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.
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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. 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 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.
