2009/2010 AIRtime Fellowship Recipients Announced

free103point9 is pleased to announce the 2009/2010 AIRtime Fellowship recipients: Brett Ian Balogh, Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown, and Zach Poff.

The AIRtime program provides artists (individuals and/or collectives) with valuable assistance with which to concentrate on new transmission works and conduct research about the genre using free103point9's resource library and equipment holdings. Fellows present their work in conjunction with WGXC, in Greene and Columbia Counties, and free103point9 city-based programs at the Ontological Theater at St. Mark's Church in Manhattan. Fellows receive an honorarium, and technical and administrative support from free103point9 staff.


About the selected artists and projects:

Brett Ian Balogh (Chicago, IL), Noospherium

Brett Ian Balogh is an artist working at the intersection of objects, sounds and spaces. His current practice employs sound, radio and digital fabrication technologies to re-imagine traditional notions of space and our placement within. Balogh’s AIRtime project, Noospherium will manifest as an array of radio receivers installed throughout an exhibition space as points of sound diffusion accompanied by a video projection. Audio samples will be taken from various portions of the radio spectrum and rebroadcast via low-power FM by a programmable wide-band transceiver developed by Balogh. A computer application written in Max/MSP will control the sampling and rebroadcast of the received signals as well as animate the audio across the array of receivers, endowing the resulting soundscape with motion within the space. The video projection will consist of computer-animated representations of broadcast coverage areas derived from data available from the FCC relevant to the geographic location of the venue. This project aims to unite the DIY spirit of both the radio and open-source communities by advancing a low-cost, user-friendly, programmable, and extensible transmission arts platform, which will be made available to others.

Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown (Madison, WI), The Bike Box

Sabine Gruffat is an interdisciplinary artist whose work maneuvers through, manipulates, and challenges prescribed genres and codes. Bill Brown seeks to correlate geographical coordinates with conceptual ones in his work, such as uncovering the memories and histories folded up inside physical landscapes and borders. Their collaborative AIRtime project, The Bike Box, is grounded in the artists’ interest in site-specific art and interactive media. The Bike Box will give an area’s residents access to cheap, durable, technology-enhanced bicycles in order to assist and encourage the exploration and interpretation of their environment. Bicycles at The Bike Box will be equipped with a GPS receiver/transmitter that may be connected to each user’s mobile phone. As cyclists pedal through the streets, their GPS coordinates will be beamed to a central computer and their positions will be displayed on a screen at The Bike Box receiving station. When cyclists pass through certain pre-selected GPS coordinates, their cell phones will ring, allowing them to listen to a pre-recorded description of the location informed by local land-use experts, historians, poets, and other interpreters.

Zach Poff (Brooklyn, NY), Radio Silence

Through artwork, teaching, and free software creation, Zach Poff examines the opportunities and challenges that arise from the translation of our experiences into "information." His recent work has been focused on how traditional broadcasting reverberates into digital media and influences notions of an emerging post-broadcast discourse. Poff’s AIRtime project, Radio Silence, explores the silent moments of talk-radio, using the cadences of different live radio personalities to compose an ongoing collaborative “performance.” Eight radio tuners feed their signals into custom software that will detect each silent moment and replace it with a unique “note.” Each note is a spectral average of the source audio, so it reflects the timbre of whatever is currently on the air. The speakers are arranged in a row above a computer display, which shows a “waterfall” visualization of the recent silences of each program and the call-letters of each station. The result is a multichannel composition of abstract bursts that inherit specific human rhythms from the rhetoric of their sources.

The 2009/2010 AIRtime Fellowship panelists included: Marie Evelyn (Analogous Projects,) Ralf Homann, and Shannon Sindelar (31 Down and Ontological Theater.)


free103point9 is a non-profit arts organization focused on establishing and cultivating the genre Transmission Arts. This genre encompasses a diversity of practices and media working with the idea of transmission or the physical properties of the electromagnetic spectrum. Transmission art is generally a participatory live-art or time-based art, and often manifests as radio art, video art, light sculpture, installation, and performance. free103point9 activities support and promote artists exploring transmission mediums for creative expression. free103point9's programs include public performances and exhibitions, online radio stations, the free103point9 Transmission Artists, an artist fellowship program, facilitation of a NYSCA regrant for individual artists, a distribution label, an education initiative, an online study center and archive, and a forthcoming full-power FM radio station WGXC-FM serving Greene and Columbia Counties in New York.

free103point9 is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and with public funds through the Electronic Media and Film Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; the Greene County Legislature through the County Initiative Program, administered in Greene County by the Greene County Council on the Arts; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Additional program support is provided by Experimental Television Center; a matching grant from Public Radio Capital, with funds provided by the New York State Music Fund; the Brooklyn Arts Council JPMorgan Chase Regrant Program; harpofoundation; the Puffin Foundation; the Joseph Family Charitable Trust; India Richards; and other generous individual donors. Past programs have been made possible by the Peter Norton Family Foundation; Meet The Composer's JPMorganChase Regrant Program for Small Ensembles; the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; CEC ArtsLink; and Mondriaan Stichting.