Avant Radio Festival

Early Bird Registration: $175 Early Bird Student Registration: $140 Early Bird Deadline: August 1 Regular Registration: $195 Avant Radio Fest [https://mailchi.mp/wfmu/arf] Friday November 13 2:00 PM Dorit Chrysler: Theremin Workshop with Dorit Chrysler limit 15 participants, extra cost for materials ($35) The Art of Playing the Theremin - Everything you ever wanted to know about the theremin! Dorit Chrysler will guide you through tips and tricks during this workshop. You will learn technical and practical aspects in how to approach this mysterious instrument. Theremins will be provided for each session. Sessions are limited to 15 players. Calibration, positioning, exercises, repertoire, woowoo - and no touching! 5:00 PM Raw Power: Radio Remotes for the Masses In a new era of political repression and corporate consolidation where mainstream media becomes less reliable, Democracy will depend on communities building new methods of sharing and distributing information. In this workshop, the DJs of ART FM will lead participants through the steps of developing their own online signal, allowing them to broadcast their voices, ideas,and musical selections live and loud from wherever they may be in the world. Includes demonstrations from WXOX DJs in their various remote locations. 8:00 PM Performance/Demo: Demon Box Developed by Eternal Research, the Demon Box transforms the hidden electromagnetic world into sound, signal, light and data. It captures frequencies from everyday electronics like phones, drills, and TVs, then converts them into audio signal, MIDI data, and control voltage. 9:00 PM Radio Wonderland Radio Wonderland (aka composer-performer Joshua Fried) turns the very bits and bytes of commercial culture into the driving backbeat to our dance of independence. "Radio Wonderland" abstracts live FM radio with laptop, electrified shoes hit with sticks, and a computer-hacked steering wheel (from a Buick 6). "Radio Wonderland" software creations include The Reshuffler (deploy slices of radio on a rhythmic grid making instant techno 90 percent of the time), the Re-Esser (extract the sibilance, play those S's, T's, and K's like a drum machine), and Anything Kick (morph slowed-down radio into a bass drum to shake the dance floor). 10:00 PM Performance by Laenz: Laenz is a producer based in Brooklyn, NY, working within radiophonic textures and caliginous dance music. Saturday November 14 9:30AM Hearty White: Homemade Radio Theater with Hearty White Homemade Radio Theater or How to Make Bad TV on the Radio, with WFMU spiritual leader and master of voices, philosophy and foley, Hearty White 9:30 AM Models for Organizing/Curating Radio Art with Galen Joseph-Hunter Galen Joseph-Hunter served as Executive Director of the international transmission arts organization Wave Farm including WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears from 2002-2025. She has organized and curated numerous exhibitions and events internationally on behalf of Wave Farm and is the author of the book “Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves” (PAJ Publications: 2011.) 11:00 AM What is Radio Art / Transmission Art with Anna Friz Anna Friz is a sound and radio artist, and media studies scholar. Since 1998 she has created and presented new audio art and radiophonic works internationally in which radio is often the source subject and medium of the work. 1:30 PM 36 Years of Experimental Radio Comedy 36 Years of Experimental Comedy: Co-hosts Andy Breckman and Ken Freedman discuss their long running comedy experiment, their greatest successes and most hilarious failures. 1:30 PM 40 Watts From Nowhere (Documentary Film) Sue Carpenter built a 40-watt FM station in 1995 and ran it out of her apartment in Los Angeles, exploiting a ruling that allowed hundreds of low-power illegal radio operators to proliferate throughout the country, giving birth to the legal LPFM movement. This is Carpenter's documentary on KBLT which took on a life of its own, drawing Mazzy Star to headline a benefit concert and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to play live in her living room. Presented as part of ARF’s radio-art and media-education program, followed by a moderated discussion. 3:00 PM: Workshop: Inductive Listening with Zach Poff Zach Poff is a New York area media artist, educator, and maker-of-things. His artwork is rooted in open systems that eschew individual authorship in favor of collaborative or generative models. At ARF, Zach will faciliate a hands-on workshop titled "Inductive Listeners." We will build inductive coils to plug into sound recorders, then go on a walk around the neighborhood to listen to the radio emissions of infrastructure. Participants should bring a laptop, wired headphones, and if possible, a sound recorder that is not a phone. Limited to 12 participants. $30. 3:00 PM Neon Icon: Syndicating Experimental Programming Groundbreaking and spellbinding, you have created an exceptional piece of experimental audio and this workshop will help get it out there! Looking to sites such as Pacifica Audioport and Public Radio Exchange, the DJs of WXOX will help you format, distribute, and publicize your program for airplay on noncommercial stations nationwide! 4:00 PM Babette Thomas Babette Thomas is a radio producer media artist and PhD candidate in the departments of Black Studies and American Studies at Yale University. They are also the co-host of the award-winning podcast, Gender Spiral. Babette's current research focuses on community radio. 5:00 PM Audience Building WFMU Station Manager Ken Freedman discusses the tools and strategies that have expanded WFMU's audience and have allowed the station's revenue to grow from $50k to $3m per year. Ken will also update the Audience Engine project and describe station opportunities for using the tool. 8:00 PM Negativland performance extra $5 for workshop registrants Negativland + Sue-C present "Significantly Less Deceptive:" Legendary sound collage group Negativland and live cinema visual artist SUE-C collaborate to bring you their latest audio-visual performance about our minds, our current realities, and the evolving forms of media and technology that orchestrate our perceptions. 9:00 PM Negativland Q&A Negativland's Mark Hosler, Jon "Wobbly" Leidekker and Sue C discuss take your questions on their incredible legacy of media jamming and sampledelic art. Sunday November 15 10:00 AM All Together Now: Activating the EAS Hurricanes, earthquakes, and nuclear war, thanks to the Emergency Alert System radio broadcasters have a fast and efficient system for dealing with natural emergencies. Developing a similar rapid response network for responding to political and societal emergencies is the goal of this closing day workshop. Riding on the heels of impromptu radio nationwide broadcasts following the invasion of Ukraine and the murder of Breonna Taylor, this session will focus on building a network of stations and audio practitioners who can quickly and creatively react to global events and respond with coordinated action. 10:00 AM Supplemental Media - Tik Tok, Twitch, Print, etc etc 11:00 AM TBA 11:00 AM TBA 12:00 PM Looking to the Future full group session Where do we go from here? What are the possibilities? What is this for?