhibited at venues including the Drawing Center, Picture Theory, and SculptureCenter (New York). Screenings of her work have occurred at the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück (Germany), Bomb Factory (UK), and MUMOK (Vienna, AU).

Chico MacMurtrie - Dual Pneuma (Kings County)
Dual Pneuma is an interactive performance and site-specific installation composed of soft robotic performers and several sound-based terracotta sculptures. The soft-robotic performers evoke a humanoid body with four limbs that allow for a transition from quadrupedal to organic form and motion. Composed of inflatable, high-tensile fabric muscles, the artwork is capable of assuming a wide range of human, animal, and insect-like positions. The ceramic sculptures are cast directly from the soft-robotic figure. Compressed air will be channeled through them to produce whistling sounds, sonifying the artwork in reference to the water and wind-based huaco instruments of early Mesoamerican cultures. MAAF funding will support the completion of this project, especially the integration of computer-based sound and movement control.

Since the 1980s, Chico MacMurtrie has explored the intersection of art and technology through large-scale robotic sculptures, installations, and performances. A Guggenheim Fellow and Creative Capital Grantee, he works out of the “Robotic Church,” a former Norwegian Seamen’s Church in Brooklyn housing 50 of his percussive and sonic robotic sculptures. His ongoing “Border Crossers” project—a series of inflatable robotic performances along the U.S.-Mexico border—continues to foster interdisciplinary collaboration across institutions and border communities.

Keli Safia Maksud - Archē (ἀρχή) (Kings County)
Archē (ἀρχή) explores thresholds as a Third Space—a transitory space that blurs binaries such as inside/outside and public/private. Drawing from the Door of No Return—the monuments marking the forced departure of Africans onto slave ships—the installation features archways and doorways embedded with sensory-responsive elements that react to movement, light, or environmental shifts. Informed by the political philosopher Erin Manning’s concept of bodies as “relational matrices” that complicate strict oppositions between inside and outside, Archē (ἀρχή) considers how space is composed in and through movement and stillness and via a range of technologies and experienced through different sensory registers. MAAF funding will support completion of this work in preparation for public presentation at Smack Mellon.

Keli Safia Maksud is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working in sound, sculpture, installation, text, printmaking and embroidery. Concerned with histories of colonial encounters and their effects on memory, Maksud’s practice favors the space of in-between and its threshold and works towards destabilizing received histories in order to expose fictions of the state. Maksud earned her BFA in Painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, a Diploma in Art and Curatorial Studies at the New Centre for Research and Practice, and an MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. Her work has been shown at the Cue Art Foundation, Goodman Gallery, Salon 94, Huxley Parlour, Bamako Biennial, National Museum of Contemporary Art - Seoul, Galería Nueva and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil.

Caroline Voagen Nelson - Change for a Ride (Queens County)
Change for a Ride is a media installation incorporating projection mapping of animations on a sculpture built from recycled takeout containers. The piece explores the relationship of value and the environment through a conveyor belt animation about the history of currency during antiquity. An animated passageway of water appears on the glowing sculpture and the current pulls various forms of money along the ride. The etymology of currency, root latin word “currēns”, means to travel through, and its meaning extends to the currents of water and electricity. The sculpture is built to reference blueprints of an amusement park dark ride and a pinball machine; a nod to the facade of an entertainment spectacle to attract viewers. The ride includes 12 chapters, or loops, of currency––including coins from Ancient Rome, giant stones from the Island of Yap, Cowrie Shells from Egypt, and glass beads from Africa. The projection mapping layers animations on three levels, showing a macro view of the currency on the ride and a micro detailed view projected on the ground around the sculpture. A soundscape within the sculpture is created by sound designer Chris Burke. As we continue down this digital, plastic ride with intangible cash flow in today’s economic climate, Change for A Ride is a reminder of the origins of measuring value––questioning how we equate what’s valuable and its connection with the land. MAAF Funding will support completion of this work for its premiere at PS 122 Gallery’s exhibition, Roots & Routes: Tracings of Time, on view from June 7 through June 29, 2025.

Caroline Voagen Nelson is a media artist working in animation, digital art, and installation. Her work has a collaged, atmospheric aesthetic that brings to life moments from history, mythology, and memory. She deconstructs and rebuilds archives and environments to create surreal recollections of the past in the moving image form. Nelson works as a professor teaching Digital and Media Arts in New York City.

Brydie O'Connor - THE ROAMING CENTER FOR MAGNETIC ALTERNATIVES (Kings County)
THE ROAMING CENTER FOR MAGNETIC ALTERNATIVES is a short documentary following a mobile archiving center in a cargo trailer as it crosses the USA to digitize home video VHS tapes of LGBTQ+ folks who documented their own lives on video. In real time digitizing sessions, people watch their own histories as they are preserved, and give us a broader look into queer life since the 1980s. This film takes a road trip through the past and gives us a glimpse of an ever-expanding queer archive to come in the future. MAAF Funding will support completion of the film, collaborating with musicians, a sound designer, and colorist, as well as securing archival licensing and setting up community screenings.

Brydie O’Connor (she/her) is a New York based filmmaker. Her work activates archives through queering storytelling structures within the nonfiction space. Brydie’s work has been presented at The Museum of Modern Art, BFI, & DOC NYC, among other festivals and galleries worldwide. Most recently, Brydie was selected as the recipient of the Hulu/Kartemquin Accelerator, and she was an inaugural fellow in the UFO (Untitled Filmmaker Organization) Short Film Lab (2023-2024). She is a graduate of The George Washington University, and has developed her work at the Provincetown Film Society LGBTQ+ Filmmakers Residency (2024) and the On:View Residency (2024) in Savannah, GA.

Will Rawls - [siccer] (Kings County)
[siccer] is a multimedia video and sound installation about the photographic capture of black bodies in mass media and uses stop-motion animation as a filmmaking technique. The installation will be presented in New York in the fall of 2025. The work features several stop-motion videos, starring real people instead of animated figurines. In the creation of the films, the performers froze every time the shutter closed and improvised in the gaps between photographs, thus rescripting the terms through which blackness and queerness are made visible. The durational stop-motion films are projected on a series of green screens, thus creating layers of shadows/censorship as the work evolves. The sound art was developed around the rhythmic and incessant sound of the onstage camera clicks. This creates a rhythmic backdrop against which sound artists Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (mixing live through Ableton) and Holland Andrews manipulate field recordings from swamps, original voice loops and electronic loops to create a sense of anxiety and distortion. The result is a saturated, sonic swamp environment that eerily slips between familiar and abstract. The show considers how Black gestures are relentlessly documented, distorted, and circulated in lens-based media. MAAF Funding will support the completion and public presentation of this work, including a re-design and reconstruction of the installation for its premiere in New York.

Will Rawls is a multidisciplinary choreographer whose practice encompasses dance, video, sculpture, works on paper and installation. Rawls' choreography explores language and gesture to stage performances of black presence and becoming. Rawls has presented solo exhibitions at 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023), Art Basel (2023), Adams + Ollman (2022) and a multi-part installation, Everlasting Stranger, at the Henry Art Gallery (2021). He has also presented at the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, Performa 15, Danspace Project, The Chocolate Factory Theater, High Line Art, Walker Art Center, REDCAT, the 10th Berlin Biennale, and the Hessel Museum at Bard College.

Nimco Sheikhaden - Exodus (Bronx County)
Exodus serves as a portrait of two women, Trinity Copeland and Assia Serrano, who both face unique challenges following decades of incarceration and interrogates the broader societal and systemic forces that have shaped their lives. Exodus explores their struggles to rebuild their identities, relationships, and futures, while contending with the structural obstacles that continue to shadow their reentry. Through their stories, the film examines the enduring impact of the justice system, offering a profound look at resilience, healing, and the journey towards building a dignified life. MAAF funding will support the post-production and public presentation of this work.

Nimco Sheikhaden is a Bronx-based filmmaker. Her current project, Exodus, executive produced by Geeta Gandbhir, Blair Foster, and Rudy Valdez, premiered at the 2025 SXSW Film Festival. She produced the new iteration of Eyes on the Prize, a continuation of the seminal series, and previously produced HBOs award-winning Black & Missing. Her work spans major platforms like HBO and Netflix, working with renowned filmmakers such as Sam Pollard, Alex Gibney, and Shaka King.

Nina Sobell - GammaTime (New York County)
GammaTime, in collaboration with Ed Bear, will be a real-time participatory brainwave drawing performance. GammaTime aims to create a foundation for understanding and experiencing gamma brain waves as well as other brain waves through art and music. By engaging with the installation, participants will not only gain insights into their own brain wave activity and each other’s, but also experience the potential cognitive and emotional benefits of 40 Hz gamma stimulation. The project seeks to inspire, educate and provide a platform for creative exploration, ultimately contributing to the broader discourse on the intersection of art and neuroscience. MAAF funding will support the exhibition of this work later this year.

Nina Sobell is a multi-platform artist and electronic medium. Sobell originated Brain Wave Drawings, the synchrony of brainwaves between two or more people creating a combined physical and mental portrait by visualizing non-verbal communication interactively in 1973. She has been a pioneer in video work and Brain-Computer Interfaces, she created the first live interactive telerobotic web performance, and developed the first mobile webcam at NYU’s Center for Advanced Technology. Sobell was invited by Joseph Beuys to speak about her social sculpture Videophone Voyeur at Documenta 6. Her work has been exhibited at or is in the collection of: Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, Indexical Gallery, Santa Cruz, MUDAM, Luxembourg, Kunsthalle, Vienna, Mémoire de L’Avenir Galerie, Paris, VEKKS, Vienna, DIA, the Whitney, Hammer, LACMA, LAICA, LBMA, CAM Houston, Blanton Museum, MIT Vera List Gallery, Getty Museum, ZKM, Whitechapel, Zwirner, WP Phillips Gallery, Louisiana MOMA, Denmark, Kunst Forum; taught at UCLA, SVA and received NEA, NYSCA, Jerome, Turbulence, Franklin Furnace, and Acker awards. MFA Cornell; BFA Tyler School of Art, Temple U.

Elia Vargas - Energy is Entity (Erie County)
It takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds for sunlight to touch the Earth. Energy is Entity is a single shot experimental video that explores the metaphysics of this phenomenon. The entire video constitutes a single zoom shot of the sun that lasts the duration it takes for lightwaves from the sun to reach the camera/Earth. Accompanying the zoom shot is a low frequency modulation analog synthesis sound-score. Subtitles narrate a stark poetics of these conditions and an examination of Michael Snow’s zoom-film, Wavelength. Energy is Entity was captured on the one-year anniversary of an electromagnetic storm that caused aurora borealis in Buffalo, NY, during which Elia Vargas’ second child was born. Vargas’ spouse unexpectedly birthed her in their home, and Vargas delivered her. All that electromagnetic energy comes to us from the Sun. Did you ever think: it could be different? The Sun could be different. As a result, we could be different. The sun enacts the Earth. This rare Earth. MAAF funding will support materials and post production costs.

Dr. Elia Vargas is an artist and a scholar working across multiple mediums, ranging from video and sound to writing and performance, focused on nature-cultural media practices. He is a visiting assistant professor of Media Study at the University at Buffalo. In 2024, he received a NYSCA Artist Support grant for his work on Heliotechnics/Heliotechniques and was shortlisted for the Creative Capital grant. He collaborates widely, was commissioned by Goethe Institute to create a podcast on global technocultural exchange, and is the co-founder of the SF Bay Area art and technology organization, the Living Room Light Exchange. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is currently finishing a book manuscript about crude oil, art, and media through a speculative approach.

About the New York State Council on the Arts
The mission of the New York State Council on the Arts is to foster and advance the full breadth of New York State’s arts, culture, and creativity for all. To support the ongoing recovery of the arts across New York State, the Council on the Arts will award over $161 million in FY 2026, serving organizations and artists across all 10 state regions. The Council on the Arts further advances New York's creative culture by convening leaders in the field and providing organizational and professional development opportunities and informational resources. Created by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1960 and continued with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, the Council is an agency that is part of the Executive Branch. For more information on NYSCA, please visit www.arts.ny.gov, and follow NYSCA's Facebook page, on X @NYSCArts and Instagram @NYSCouncilontheArts.

About Wave Farm
Wave Farm is a transmission arts organization driven by experimentation with the electromagnetic spectrum. We cultivate creative practices in radio and support artists and nonprofits in their cultural endeavors.

Based in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, Wave Farm is a media arts center, media platform, and arts service organization. Wave Farm offers interdisciplinary outdoor installations, residencies and fellowships, and a research library. We operate FM radio station WGXC and host many online radio channels. Wave Farm provides fiscal sponsorship, consultation, and grants to artists and organizations. For more information, please visit https://wavefarm.org.