Acra, NY—Wave Farm announced today the artists and projects selected for the 2021 Wave Farm Residency Program. This year the program will focus on new radio artworks intended for FM broadcast. The 2021 program received a total of 114 submitted proposals, originating from 12 countries and 25 U.S. states. Each selected artist (or collaborating artists) will live and work on-site at the Wave Farm Study Center for ten days during the residency season, which spans June through October.
In 2021, Wave Farm welcomes sTo Len (Glendale, NY); Temar France (Queens, NY); KHONSU X (Harrisburg, PA) and Titan (Gilboa, NY); Neo Gibson (Jackson Heights, NY) and Charles Stobbs (New York, NY); August Black (Boulder, CO); Kamikaze Jones (Norwalk, CT); Claire Serres (Paris, France); Sadie Woods (Chicago, IL); Ricardo Iamuuri Robinson (Pittsburgh, PA); and Quintron (New Orleans, LA).
The Wave Farm Residency Program provides artists with a valuable opportunity to concentrate on new transmission artworks and conduct research about the genre using the Wave Farm Study Center resource library. This year applicants were asked to propose a specific radio art project, which they will complete while in residence and premiere on Wave Farm's full-power FM radio station: WGXC 90.7-FM Radio for Open Ears.
Wave Farm Executive Director Galen Joseph-Hunter said, “This year we are focusing on works explicitly made for FM broadcast. During the COVID-19 pandemic we were reminded of the unique power and presence of terrestrial radio. Throughout the past year, so many listeners, new and old, expressed their deep gratitude for independent and experimental content on their FM dial via Wave Farm's WGXC-FM. In response, we are especially thrilled to support these ten artists/collaborations who approach FM radio with both creativity and a healthy sense of adventure; and, we look forward to bringing the resulting 10 new radio artworks to public audiences in New York's Upper Hudson Valley and across the globe.”
WAVE FARM RESIDENCY PROGRAM SELECTED ARTISTS AND PROJECTS
(in chronological order)
sTo Len (Glendale, NY)—Live Streaming
June 4-13, 2021
Centered around conversations with streams and rivers, sTo Len will use divining rods, fishing rods, hydrophones, contact mics, and radio transmitters to connect with the local waterways of Greene County, NY through sound rituals. Len will visit with the streams near Wave Farm during his residency and document the journey. Live Streaming will live stream on the internet in spontaneous events, and a final audio collage will be presented for FM broadcast at the culmination.
sTo Len is a genre-fluid artist with interests in printmaking, installation, sound, video and performance. The cross-disciplinary nature of Len's work often centers around collaborations with bodies of water that transform waste into art materials and the public commons into an art studio and performance space. His sound work incorporates contact mics, analog effect pedals, cassette players, samplers, solar panels, drum machines, household appliances, and the đàn bầu, a one-string Vietnamese instrument. sTo Len is based in Queens, NY with familial roots in Vietnam and Virginia, and his work incorporates these bonds by connecting issues of their history, environment, traditions and politics. Len was recently the first artist in residence at AlexRenew Wastewater Treatment facility in Alexandria, VA and is a member of Works on Water, a group of artists and activists working with and about water in the face of climate change and environmental justice concerns. stoishere.com
Temar France (Queens, NY)—The Black Garden Project
June 18 - 27, 2021
The Black Garden Project is a documentary radio play that takes music and sound texts (interviews, field recordings, recorded lectures, etc.) into a critical investigation of black queer life ecologies. The program will specifically examine the process of creating nourishing spaces for black people in institutions of higher education. Inspired by stories of activism in response to anti-black and indigenous racism on college campuses, this piece will poetically mix elements of newspaper theater with radio interference to gesture towards the ephemeral instability and impossibility of structuralizing nourishing spaces for black life in the contemporary world while exploring the simultaneous capacity of radio to enact real structural connections through vulnerable Black communities that are creating new sites for black resistance politics, black life gardens, and futures.
Temar France is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose research-based practice considers black feminist ecologies, queer world-making, sexuality, and healing. Their recent work focuses on radio broadcast and live performance, combining interviews, field recordings, poetry, and music to construct and amplify narratives that explore questions about black queer ecological succession, community, and rebellion. France is currently in graduate school at Brooklyn College studying performance and interactive media art. temarfrance.com
KHONSU X (Harrisburg, PA) and Titan (Gilboa, NY)—Defiant Masculinity
July 2 - 11, 2021
Defiant Masculinity is a radio theatre production born out of The Broken Bois Series–a compilation of transmissions exploring how social constructs of masculinity have been historically warped by media. Through dissonance, intermodulation, and resonance, the play follows a trans-man and his trusty radio as he traverses a sea of cultural influences. A three-hour soundscape will be developed during the Wave Farm Residency, incorporating five nights of live broadcasts and recording sessions with WGXC listeners guided by curated audio prompts. The final product should be a puzzle left unsolved, spurring the mind to continual thought and dialogue about how masculinity presents in our world today through diverse male perspectives.
Titan and Khonsu X formed the Broken Bois Collective in 2019, after months of traveling cross-country with only FM-radio for entertainment. Over pundits and disco, a white trans-kid from Schoharie County, and a Black transman from central Pennsylvania combined their creative practices, finding radio as the coagulant. Using storytelling, poetry, music, and cultural commentary, they focused their joint practice on the production of artworks that seek to revolutionize understandings of masculinity. Outside of the studio, Titan and Khonsu X can be found tending radical land projects, producing Clubhouse Radio on WGXC, and playing with their beloved pitbulls. brokenboiscollective.tumblr.com
Neo Gibson (Jackson Heights, NY) and Charles Stobbs (New York, NY)—Image Broadcast
July 16-25, 2021
Image Broadcast, focuses on FM’s material nature, the broadcast will suspend visual works in air, allowing them to interface with the sonic and visual landscape of the residency’s location. In addition to images produced on site, the broadcast will contain a number of images from various participants, whose inclusion in the broadcast is informed by research conducted during and prior to the residency. The broadcast will be made visible through the use of a real–time “waterfall” spectrogram read-out.
Neo Gibson is a musician, releasing music under the alias 7038634357. Charles Stobbs is a part-time lecturer. Together they have produced radio broadcasts and installations under their own names, and as Maitre D'. Previously they have been hosted by Veronica, the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, and Montez Press Radio. Recently, their work has prioritized the compression and translation of non-audible sensory data into sound. This sound is prized, but only as the outcome of an intentionally organized process of transmission. Their interest in FM radio lies in sharing the experience of moving through the material bubble of that transmission’s radius. waiting-all-my.life
August Black (Boulder, CO)—Radio Research
July 30 - August 9, 2021
At the heart of August Black's residency period is a prototypical web application that aims to catalyze new forms of live interactive radio for the purpose of growing communities, making speculative acoustic situations, and enabling grassroots initiatives. The software allows multiple constituents to fluidly participate in broadcast-like scenarios through their mobile devices at the flick of their thumbs. It works in a browser, requires no downloads, and is meant to be frictionless, quick, and easy. Black will host workshops on-site (covid permitting) with the software, solicit ideas and interaction from the local community, and conduct daily radio experiments outside the studio with various local and remote participants (TBD).
August Black is a hybrid practitioner of art, design, and engineering. He builds instruments in hardware and software for the sake of enabling expressive spaces of potential acoustic and interactive outcomes. august.black
Kamikaze Jones (Norwalk, CT)—Over and Out
August 13 - 22, 2021
Over and Out is an experimental radio play that mines the history of—and utilizes—CB radio to sonically investigate the underrepresented legacies of gay cruising culture in the trucker community. CB radio in the United States has historically subversive connotations: primarily as a tool to evade police detection during the 1973 oil crisis, in which a nationally mandated speed limit hindered truck drivers’ productivity and earnings. CB radios were further implemented as a means of organizing blockades to protest the speed limit and, concurrently, to discreetly facilitate sex work. The implicit risks of chance homosexual encounters on the open road (exposure, arrest, persecution) were significantly reduced by the ‘misuse’ of these devices. For this piece, in addition to the manipulation of archival and field recordings, Kamikaze will quite literally ‘cruise the airwaves’ of the Hudson Valley and incorporate the raw recordings of his encounters to explore the innately queer hauntologies and dissident materialities of CB radio. How does CB radio, an arguably outmoded tool that is nevertheless still used today, continue to inform sexual ideologies? Has the lineage of these technologies moved further away from—or closer to—a homosocial syntax? To what extent have these devices permanently sculpted the semiotics of queer consciousness? It is Kamikaze’s objective to immerse himself in these conceptual inquiries as both an active participant and a sonic medium, to receive and transmit some of the spectral mysteries that exist within these obscured correspondences.
Kamikaze Jones is an interdisciplinary artist whose work often explores extended vocal technique, queer hauntologies, and ritualized erotic transcendence. His recent practice has been focused on cultivating both sonic and sculptural sanctuary for the ghosts of public sex. He is a co-founder of The Anchoress Syndicate, a poetry and performance collective based in New York City. instagram.com/kamikazejoness
Claire Serres (Paris, France)—Serpentine waves
August 27 - September 5, 2021
Serpentine waves is a live incantation in front of microphones, combining lyrical voices, whistle, spoken words, and breathing. This poem as sensual as it is monstrous, relates the molt of the mythological snake woman, the wyvern demoness. In this performance, the voice is a vehicle between our outer and inner worlds, a crossroads to explore desire in a deep airwaves dance. A live radio performance, Serpentine waves, will be performed outside the studio, outdoors, with a public audience.
Claire Serres is an artist performer, vocalist and radio director. Most of her practice talk about transformation, gesture and improvised voice. She plays and records the lovsong series, contextuals ballads for the street, museums, and radios in Europe. Since 2020, she has composed for a choir of women. ligie.org
Sadie Woods (Chicago, IL)—The People’s Radio
September 7 - 16, 2021
The People’s Radio explores radio as a technology developed and pioneered by the U.S. military industrial complex as political warfare and public radio as a conduit for Black expressive culture and radical imagination. This broadcast is created from a variety of sources, including cultural media, ephemeral and symbolic sounds, political speeches like "Power Anywhere Where There’s People" by Fred Hampton, excerpts from Motown’s sister label Black Forum releases like "Black Spirits: Festival of New Black Poets in America," and oral histories propelled through Black music. The People’s Radio emphasizes resistance during times of social unrest in aims to recuperate and make legible repressed histories, reminding us of the political dimensions under the surface of Black life.
Sadie Woods is an award winning post-disciplinary artist, independent curator, and deejay. Woods' work focuses primarily on social movements, cultural memory, and producing collaborations within communities of difference. Woods received her BA from Columbia College and MFA from The School of the Art Institute. She is a 2020 recipient of the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Esteemed Artist Award, the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of The Petty Biennial, Faculty at the School of the Art Institute and Curator for Bond Creative Advisors at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center. sadiewoods.com
Ricardo Iamuuri Robinson (Pittsburgh, PA)—BLACKBODY, WHITE NOISE
September 24 - October 3, 2021
BLACKBODY, WHITE NOISE is an experimental noise radio art composition using two vacant structures and sound reproduction technology.
Each structure will bear a single hole allowing sunlight to penetrate and reflect throughout the interior space. During the course of the residency records of temperature, movement and shape will be documented. The collected data will compose a sonic relationship with excerpts from Frantz Fanon’s highly acclaimed literary work, “Black Skin, White Mask.” This project sets out to suggest and translate a correlation between the life of the Sun and struggles against the age of enlightenment and environmental racism. Sounds selected will portray a common ancient narrative and a new future, solar language.
Ricardo Iamuuri Robinson is a conceptual sound artist. His works attend to patterns and forms in sound and space, using deep listening techniques and reproduction technologies for engaging sonic influences and reforming social self awareness. He calls this artistic practice “Sonarcheology.” A creative art practice merging improvisational listening with environmental archeology. By way of this method the art attempts to relisten to the interrelationships between sound and shape, sonic information and sonic place…or what he calls “the ancestry of sound.”
Quintron (New Orleans, LA)—On The 1s
October, 2021
With On The 1s, Quintron continues to explore "audio mirrors" of the external world, in real-time. On The 1s will collect traffic-data input (microphones plus online traffic data), which will then be transformed into analog synth “music” for radio broadcast throughout the day. The project will do for traffic what Weather Warlock did for the weather at Wave Farm.
Quintron has been inventing electronic gadgets and creating genre-defying noise, soundscape, and house rocking dance music in New Orleans for over 20 years, much of it in collaboration with artist / puppeteer Panacea Theriac aka "Miss Pussycat." He is a Grammy-nominated song writer with dozens of full-length albums, as well as a frequent collaborator with a wide swath of the American musical landscape, including The Oblivians, Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, and New Orleans RnB legend Ernie K-Doe.
In 1999, Quintron helped to foster a DIY analog synth revival with a patented instrument called the DRUM BUDDY, a light activated analog drum machine which creates murky, low-fidelity, rhythmic patterns. These experiments eventually led to Quintron's focus on a weather-controlled drone synthesizer called Weather Warlock and a website devoted to streaming its music called Weather For The Blind. weatherfortheblind.org
