Betsey Biggs

International collective of sound and transmission artists broadcasting monthly. Each broadcast 58 minutes.

In the summer of 2021, August Black invited me to perform a live radio improvisation on Austria’s Kunstradio show (on Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) with himself, Anna Friz, Rupert Huber, Jen Kutler, and Tom Sherman using his custom browser-based software Mezcal, playable on a mobile device. A few months later, he convened the first of dozens of collective radio performances which coalesced into a constant group of ten artists. The Conduction Series -- a play on the word ‘conduction,’ meaning both ‘music director’ and ‘signal carrier’ (heat or electrical) -- is a collaborative live radio broadcast produced by ten sound and transmission artists across the Americas on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM Radio for Open Ears in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley and syndicated on Radio MonteAudio in Montevideo, Uruguay, Radio Tsonami in Valparaíso, Chile, CITR FM in Vancouver, Canada, and New Adventures in Sound Art in Ontario, Canada.

Our collective comes together on the first Friday of every month at 3:02pm ET using custom software, Mezcal, written by August Black. Emphasizing live interactivity and media archaeological methods, our work explores the possibilities of remote sonic collaboration at scale and across borders. Each month a different member serves as the 'conductor' of the show, coming up with a prompt or (in)formal score for the broadcast. Our work is recreational in manner, centering on playful prompts and scores to organize our improvisations. Our work is also ‘re-creational,’ usually somewhat (but not entirely) composed of playfully recontextualized archival audio which re-creates and re-ambiguates the archive into more questioning, utopian, provocative possibilities. We also think of what we do as geospatial audio, both in terms of input (our ten participants broadcast live from across the Americas) and output (our radio show can likewise be heard live on radio stations across the Americas, making it a kind of macro-spatialized sound.)

In 2023, Professor Black invited me to co-write an application for the University of Colorado’s prestigious Research and Innovation Seed Grant and to serve as Co-PI of the project. Our RIO Seed Grant application proposed a weeklong ‘radio camp’ to bring our group together for the first time for idea generation, funding and writing sprints, and a public live broadcast. Before we received the award, our group (which spans the Americas) had never met in person. We wanted to spend time together reflecting on our group identity and goals, envisioning ambitious new projects which could build bridges across countries and continents, drafting funding ideas and a research paper about The Conduction Series, and most of all spending time and space together to deepen our commitment and our understanding of the group’s possibilities. As we wrote in our proposal, “There can be no conspiracy that doesn’t share the same breathing air (con-spirare).”

The generous $50,000 RIO Seed Grant we won allowed The Conduction Series to convene our ten-person collective in person for the first time for a week of experimentation, idea generation, and performance. During this week, we also spent time with key figures in radio art, including Galen Joseph-Hunter, founder of internationally renowned transmission nonprofit Wave Farm and Elisabeth Zimmerman, well known for her work with Kunstradio-Radiokunst, a program series on Ö1 (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) and co-editor of the book Re-Inventing Radio - Aspects of Radio as Art.

The week we spent together paid off, with our aesthetic now more broadly diversified, and further projects making an impact in the world. A research paper written by our collective (but primarily by Professor Black and I) was presented at the 30th Audio Mostly conference at the University of Coimbra, Portugal this summer, and we plan to write a paper about the transmission software we use, Mezcal, which Professor Black created, with ongoing design updates suggested by the collective. Aside from our regular monthly broadcasts, Wave Farm recently asked us to create a 28-minute performance as their annual contribution to the international radia.fm project, and we have been commissioned to perform a live Kunstradio show (Austria). We will also be performing and recording our first LP this summer, which will be released by Wave Farm as an LP later this year.

In roughly four years, we have made almost fifty broadcasts, producing more than 2,000 minutes of live content that is syndicated on radio stations across the Americas, including well-known transmission and sound art festivals such as Art’s Birthday, the Tsonami Sound Art Festival, and the Monteaudio Radio Festival.

CREDITS

software: August Black
collective members: Betsey Biggs, August Black, Peter Courtemanche, Florencia Curci, Jeff Economy, Anna Friz, Jimmy Garver, Maximilian Goldfarb, Virginia Mantinian, Rodrigo Zunino.

GRANTS, AWARDS, COMMISSIONS

Research and Innovation Seed Grant ($50,000) for The Conduction Series: Radio Camp.

RECORDINGS

2025: The Conduction Series LP, Wave Farm, Acra, NY, USA. Forthcoming.

PUBLICATIONS

2025: With August Black and others, "The Conduction Series: Live Collaborative Transmission Art Across Borders,” presented at the 30th Audio Mostly conference, University of Coimbra, Portugal.

PRESS

2024: Federico Bonelli, Logbook, "Conduction Camp: radio-art camp in upstate," June 18, 2024.

PERFORMANCES (IN WHICH I PERSONALLY CONDUCTED OR PERFORMED)

July 2025: “Sustained Fallout”

May 2025: “Remaking the Making”

March 2025: “Involuntary Transmission”

February 2025: “Reindeer Cyclone” (conductor)

January 2025: “Bildungsroman”

January 2025: Art’s Birthday international radio event, broadcast worldwide. 60 minutes.

December 2024: Monteaudio Radio Festival 2024, Montevideo, Uruguay. Untitled Abstraction #1. 60 minutes.

November 2024: “Dead Air or the Mission To Tie”

September 2024: “Sunset”

August 2024: “Feeeeedbaaaack”

June 2024: “Camp Coda”

June 2024: “Conspiracy”

June 2024: “Snackpoint Charlie”

June 2024: “One Thing Leads to Another”

April 2024: “Joint Trips: Ups, Downs, Sweeps and Spirals”

February 2024: “A Great Leap” (conductor)

January 2024: “The Edge of Awareness”

December 2023: “The Sun! (El Sol!)” - live from Bogotá planetarium and with artist Tom Sherman

November 2023: “Plumbing Problems”

October 2023: “Number Nein”

September 2023: “Lost in Translation”

August 2023: Radiophrenia, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasglow, Scotland. Selected broadcasts featured over several days at sound art festival.

May 2023: “The Rustle of the Happy Machines”

July 2023: “April Showers” (conductor)

March 2023: “Potential Energy, Ready to Burst”

February 2023: “Surveillance Rochambeau”

December 2022: “Swarms, Flocks, Schools, Pods, and Parliaments”

November 2022: “Running, oppositional forces”

October 2022: “Rehearsal”

September 2022: “Audio Weeds (aka Glitch)”

August 2022: “Fragile Balance”

July 2022: “Liberation” (conductor)

June 2022: "In Recognition of Their Desperation" or "I Shot Andy Warhol" or "Radical Feminism"

May 2022: “The Final Frontier”

April 2022: “A Fool's April”

March 2022: “War in Schizophonic Stereo”

February 2022: “First Dates”

January 2022: “Change Winds”

December 2021: “Prompt:___”

November 2021: “Name Your Disaster!”

June 2021: ORF Kunstradio broadcast, Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, Vienna, Austria. Reality Triangle with August Black, Anna Friz, Rupert Huber, Jen Kutler, and Tom Sherman.