Wave Farm, a nonprofit organization in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, houses an international radio and transmission arts residency and fellowship program. In this essay, Caroline Preziosi interviews three of Wave Farm’s past artists-in-residence and reflects on the confluences of their work in using methods of transmission to center and elucidate nonhuman voices and pose questions about environmental change and catastrophe. Lucy Helton, Lisa Schonberg, and Sally Ann McIntyre each spent time in residence at Wave Farm between 2019 and 2024, developing transmission art projects using low energy radio waves to convert numerical weather data into visual form, investigating the effects that differing cellular wavelengths might have on insects, and creating compositions and live performance based on correspondences between bird vocalization and space weather. Interviews with these three artists are presented with interstitial text that unpacks their relationships to sound outside of human audibility and how the medium of transmission offers unique opportunities to explore questions of climate change and human responsibility.
Caroline Preziosi (Thu,) studied this question.