Acra, NY—Wave Farm announced today seventeen grantees for the 2022 Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF) for Artists, a regrant partnership with the New York State Council on the Arts. MAAF Grantees: Mike Crane, Ar Ducao, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, Lucy Helton and Jason Geistweidt, Walter Hergt, Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler, Joseph Morris and Owen Trueblood, Paul A. Notice II, Anna Oxygen and Fawn Krieger, Emily Packer, Jingyao Shao, Sarah G. Sharp, Lucie Vítková and Merche Blasco, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Nia O. Witherspoon, Tansy Xiao, and Caveh Zahedi.

The Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF) supports electronic media and film organizations, as well as individual artists, in all regions of New York State. For individual artists, MAAF provides support 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 advance artistic exploration and public engagement in the media arts.

Grantees are selected through a competitive panel process. The deadline for the 2023 Media Arts Assistance Fund for Artists opportunity is January 15, 2023. Detailed information about the seventeen 2022 MAAF for Artists funded projects is available below.

GRANTEES AND PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS

Mike Crane - Recording Mary (working title) (Kings County)
In Recording Mary (working title), the filmmaker calls upon his father to help him track down a childhood audio recording that he made of the voice of the Virgin Mary. The two resort to a game of broken telephone in their attempt to locate the long lost artifact, unearthing strange new memories of spiritual fortitude and cosmic instability. MAAF funding will support the necessary tools for completion and distribution, including 5.1 surround sound mix, color grading, and DCP authoring.

Ar Ducao - The Great Tit is a Bird (Kings County)
The Great Tit is a Bird is a sci-fi narrative project about Black and Brown feminine and trans-feminine people around the world, the losses they survive, and the ways they shape our high-tech era even as they are pushed to the margins. This transfeminine story explores issues its creators have witnessed firsthand, including techno-colonization, research misconduct, gender-based violence, and threats to body autonomy. A limited series, The Great Tit is a Bird  is a mosaic of “found footage:” voice memos, commercials, voicemails, radio shows, and phone calls. MAAF Funding will support the preparation of final cuts, 3D animation highlights, and distribution to people in the same demographic as the show’s main characters: BIPOC feminine and transfeminine folks, particularly youth interested in STEAM (science, tech, engineering, art, math), struggling with systemic oppression, and/or reckoning with inter-generational, post-colonial trauma. 

Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby - The Infernal Grove (Onondaga County)
The Infernal Grove is an interdisciplinary, multimedia art project that challenges current definitions of drugs, crime, addiction, and recovery. It amplifies the message of harm reductionists, who advocate for a safe, clean drug supply and safe drug-user-led spaces in which to take them. The project provides an unconditional forum for dialogue among people with lived experience of drug use, including those dealing with legal outcomes of drug prohibition. MAAF funding will support the post-production of the experimental documentary at the heart of the work and prototyping for an immersive video installation. 

Lucy Helton and Jason Geistweidt – QSL (Kings County and Erie County)
Building on current radio-art and telematic-media practices, QSL utilizes automated photography, analog-data transmission protocols and radio-marine faxes to look at localized climate conditions. Seasonal and site-specific, the installation will conduct a time-based performance that oscillates between live and archival images of ice formations to discuss our planet’s past, present, and future. Remote cameras with small single-board computers will be pointedly staged in Buffalo’s Main Light on the shore of Lake Erie, to capture, encode, and transmit environmental data driven by lake-effect process. Shifts in the frozen landscape will be imaged and converted to a slow-scan analog signal (WeFax) to materialize as panoramic images printed by a mechanical installation of radio-faxes. This backup environmental technology–designed to receive news, meteorological reports, and emergency communications at sea–are like most analogue fax machines and print out information onto a roll of thermal paper. MAAF support will facilitate installation in gallery settings in both Buffalo and Manhattan, NY, where audience participation will be explored through the assembly of the received thermal prints to make wall objects and other ephemera.

Walter Hergt - Convergence (Dutchess County)
Convergence is an experimental multimedia documentary project incorporating archival film, oral history interviews, collected sound, and written documents. Drawing from the artist’s family archive, it uses multimedia layering and dissonance to challenge viewers to step into the tension that resides where memory and history overlay, creating a discordant atmosphere that troubles the viewer’s cultural impulses of nostalgia and historical idealization. MAAF funding will support the completion of the experimental film and the development of its accompanying public exhibition installation.

Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler - The Roaring of the Carabao (Kings County)
The Roaring of the Carabao considers the unresolved histories and inherited emotions of imperialistic oppression through the imagined embodiment of the Taal volcano. Located in the Philippine’s province of Batangas, 30 miles south of Manila, the Taal volcano is among one of the most active volcanoes in the country. Utilizing aspects of hauntology, this work engages with the volcano’s ongoing turbulence as a spectre of the production of Filipino Americanism; silenced imaginaries never properly mourned for and visions of a future that were promised but never arrived. In a series of renderings, this film features the research and experimentation of recreating a 3D model of the Taal Volcano, a method of considering the volcano’s activity itself as a process of relentless remembering. The work ultimately results in a CGI animation that narrates a story of a night of the volcano’s eruption, intergenerational anger and a desire for heat. MAAF funding will support sound engineering and post-production editing.

Joseph Morris and Owen Trueblood - Anchorage, Babel in Reverse (Kings County)
Anchorage, Babel in Reverse is a site-specific installation by artists Joseph Morris and Owen Trueblood in collaboration with the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) that features the voices of hundreds of speakers of endangered languages spoken throughout the city of New York. Using hanging electronic speakers, the artists will dedicate each speaker to a single audio recording of a language documented by the ELA. As people approach the installation, the sound is a whispering babel, with hundreds of recorded voices speaking hundreds of languages. However, as one walks beneath the speakers, the babel fades, and individual voices and languages are heard. As participants move through the installation, speakers sense their location, fading in and out to only play the audio of the speaker they stand beneath, allowing them to hear the voices of New Yorkers reciting stories, poems, and fables of languages we’re accustomed to hearing as well as the hundreds of voices that NYC is expected to lose in a generation or two. MAAF funding will support the labor and equipment costs of installing this site-specific work under the archway of the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn.

Paul A. Notice II - Willow (Queens County)
After “Peer Consumption” is legalized in this world, their utopian governance and ideals like universal healthcare, universal education, universal employment, and a Ban on Police are overshadowed by a predatory housing market paired with vampiric cannibalism. Desperate to pay rent, or risk being eaten alive, Willow, a brooding elected observer of alt worlds and timelines - better known as a Griot - navigates her way to Power. In World #336, a successful 1811 German Coast Slave Revolt leads to a multi-ethnic near-utopia, outlawing White Supremacy and most systemic instruments it uses. However, in this reality, consuming others grants one electrical power, regenerative healing, and the memories of their victim–a metaphor that viscerally reveals capitalism’s inherent violence, and toxic allure. Though a standalone short film, Willow, also lays the groundwork for an Afrofuturist TV series that wields the non-linear nature of time and alt world travel as a vehicle to examine the ways in which sociopolitical events of the past impact the present and future. With MAAF support, Willow will begin screening with panel discussions in New York and film festivals in October 2022, culminating in online distribution in August 2023. 

Anna Oxygen (Anna Huff) and Fawn Krieger - How We Touch the Light (Tompkins County and Queens County) 
Under the collaborative moniker "Volumes" artists Anna Oxygen (aka Anna Huff) and Fawn Krieger work across media, sculpture, sound, and time. In How We Touch the Light, scanned sculptures placed in the UNITY game engine, become protagonists and active collaborators in a live and simultaneously mediated/broadcast musical performance. The piece narratively addresses virtual placemaking, speculative future building, scale, rupture, and labor and explores the potential of volumetric capture and 3D scanning as a way to generate media assets for a new kind of liveness and meaning making. MAAF funding will support the scanning of two remaining sculptures as environments, costume and soft sculpture creation, and the finalizing of the live performance.

Emily Packer - Holding Back the Tide (Queens County)
Holding Back the Tide is a feature length hybrid experimental documentary about oysters as queer environmental heroes in New York City. This city symphony of urban and aquatic landscapes follows the precarious ebb and flow of the oyster across their life cycles. Along the way, viewers meet an ensemble of farmers, chefs, scientists, and environmental activists, all connected by their role in closing the ecological loop on oyster consumption. Scripted interludes inspired by oysters’ genderfluid reproductive biology conjure the Greek figures of Aphrodite, born of a mollusk shell, and Hermaphroditus, as they traverse the city and the waterways in search of a queer and environmentally sustainable way of being. MAAF funding will support post-production including color correction and immersive sound design by artist Kaija Siirala.

Jingyao Shao - The kite knows where I go (Kings County)
The kite knows where I go is a media installation exploration to trace the sensation and perception of awe through flying a kite. Shao adapted a traditional kite with lighting elements and a solar-powered spool. A microcontroller embedded within the spool transforms the tension of pulling the kite string into sound, audible through connected headphones. MAAF support will enable the completion stage of the project including documentation.

Sarah G. Sharp - Women Looking (Kings county)
Women Looking is a multimedia project that explores archival material found in underground feminist press from the early 1970’s through textiles, domestic decor, and Augmented Reality (AR). When specific wallpaper and fabric patterns are viewed through the Women Looking AR App, layers of related archival and contemporary media are activated, producing concrete and poetic associations between social issues, movements, and community building technologies of the past, present, and future. By imprinting these radical images onto traditionally domestic forms like quilting, embroidery, and wallpaper, the home is evoked as a potential site of revolution, community building, and imagination. MAAF funding will be used to develop and publish the final version of the Women Looking AR App. 

Lucie Vítková and Merche Blasco - Blasco/ Vítková/ Anette (Kings County)
In the album Blasco/ Vítková/ Anette, Lucie Vítková and Merche Blasco explore cyborg-ness through their relationships with their instruments. Vítková perceives the accordion as an extension of their body, where sound and movement are locked into a self-generating cybernetic loop. Blasco built Anette, a 3D printer, as her latest interlocutor and companion in the performance space. Anette’s electromagnetic voice is amplified in an octophonic system through custom-built antenna/thimbles that Blasco wears on her fingers. The eight signals broadcast from the thimble-microphones in studio and in performance were later mixed down to stereo, preserving the spatial image created in the live set. The 3-way performance with Vítková, Blasco, and Anette becomes an inter-material conversation between all the human and nonhuman elements that participate in this cyborgian system. MAAF funding will support the release of a double CD through experimental music label XI Records during the Fall/Winter of 2022.

James N. Kienitz Wilkins - Still Film (Queens County)
Still Film is an experimental feature that puts “cinematic memory” on defense and trial, taking the form of a fictionalized witness deposition. The project is conceived as a capstone to an unofficial trilogy of movies using voiceover performance and photography to explore how the appeal of movies may be the promise of something never delivered. MAAF funding will support the movie’s post-production.

Nia O. Witherspoon - Bring Back the Moon (Kings County)
Bring Back the Moon is a visual album associated with Priestess of Twerk: A Black Femme Temple, a constellation of experiences, engagements, and ceremonial happenings that center Black femme pleasure, bodily autonomy, and spiritual evolution. Featuring three songs from the larger album, entitled Goddexx Fly Trap (+ Bad B*** Mantras), and inspired by African goddesses like Isis, Oshun, and Yemonja, the film short is a collaboration with cinematographer Imani Dennison and is a fantastical re-telling of how a Black/mixed-race girl’s hair journey turns into a portal for healing. When her white mother is unable to manage her hair, they end up at a Black hair salon, where the little girl is not only embraced and affirmed, but gains access to a quantum realm where she is able to cross dimensions. MAAF funding will support the film’s release locally in the fall of 2022, as well as submissions to festivals throughout the year. 

Tansy Xiao - The Linguistic Errantry (Kings County)
The Linguistic Errantry is a stochastic sound environment and social experiment in a virtual setting. Viewers are invited to operate a first-person character with a game controller. 14 giraffes are set to randomly roam a surreal land full of symbolistic landscape and omnipresent surveillance cameras. Each giraffe is set to sing a measure constituting 2-4 notes and nonlinguistic lyrics deconstructed from L'Internationale. When two giraffes collide, they adopt each other’s measure to add to their own array. The piece reimagines the Tower of Babel in a way that manifests the arbitrary nature of history: the consolidation and disintegration of sovereigns, an anticipated revolution to be generated by mere chance, or a parallel universe where nothing ever happens and only entropy reigns supreme. Contingency here serves as a passive approach of resistance, with a silver lining that in theory, like the infinite monkey theorem, the giraffes could sing complete lines of L'Internationale if given an infinite amount of time. MAAF funding will support the equipment for public exhibitions and compensation for vocalists and technicians assisting in the completion of the project.

Caveh Zahedi - Post-Coital Tristesse (Kings County)
Soon after the worldwide pandemic lockdown, an American filmmaker living in New York and a French performance artist living in Berlin meet and fall in love online. Because of travel restrictions in Germany and the U.S., they decide to meet in person in London for two weeks and shoot a film about their encounter. MAAF funding will support the final post-production activities necessary for completion of Post-Coital Tristesse.

–

The New York State Council on the Arts is dedicated to preserving and expanding the rich and diverse cultural resources that are and will become the heritage of New York’s citizens. The Council believes in artistic excellence and the creative freedom of artists without censure, and the rights of all New Yorkers to access and experience the power of the arts and culture, and the vital contribution the arts make to the quality of life in New York communities. http://arts.ny.gov

Wave Farm is a non-profit arts organization driven by experimentation with broadcast media and the airwaves. A pioneer of the Transmission Arts genre, Wave Farm programs provide access to transmission technologies and support artists and organizations that engage with media as an art form. Major activities include Artist Residencies and Fellowships; a Public Transmission Art Park; Wave Farm Radio, including WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears, a creative community radio station based in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley; a Fiscal Sponsorship program; and Regrant Partnerships with the New York Council on the Arts. https://wavefarm.org

For more information about the The New York State Council on the Arts in Partnership with Wave Farm: Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF) visit https://wavefarm.org/grants/maaf-artists.

An Associated Press reporter posted on Facebook on June 27, “If you send me your address, I will mail you abortion pills.” The post was taken down by Facebook within one minute, with the account given a “warning” status, as Facebook saying it violated its standards on “guns, animals and other regulated goods.” So the same reporter then posted on Facebook, “If you send me your address, I will mail you a gun.” This post was allowed to stay online. Then the reporter posted on Facebook, “If you send me your address, I will mail you weed.” That post also was allowed to remain online. Mailing abortion pills is legal. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives says "A nonlicensee may not transfer a firearm to a non-licensed resident of another state. A nonlicensee may mail a shotgun or rifle to a resident of their own state or to a licensee in any state. Mailing cannabis across state lines violates federal law. Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook's parent company name, said in a Tweet June 27 that the company does not allow individuals to gift or sell pharmaceuticals on its platform, but will allow content that shares information on how to access pills. But, Stone said, mistakes have been made by Meta. “We’ve discovered some instances of incorrect enforcement and are correcting these,” Stone said in the Tweet. West Virginia and Tennessee are already prohibiting prescribing abortion pills through telemedicine consultation and the mail, even though Attorney General Merrick Garland said June 24 that, “states may not ban mifepristone based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy.” Mifepristone is a prescription abortion pill. The Supreme Court on June 24 allowed states to ban abortions.

Radio Ink reports that Florida Senator Marco Rubio was interviewed by Beasley Media Group Director of Latin Formats, Nio Fernandez at the Radio Ink Hispanic Radio Conference on June 23. Fernandez asked Rubio if he was in favor of the National Association of Broadcaster’s Local Radio Freedom Act and Rubio replied, “I think the Radio Freedom Act would impose new taxes and fees on an industry that’s already in a lot of trouble when it comes to revenue. We’re going to lose local news and information if we keep raising costs on operation. And this is just one more cost.” A typical politician's response, right? Well, Rubio's answer proves he has no idea what the Local Radio Freedom Act says. The proposal is a non-binding resolution the National Association of Broadcasters has been circulating in Congress for years which says that no new taxes should be imposed on local radio stations. Congress.gov has a one-sentence description of the proposal, House Congressional Resolution 33: "This concurrent resolution declares that Congress should not impose any new performance fee, tax, royalty, or other charge relating to the public performance of sound recordings on a local radio station for broadcasting sound recordings over the air, or on any business for such public performance of sound recordings." Rubio says he disagrees with the Local Radio Freedom Act that is against new taxes for radio stations, but in the same interview he said, “Local media outlets are already facing a tremendous amount of pressure and competition from the sheer volume of where people are getting their information from. The last thing I think local media needs is another tax or fee that increases the cost of operating. That business model just becomes cost ineffective.” Fortunately, Rubio is not on the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband, which regulates the FCC and radio issues.

Jon Brodkin reports at Ars Technica that after the Supreme Court let states do away with abortions last week, Democratic Senators Ron Wyden, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Sara Jacobs sent a letter to Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, asking to "investigate Apple and Google for engaging in unfair and deceptive practices by enabling the collection and sale of hundreds of millions of mobile phone users' personal data." After the Supreme Court ruling some are concerned that making a Google search for abortion, or using a period tracker app in states where abortion is outlawed will lead to legal consequences. "The FTC should investigate Apple and Google's role in transforming online advertising into an intense system of surveillance that incentivizes and facilitates the unrestrained collection and constant sale of Americans' personal data," the senators wrote. "These companies have failed to inform consumers of the privacy and security dangers involved in using those products. It is beyond time to bring an end to the privacy harms forced on consumers by these companies." The senators also wrote that women "seeking abortions and other reproductive healthcare will become particularly vulnerable to privacy harms, including through the collection and sharing of their location data." Clearly, information harvesting is part of almost any computer app in existence, even if some companies deny they sell that information. "Google never sells user data, and Google Play strictly prohibits the sale of user data by developers," the company said in a statement on June 24. But the senators letter, sent the same day, says they are concerned about how companies use the public radio waves to track the public. "Data brokers are already selling, licensing, and sharing the location information of people that visit abortion providers to anyone with a credit card. Prosecutors in states where abortion becomes illegal will soon be able to obtain warrants for location information about anyone who has visited an abortion provider. Private actors will also be incentivized by state bounty laws to hunt down women who have obtained or are seeking an abortion by accessing location information through shady data brokers," the letter said. The Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out in a statement June 24 that even if companies do not sell the data they harvest, it could be used against women in court. "Everyone deserves to have strong controls over the collection and use of information they necessarily leave behind as they go about their normal activities, like using apps, search engine queries, posting on social media, texting friends, and so on," the EFF said. "But those seeking, offering, or facilitating abortion access must now assume that any data they provide online or offline could be sought by law enforcement." And a strongly-worded letter won't stop a court order. Read more about this story at Ars Technica.

Randy J. Stine reports for Radio World that the National Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio are among the group's opposed to the Federal Communications Commission allowing ZoneCasting. The new technology lets a radio station that covers a large area use FM boosters to geo-target some content in specific areas. So in New York, for instance, WAMC is a network of translator stations all broadcasting the same signal from the Canadian border to the outskirts of New York City. Under this new technology they could geotarget local news for, say, Newburgh or Kingston, while different local news plays in Albany. The National Association of Broadcasters, a trade group for the biggest corporate radio stations in the U.S., cites supposed "interference" the new technology would create for its opposition. National Public Radio claims the technology would threaten to cause widespread harm to the fidelity of the FM dial. Neither support those claims with many facts. More likely, both organizations want to ward off competition. In the past the NAB and NPR both opposed allowing community-run low-power FM stations on the air, because they did not want the competition. In that case, all the industry claims that new, small low-power stations would cause interference to big, corporate stations proved false. In this case, smaller broadcasters are in favor of ZoneCasting, as a way to better serve those listeners. But if smaller stations serve their listeners well, the NAB and NPR seem to believe it will come at the expense of larger stations. In 2009 a Federal Communications Commission report found that small, community radio stations do not impact the ratings or revenue of large commercial stations. "Our final conclusion is that the analysis finds no statistically reliable evidence that [low-power FM] stations have a consistent effect on the economic performance of full-service commercial FM stations," the report said.

Inside Radio reports that the latest wacky legislation from Florida goes into effect July 1. Drivers must lower the volume of any car device so that it is not heard at a distance beyond 25 feet. Florida House Bill 1435 was created to stop unsanctioned “pop-up” events organized on social media according to Republican sponsor Tom Leek, who said the events were “invasions” that shut down coastal communities. The new law says that a person “operating or occupying a motor vehicle on a street or highway may not operate or amplify the sound produced by a radio, tape player, compact disc player, portable music or video player, cellular telephone, tablet computer, laptop computer, stereo, television, musical instrument, or other mechanical or electronic sound making device or instrument, which sound emanates from the motor vehicle, so that the sound is: “(a) Plainly audible at a distance of 25 feet or more from the motor vehicle; or “(b) Louder than necessary for the convenient hearing by persons inside the vehicle in areas adjoining private residences, churches, schools, or hospitals.” How loud is a radio one can hear from 25 feet away? “I feel like they’re targeting people,” Jacksonville resident Dwohn Leonard said to News 4 Jacksonville. “When they say plainly audible, that’s basically an excuse to pull anyone over because if you have your windows down and your music up even half way, plainly audible would be even somebody on the street being able to hear your music.”

For years corporate radio officials have claimed the airplanes will fall from the sky because of the scourge of pirate radio. But no plane crashes have been attributed to an illegal broadcast. So when the Federal Aviation Administration and airline industry officials recently began saying airplanes could fall from the sky because of 5G signals, it sounded like another conspiracy theory. Airplane altimeters tell pilots plane altitudes, and rely on a spectrum from 4.2 GHz to 4.4 GHz. That is close to where 5G signals get sent, between 3.7 to 3.98 GHz. So, unlike FM transmissions which are not nearly as close, it is conceivable for faulty transmissions or receivers could cause problems. And, it turns out many planes have older altimeters that were designed before the age of so many cell phone signals. That led to the Federal Aviation Administration objecting to the Federal Communications Commission’s authorization of 5G networks near airports earlier this year. Now Jon Brodkin at ArsTechnica reports that the FAA has announced a plan to replace or retrofit airplane altimeters that can't filter out transmissions from outside their allotted frequencies. The FCC says interference in altimeters was unlikely to occur "under reasonable scenarios" and that the aviation industry should conduct more research "on why there may even be a potential for some interference given that well-designed equipment should not ordinarily receive any significant interference (let alone harmful interference) given these circumstances." The FAA seems to be conceding to the FCC that the problem really is not that large. "During initial negotiations in January, the wireless companies offered to keep mitigations in place until July 5, 2022, while they worked with the FAA to better understand the effects of 5G C-band signals on sensitive aviation instruments," the FAA said last week. "Based on progress achieved during a series of stakeholder roundtable meetings, the wireless companies offered Friday to continue with some level of voluntary mitigations for another year." But the airline industry is mad that they are being made responsible for the issue. "At today's FAA roundtable we were told that the vast majority of our fleet (approximately 4,800 aircraft) would need to be retrofitted by July 2023," Airlines for America, a trade group that represents the major U.S. airlines, said in a letter to the FAA. "Given that the FAA has not even approved solutions nor have manufacturers manufactured these products for most of this fleet, it is not at all clear that carriers can meet what appears to be an arbitrary deadline." Read more about this story at ArsTechnica.

Matt Burgess reports for Wired that for an hour on May 30, there was no internet service in the city of Kherson in south Ukraine. There was not a bombing of a cell tower, or a warehouse of servers that day. Russia was taking over the internet then, switching to its service providers and online censorship, moving from KhersonTelecom to Miranda Media, a Crimea-based company. "Multiple Ukrainian ISPs are now forced to switch their services to Russian providers and expose their customers to the country’s vast surveillance and censorship network, according to senior Ukrainian officials and technical analysis viewed by Wired," Burgess wrote. Internet companies are being given a choice: reroute their connections under Russian control or shut down entirely. “We understand this is a gross violation of human rights,” Victor Zhora, the deputy head of Ukraine’s cybersecurity agency, said. “Since all traffic will be controlled by Russian special services, it will be monitored, and Russian invaders will restrict the access to information resources that share true information.” There are many media reports that Ukraine is doing well, holding off Russian invaders, but this story says the Russians are taking over not just land but infrastructure. In occupied regions of Ukraine around most of the 1,200 ISPs have been switched to Russian control. “We understand that most of them are forced to connect to Russian telecom infrastructure and reroute traffic,” Zhora said. The war in Ukraine has been fought on the radio waves, with Russia bombing Ukraine TV stations, using satellites for cyberattacks, and sending out misinformation on all sorts of frequencies. And Russia's System for Operative Investigative Activities is used to read people’s emails, intercept text messages, and surveil other communications. “They are afraid that the news about the progress of the Ukrainian army will encourage resistance in the Kherson region and facilitate real activities,” Zhora claims. Read more about this story at Wired.

The Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act on May 14, 2018, allowing states to legalize gambling on sporting events. That led to radio and television stations being able to accept advertisements for sports gambling. Anyone in a state that recently legalized gambling, saw and heard thousands of ads for sports betting on TV and radio. Since 1996, 37 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have adopted laws allowing legal access to cannabis, with 15 states and the District of Columbia passing laws legalizing cannabis for adult recreational use. Many radio and television executives hope they get the same advertising bonanza from cannabis that they received from the gambling industry. The difference is there has been no Supreme Court ruling, nor any national legislation passed, or federal executive order decreed, allowing those advertisements on the public airwaves. The Federal government still considers cannabis illegal, and while the drug is currently allowed in both New York and Massachusetts, it is a federal offense to buy cannabis in one state, and then take it across state lines. The Republican-appointed FCC Commissioners Nathan Simington and Brendan Carr have both spoken recently about how broadcasters in states where cannabis has been decriminalized or legalized cannot accept ad dollars from dispensaries, Inside Radio reports. That could change, at least temporarily, soon. Broadcasters backed the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act (H.R. 3617), which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in April and would decriminalize cannabis in federal law. But Republicans in the Senate are blocking the bill. To get around that, Democrats in the House have recently included language in the Financial Services and General Government funding bill that says the FCC could not use federal funds to penalize TV or radio broadcasters for airing cannabis ads where it is legal. If passed, this funding bill would legalize cannabis ads in states where it is legal, but only for the one year the bill covers, from this Oct. 1 until Sept. 30, 2023. The spending bill was voted out of the subcommittee on June 16 and now heads to the full House Appropriations Committee for a voice vote, before the entire House can vote on it. But Republicans are still attempting to strip the cannabis language out of the bill before future votes, so an influx of cannabis ads may or may not be coming to the public airwaves.

Paul McLane reports for Radio World that climate change is now affecting radio policy. Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel released a statement June 16 saying the bureau will work to improve cell phone reception during hurricanes and wildfires and other disasters. “While wireless providers have worked hard to prevent outages and restore service during recent disasters, there were times when communications fell short and recovery took too long, which put lives at risk,” her statement read, in part. The Western United States has seen more forest fires recently, and several very large hurricanes have impacted the southern states too. Locally ice storms, high winds, and flooding have knocked out communications in recent years. Rosenworcel, the Democratic-appointed Chair, and Republican-appointed Commissioner Brendan Carr visited in Louisiana after Hurricane Ida and they “heard firsthand where communications resiliency needs improvement" and "now it’s time to act on what we’ve learned,” Rosenworcel said. Proposals for improving disaster communications include mutual aid arrangements that enable service providers to request, or receive a request, for assistance during emergencies. Companies would also draft more complete disaster plans, under the proposal. Public safety and first responder groups including the National Sheriffs’ Association and the International Association of Fire Chiefs approve the proposals, Carr said. The mutual aid agreement may have emerged after some carriers had signals after Hurricane Ida hit the New Orleans area in 2021. WWL asked readers "why were Verizon subscribers still able to make calls while T-Mobile/Sprint and AT&T customers couldn't?" Nearby Lafourche Parish did not have any cell service for a week after the storm hit. Anthony Nordin, a construction manager with a cell company, said service providers can add back-up generators and fuel supplies, and otherwise harden transmitter sites to stay on the airwaves.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt reports about the likely unconstitutional law that New York passed in the wake of the Buffalo mass shooting. The law requires websites to have a “hateful conduct policy.” Of course, website do not really have any conduct, but they contain speech. And the government is not allowed to regulate speech, outside yelling fire in a crowded theater. The law defines hateful conduct as "the use of a social media network to vilify, humiliate, or incite violence against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression." That describes speech, not conduct. And speech is protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The law claims that it has nothing to do with free speech: "Nothing in this section shall be construed (a) as an obligation imposed on a social media network that adversely affects the rights or freedoms of any persons, such as exercising the right of free speech pursuant to the first amendment to the United States Constitution," the law says. If it does not regulate speech, what exactly is the "conduct" of websites that it seeks to alter?

The Broadcast Law Blog reports that the Federal Communications Commission is back with its monthly public meeting in July in person. The FCC closed its old office building to outside visitors on March 12, 2020. The agency has since moved to a new building. Axios reports that things are not all back to normal, though. The FCC is still a commissioner short, locked in a two-two tie between Republicans and Democrats so nothing much can get accomplished. "Biden was historically slow in picking his nominee," Gigi Sohn, Axios reports, who was nominated last October and has yet to get a full confirmation vote from the U.S. Senate. "The absence of effort from the White House to see this through by pushing a nominee through is frustrating beyond belief," one anonymous advocate for progressive radio policies told Axios. They report that President Joe Biden does not yet have the votes to get his nominee through, with Democrat Joe Manchin undecided, and Democrat Mark Kelly still evaluating her nomination. Sohn authored the net neutrality legislation, and is considered a progressive Democrat. By comparison, former President Trump promoted former FCC commissioner Ajit Pai to chair less than a week after taking office, and got Brendan Carr confirmed for the Republican majority seat by August in his first year.

A legendary figure in pirate radio history, Carlos Juan Camacho Jr., died June 8 in Tampa. Camacho operated La Primerisima 89.3 FM from his home in Ybor City in Tampa, Florida, playing salsa and merengue music in the 1990s. The station was raided by officials from the Federal Communications Commission on April 13, 1998. Radio Amore, another unlicensed Tampa radio station was also raided that day by the FCC. That station was run by the Rev. Alberto Acosta who broadcast on 90.1-FM from a Baptist church. That raid came four months after three other pirate stations -- The Party Pirate, 87X, and Lutz Community Radio -- in Tampa were taken down by SWAT teams and the FCC. Tampa was a hotbed of pirate radio at the time, and the FCC's Tampa office busted more unlicensed stations than any other office in the country. Camacho did a do-it-yourself triangulation to locate 87X and meet Kelly Kombat, who was running that pirate station. "He proceeded to take me under his wing and school me on proper signal stabilization, how to use a limiter, how to tighten guy wires, and various other techniques in the operation of a 'professional pirate radio station,'" Kombat wrote of Camacho on Facebook after his death. "Carlos spoke in a thick rapid-fire Nuyorican accent, always with great enthusiasm about music and radio and family." Camacho was born in Puerto Rico on June 9, 1950. He ran the Red Plum Event Hall in New York, hosting performances from salsa stars including Hector Lavoe and Johnny Ventura. Camacho's obituary says "He made the first sound truck known as the 'Come Pava' in Puerto Rico," and also that, "He was an electrical technician and an alarms specialist and at the same time he followed his dream of having his own radio station, which he successfully broadcast for several years."

Former President Donald Trump's social media service "Truth," which he started after he was kicked off Twitter for lies and misinformation, is not a place one can be banned for their beliefs, right? “I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech. We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable,” Trump said in a press release last year before his site launched, bragging about the lack of censorship. Now Mike Masnick reports at Techdirt that Trump's Truth site is banning users for trying to spread some “truths” about the January 6 hearings. "My Truth Social account was just permanently suspended for talking about the January 6th Committee hearings," Travis Allen, a political commentator on social media and self-described information security analyst, posted on Twitter on June 9, the day the first public hearing on the attempted coup of the United States was held. "So much for "free speech." This is censorship!" he wrote. Jack Cocchiarella posted on Twitter a similar story on June 10. "I was suspended from Truth Social for posting about the January 6th hearing last night," he wrote. "Donald Trump is scared of free speech." And this is not the first time that cancel culture has come to Trump's version of the Truth. In February, Techdirt reported, "Trump's social network is rapidly banning users it doesn't like, without telling them why." And the site's terms of service state that they may ban users: "We reserve the right to, in our sole discretion and without notice or liability, deny access to and use of the service (including blocking certain IP addresses) to any person for any reason or for no reason." Of course, no one has a constitutional right to a Twitter or Truth account, and companies are allowed to do what they want, even if Donald Trump doesn't want you to believe that truth.

Karl Bode reports in Techdirt that antitrust and telecom experts warned that a Sprint and T-Mobile merger would result in layoffs and higher prices. Now that the merger is approved and the number of major U.S. wireless services has been reduced from four to three, employees are being laid off and consumers are paying higher prices as predicted. T-Mobile almost immediately laid off more than 5,000 employees after the merger was approved. Now, over the last few weeks, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have all raised costs to consumers. The telecoms are passing the price hikes off as "fees" and blaming them on everything except reduced competition. For instance, Verizon increased the “administrative charge” it places on millions of user wireless bills from $1.35 to $3.30. “To be clear, this is not a price plan increase for consumer lines,” a Verizon spokesperson told Fierce in a statement. “From time to time, we review and make adjustments to fees to defray some of Verizon’s administrative and telco expenses and costs of complying with regulatory requirements. To that end, Verizon Consumer will implement a change beginning in June.” AT&T also raised rates from $6 to $12 a month on different mobile service plans. T-Mobile also raised its upgrade and activation fees by $5. And if all three telecom services are raising rates, what is a poor customer to do? Change carriers? Read more about this story in Techdirt.

Andrew Jones reports for Space.com that astronomers have discovered a second persistently active fast radio burst. There have been about 500 fast radio bursts -- intense, brief flashes of radio-frequency emissions, lasting for milliseconds -- found since the phenomenon was discovered in 2007. But only two are associated with a persistent radio source, and this one is within the fringes of a dwarf galaxy nearly three billion light-years from Earth. What causes these highly energetic transmissions is a mystery. Astronomers guess that the average FRB releases as much energy in a millisecond as the Sun puts out in three days. Most use radio frequencies around 1400 MHz; while a few have been detected at lower frequencies in the range of 400–800 MHz. "The big surprise for me was realizing that the new FRB seems to be such a perfect 'twin' to an earlier discovery," Casey Law, an astronomer at Caltech. "Perhaps some would have preferred to say that the first such association [between an FRB and radio source] was a coincidence, because it was hard to explain. Now the second example shows that this is a real and critical part of the life of an FRB." Di Li, of the National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC) and lead of the Commensal Radio Astronomy FAST Survey which detected the latest fast radio burst, told Space.com via email. "I personally favor an evolutionary picture in that all sources repeat, but the activity level drops precipitously as the source ages. Since FRB 20190520B is only the second of around 500 known FRBs to have a so-called PRS counterpart and both are extremely active, they could, in this hypothetical evolutionary picture, represent FRBs' youth, which lasts not very long." Read more about this story at Space.com.

The Federal Communications Commission approved the renewal of the WGXC FM license to Wave Farm on May 25. The message from the FCC read, "This is to notify you that your Application for Renewal of License 0000182419, was granted on 05/25/2022 for a term expiring on 06/01/2030." This is the second time WGXC's license was renewed, after the station first went on the air on February, 2011. Wave Farm, the licensee for WGXC, is a non-profit arts organization that works with transmission artists from around the world. "Transmission" artists work with some part of the radio dial, including shortwave radio, baby monitors, webstreams, CB radios, and other broadcast forums.