Acra, NY— Wave Farm announced today the artists and projects selected for the 2017 Wave Farm Residency Program. Each artist will live and work on-site at the Wave Farm Study Center for ten days during the residency season, which spans June through October.
The Wave Farm Residency program provides artists with a valuable opportunity to concentrate on new transmission works and conduct research about the genre using the Wave Farm Study Center resource library. In conjunction with their residencies, artists perform, are interviewed, and create playlists for broadcast on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM, a creative community radio station serving over 78,000 potential listeners in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, and international listeners online. Resident works are archived in the Wave Farm Transmission Arts Archive at http://transmissionsart.org.
In 2017, Wave Farm welcomes Jeff Thompson (Jersey City, NJ); Victoria Keddie (Brooklyn, NY); Comrade Squelch (Brooklyn, NY); Celia Hollander (Los Angeles, CA); Rory Solomon (Brooklyn, NY); Kristen Roos (Vancouver, British Columbia); DinahBird and Jean-Philippe (Paris, France); and John Wiese (Cleveland, OH).
Wave Farm Executive Director Galen Joseph-Hunter said, “Artists making multidimensional work with and about the airwaves is what transmission art is all about. This year’s roster of artists has proposed exceptional projects that experiment with the radio spectrum in installation, composition, and performance. The Wave Farm Residency program occupies an important place in this dynamic field internationally, and we are excited by the growth, interest, and support the program continues to experience.”
About the 2017 Wave Farm Residency Program Selected Artists and Projects:
• Jeff Thompson (Jersey City, NJ)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome Jeff Thompson (Jersey City, NJ). His “Every Radio Station” is a sculptural sound installation composed of 93 hand-made radios, one for every possible station in the FM band. Each radio is equipped with a speaker, letting viewers experience the entire spectrum at once, walk along it, or come in close to hear an individual station. For each geographical location the piece is installed, a totally different sonic experience results, informed by the number, strength, and kind of stations broadcasting in that area. As the terrestrial radio spectrum increasingly gives way to streaming services, “Every Radio Station��� will reflect these changes.
The idea of “everything of something” is a recurring and significant thread in Thompson’s work. He is interested in found materials and remix practice, but also seeks to remove the artist’s hand from his work. By presenting every element from a set at once, the result is a sublime whole that is more than the sum of its parts. In “Every Radio Station” the static of non-broadcasting frequencies, hyper-compression of Top-40 stations, and presence or absence of public and community radio will collective serve as a portrait of both the FM and physical landscapes of the installation’s site-specific location.
Jeff Thompson is an artist, educator, curator, and programmer whose work explores collaboration with, empathy for, and the poetics of computers and technological systems. His work investigates how and where technology can provide access points for meaningful exploration, the agency of increasingly self-aware systems, and what happens when a technology is pushed against a breaking point or asked to do something it wasn’t intended to. Through installation and performance Thompson seeks to physicalize otherwise invisible processes.
He has exhibited and performed internationally. Most recently Thompson’s work has been shown at venues including Harvestworks, New York; Brighton Digital Festival; Brighton, England; Georgia Southern University, Statesboro; Omphalos Gallery; Terlizzi, Bari, Italy; Somerset House; London, England; College Art Association Conference, Washington DC; and El Arte En Juego Buenos Aires, Argentina. Jeff Thompson received his BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and his MFA from Rutgers University. He currently teaches at Stevens Institute of Technology.
• Victoria Keddie (Brooklyn, NY)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome Victoria Keddie (Queens, NY). Her “Unit 11: The Satellite Chapter” utilizes Unit 11, a mobile studio that focuses on transmission based research and practice within a customized E-N-G news van, that has been re-outfitted with analog electronic tools for the focus and exploration of electromagnetic signal based media. Broadcast grade analog video editing and manipulation equipment pair with modular video and sound equipment via a series of patch bays that also allow for multiple auxiliary inputs and outputs. CRT monitors line the back wall of the van framed by playback devices ranging from VHS, BetaSP, and DV cam. An Otari stereo reel to reel sits on a rack under a custom radioOrgan--a hand-crafted modular FM transmission system built from obsolete electronics by artist Ed Bear and developed during Bear’s Wave Farm Residency in 2015. The most recent addition to the studio is a modular 10 foot satellite dish C band receiver. At Wave Farm, Keddie will research and record. New works will be created on-site using these recorded sessions.
Victoria Keddie is an artist working in sound, video, and transmission. Her work concentrates on electromagnetic signal generation and field recording within concentrated energy fields. Keddie’s work explores the fluctuations of electromagnetic activity, ionospheric sounding, satellite debris and collision, and time sensitivity. Her video work plays with notions of the still frame, of image and sound synchronicity and collapse, the stereoscopic image and dimensional spaces.
Since 2012, Keedie has co-directed E.S.P. TV, a nomadic TV studio that hybridizes technologies to realize synthetic environments and deconstruct the televisual for live performance. Keddie has performed and exhibited internationally at venues and festivals such as, The Swiss Institute, The Kitchen, Museum of Moving Image, Queens Museum of Art, and Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Lightcone, (Paris), Studio XX (Montreal), LOOP Festival (Barcelona), Pallas Projects (Dublin), Reykjavik Arts Festival (Reykjavik), General Public (Berlin), Axis Art Centre (Crew), The Independent Film Festival (Naples), Liste Art Fair (Basel), Seeing Sound Festival (Bath), and Daimon (Gatineau). With my project, E.S.P. TV, I have been artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and the Museum of Arts and Design. Keddie’s video works are distributed through Lightcone, (Paris). Her sound works are released with Spectral Evidence, (Cambridge, MA), In Context Music (Vancouver/ NYC), and Robert & Leopold (NYC).
• Tom Miller aka Comrade Squelch (Brooklyn, NY)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome Tom Miller aka Comrade Squelch (Brooklyn, NY). His “Talking with Birds” is a site-specific sounding event that uses the long-term installation “Pond Station” by Zach Poff at Wave Farm as a point of reception and transmission. A small fleet of sounding objects, including small transistor radios receiving micro FM transmissions, music boxes or other mechanical devices, is launched on the pond and guided by wind, current and human interaction. Sound-images broadcast above and below the water’s surface include field recordings of migratory birds and local wildlife, bird and animal calls of hunters and shamans, and recordings made during the residency period. As the objects drift towards and away from the Pond Station’s hydrophones (underwater microphones), they mix themselves into foreground and background together with the sounds of the pond. “Talking with Birds” will be presented during a special public event on July 22 in homage to Wave Farm friend and mentor Pauline Oliveros, who passed away in November 2016. It aims to create an environmental dialogue inspired in part by her “Sonic Meditations.”
Tom Miller (aka Comrade Squelch)’s sonic anthropology produces a matrix of radio waves, binaural motion, multispecies and post-human voices, phonographic ephemera, generative textures, resultant melodies, ethnographic archives, revenant memories and reimagined sound maps.
He is a National Endowment for the Arts award-winning composer, anthropologist, and curator. Miller studied ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University and the University of Washington, and has a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University. A professor at Berkeley College, Miller has taught at Rutgers, Pratt Institute and the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU. Past residencies include the American Museum of Natural History, Bates College Department of Theatre & Rhetoric, American Philosophical Society Library, Anchorage Museum of History and Art, Linden State Museum of Ethnology, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and University of Iceland Museum Studies. He has produced sound installations and radio art broadcasts for Cities and Memory, Radiophrenia Glasgow, Society for Ethnomusicology Sounding Board, American Anthropological Association, Society for Visual Anthropology, Ethnographic Terminalia, Proteus Gowanus, Linden State Museum of Ethnology, Anchorage Museum of History and Art, National Public Radio, Pulse of the Planet, American Museum of Natural History, Franklin Furnace, WFMU, WKCR, KRAB-FM and Audio Independents.
• Celia Hollander (Los Angeles, CA)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome Celia Hollander (Los Angeles, CA). Her installation “Δ / l (Change In Light)” is a series of optical theremins that render natural light into sine waves during each sunset. Every evening, the sound gradually evolves from a loud, high frequency chord when the sunlight hits the theremins directly, to a quiet, sputtering low frequency chord as daylight diminishes. At Wave Farm, Hollander will develop the installation into a modular system that can be applied to any space, effectively creating a flexible electronic instrument that “plays" the emergent product of an architectural space and the passing of time through natural changing light. Hollander will experiment with approximately 30 optical theremins on-site and explore the variations that result from different spatial arrangements and how they change the nature of the space.
Celia Hollander is a sound artist and electronic music composer who works in audio recordings, installation, composition, performance, radio shows, videos, and text. She is invested in the ways that sound art and music have the capacity to physically create social connection through shared experience, space, and time. Hollander is active in Los Angeles’ music community through hosting radio shows on the collective radio stations Dublab and KCHUNG FM, and event programming at Human Resources LA, an artist run gallery and event space in Chinatown. Hollander’s work critically engages ways that music and sound based art can be understood as a type of architectural design that questions cultural infrastructures, cultivates social connection, and enables awareness of a continuously changing present. Using temporal perception as a focal point in her work, she is devoted to creating experiences that allow for freedom of interpretation as an antidote to a contemporary assault of media that engineers what audiences ought to think and feel. Hollander studied art and architecture at Wesleyan University.
• Rory Solomon (Brooklyn, NY)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome Rory Solomon (Brooklyn, NY). His “Routing Around” is informed by the origin story of citizens band (CB) radio's rapid rise in popularity in the US. In 1973, at the height of the OPEC oil crisis, when gasoline was in short supply, Richard Nixon imposed the National Maximum Speed Lax (NMSL), limiting all auto speeds to 55 mph in an effort of fuel conservation. As a consequence of this (Watts & Barton, 2011) there was an explosion in the usage of CB radio by long haul truck drivers who used this wireless technology to establish an improvised information network for the purposes of avoiding “speed traps” and identifying well-stocked fueling stations. From this, the “CB craze” was born with popular films like “Smokey and the Bandit” and hit songs like “Convoy” topping the charts.
Today, many techno-utopian activists are deeply invested in building distributed information networks, usually using WiFi mesh infrastructure. Such actors have attached political goals to these projects, and the wireless mesh network is often understood as a topology able to avoid any type of centralized control. Through “Routing Around,” Solomon will illustrate how the improvised CB network of long haul truckers was already a kind of totally decentralized information relay network in itself. As an aesthetic and technological exploration, Solomon will tap into the sound and feeling of 1970s CB culture as well as a technological demonstration of its relevance in the prehistory of today’s wireless networks. The project will manifest in a series of broadcasts, a participatory workshop and performance at Lodge 2017 (an annual art, sound, and music festival produced by Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM at Reidlbauer’s Resort in Round Top, NY), and long-term lending library at Wave Farm.
Rory Solomon is currently developing a doctoral dissertation in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University that examines how politics are manifested through technological systems, in particular wireless networking infrastructure. His art practice is an extension of this work, comprised of creative expressions of this research as well as experiments and investigations that test his theoretical findings and provoke further questions.
• Kristen Roos (Vancouver, British Columbia)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome Kristen Roos (Vancouver, British Columbia). His “anti-wave” project examines the silent electromagnetic transmissions that are ubiquitous today (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cell phone tower emissions). Roos receives these inaudible frequencies with devices that recognize them not as information (conversations, emails, streaming), but as something similar to the unwanted sounds that were heard in early radio reception (static, whistles, sferics). In receiving and translating these frequencies into audible sounds, Roos is interested in the process of dissecting the wireless devices that embody our lives, and exposing the relationships between people and the objects that inhabit their daily rituals. At Wave Farm, Roos will experiment with products that have recently been developed to provide shielding from electromagnetic frequencies. Using the catalogue of a local business that specializes in EMF protection, Roos will acquire a variety of “Anti-Wave” products, to create a costume of sorts, which will be incorporated into a new performance work and electromagnetic soundwalk.
Kristen Roos’s work explores a fascination with the outside–what lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience. This fascination has informed a body of work with transmission, audible and inaudible frequencies, electromagnetism and tactile vibration. Roos has created site-specific installations, sound design for dance, and performance internationally including at RadioRevolten 2016 (Halle), ISEA 2015, Radius (Chicago), Studio Loos (the Hague), velak (Vienna) interpenetration (Graz), noise=noise (UK) The Vancouver New Music Festival (Vancouver), Nuit Blanche & NAISA (Toronto), Skol & Articule (Montreal), Sound Symposium & Eastern Edge Gallery (Newfoundland), La Chambre Blanche & Le Lieu (Quebec City). His writing on sound and radio art appears in the Radius GRIDS booklet published by Half Letter Press (Chicago 2015), the Errant Bodies publication Radio Territories (Berlin, 2007) and the New Star Books publication Islands of Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada (Vancouver, 2010).
• DinahBird and Jean-Philippe (Paris, France)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome DinahBird and Jean-Philippe (Paris, France). “Tuning the World” is a series of outdoor broadcasts, an active approach to field recording and listening where live sonic drones are transmitted back into the soundscape. Jean-Philippe plays a shruti box, a Northern Indian portable instrument, cousin to the harmonium, while Dinah “actively” records the process, moving back and forth between the environmental sounds such as water, wind and birds and the transmitted sound. Dinah will also play single notes and tuneless human hums, inspired by the local electromagnetic environment, via small FM radios. The aim is not to dominate or disturb, but rather more to observe how the landscape responds to the artists’ emissions. Inspired by the ideas and methods of R Murray Schafer, his theories on soundscape, and his concept of “wilderness radio,” where the “unneventful events of the natural soundscape transmitted without editing into the hearts of cities” (Radical Radio, 1987) as well as Pauline Oliveros’ practice of Deep Listening, DinahBird and Jean-Philippe have developed our own “active” listening and recording posture in order to play with the surrounding natural landscape, softly and quietly, and at varying distances from the microphones that document their actions.
DinahBird and Jean-Philippe are sound and radio artists based in Paris. Both their solo and joint practices question the notion of diffusion, transmission and memory and are highly responsive to place. Their work includes sound pieces, installations, broadcasts, performances and publications and is often inspired by early transmission technologies and archives. Their current interests include, electromagnetic hums, old weather, loops, drones, aeronautics, and high frequency trading.
• John Wiese (Cleveland, OH)
The Wave Farm Residency Program is pleased to welcome John Wiese (Cleveland, OH). His “Time Column” is a non-linear sound work, consisting of vertical disruptions imposed on sounds sources culled from site-specific origins and processes at Wave Farm. Leveraging the unique characteristic of the radio medium, in order to create a cinema of the ear, “Time Column” will be transmitted through airwaves, simultaneously experiencing a transformation, part automation, part installation, part concrète diffusion.
John Wiese’s artistic practice crosses many disciplines, but often shares conceptual similarities to musique concrète and is expressed through fixed recorded works, diffusions, performance, and installations. A celebrated artist in the field of sound, Wiese considers radio an integral part of his practice and has performed on a great variety of stations including KXLU, Dublab, WFMU, and PS1 Art Radio. Most recently, in 2016, Wiese was invited to perform at the Ina/GRM’s Présences Électronique Festival along with a residency at their multi-channel studio in the basement of Radio France.
The Wave Farm Residency Program is supported, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Greene County Legislature through the County Initiative Program, administered in Greene County by the Greene County Council on the Arts; and generous individual donors.
Visit https://wavefarm.org/ta/residencies for more information.
