9-channel immersive sound installation (yes, you are invited to crawl on your hands and knees into a hole in a wall).
Premiered as part of the group exhibition The Wet and the Dry, curated by Andrew Smith at The Lab, 16th Street and Capp Street, San Francisco.
April 11-June 27, 2026 Open Fridays and Saturdays 12-5pm
I have lived in more than one apartment where eventually animals moved in too: rats in the subfloor and under the bathtub, raccoons in the interior walls and the attic, a Jerusalem cricket hissing in the living room behind the curtain. Lately pocket gophers engineer the underground all around me, tunneling underneath my apartment and throughout the meadow outside. Holes are part of building and neighbourhood infrastructures, and some creatures travel easily through them. Typically, the animals that are adapted to life underground are often considered abject or disgusting, but rodents and worms and insects bear unique relationships to decaying and composting matter, and they find shelter in the small tight spaces in the dark corners of human life as easily as underground.
In classic myths, a human descends into the underworld in search of a lost loved one. The mortal protagonist finds their way with the help of various guides but the everyday reality of going underground actually requires material transformation, through technology or metamorphosis. How would a human need to transform physically in order to visit the potentially vast world of creatures and organisms that live in the dark of the earth, to reach the underworld and the lands of the dead? How will you know the dead when you meet them?
A hole in the wall is an invitation to rodent space and a curiosity about adaptation and visitation. The piece is part of a suite of audio works reconsidering metamorphosis and the underworld.
Hole in the Wall is a production of the Burrow of Investigation.
Broadcast each month on the first friday, hosted by WGXC 90.7 FM Upper Hudson Valley, New York and heard across the Americas on KVCU Radio 1190 in Denver Colorado, Radio CASo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Radio Monteaudio in Montevideo, Uruguay, Radio Tsonami in Valparaíso, Chile, CITR 101.9 FM in Vancouver, Canada, and New Adventures in Sound Art in based in northern Ontario, Canada. This live and collectively improvised show is created by August Black, Betsey Biggs, Peter Courtemanche, Florencia Curci, Jeff Economy, Jimmy Garver, Maximilian Goldfarb, Virginia Mantinien, Rodrigo Ríos Zunino, and myself.
I’m thrilled that Salar: Evaporation(created with Rodrigo Riós Zunino) will be part of the group exhibition Against Outer Spacecurated by Zachary Korol Gold and Valerie Olson at the Beall Center for Art and Technology on the campus of University of California, Irvine.
Show is up from November 15, 2025 – February 28, 2026.
A bicoastal experimental music festival that will alight in the redwoods, Woodstockhausen is two days of synaesthetic exploration, camping optional. I’ll be bringing the Eternal Cuckoo. Electronics, self-cut records, objects, visuals.
Jeff Kolarand I are super pleased to be chosen for Experimental Sound Studio‘s Sonic Pavilion Festivalat the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millenium Park, Chicago. Artists created work for the 24 channel speaker array in the Pritzker Pavilion, which will be presented on August 9 (1-4pm) and August 18 (5-8pm), 2025.
Our work, The Other Spectrum, draws inspiration and material from archivist Rick Prelinger‘s personal radio listening archives and our own collections of transmissions, evoking a radiophonic world of conversations between people and between devices. We tune and detune the ordinariness, the urgencies, and the intimacies of everyday radio communications, exploring the musicality and the geographies of transmission ecologies by spatializing overheard radio, such as air traffic control chatter or trains being moved, weather stations and police scanners, that reveal ways that radio is a site of labour, is implicated in systems of state command and control, and also a space of potential and connection, however fleeting.
As part of the arcane transmissions performance series, cloaca projects and The Lab present The Other Spectrum, including of a lecture by Rick Prelinger (Prelinger Library) on “useful radio,” and a live transmission art performance by Anna Friz & Jeff Kolar.
Saturday, February 22, 2025 doors at 7:30pm, show begins at 8:00 pm The Lab, 2948 16th St. San Francisco, CA 94103
Tuesday February 25, 2025 doors 6:45pm, show begins at 7:00pm DARK Lab, Digital Arts Research Center (DARC) University of California, Santa Cruz main campus Free admission
The Other Spectrum: Useful Radio A Lecture by Rick Prelinger
Useful radio is defined by its utility, as distinct from broadcast radio whose function is to entertain, inform and exhort. Useful radio regulates the labor and mobility of humans, animals and vehicles on land, sea and in the air; supports state functions, including combat, policing and surveillance; enables infrastructures of production, distribution and consumption; and links networks of technically- literate and non-technical people. As a multidirectional system of transmitting and diffusing commands, instructions and situational information, useful radio has from its origins simultaneously mapped and reproduced geographies of power and control. At the same time, manifestations like citizens band (CB) and low-power handheld radios have enabled uncountable acts of resistance and rebellion. Useful radio has played a key role in workers’ organizations, civil rights and antiwar movements and youth rebellion, and it might be considered the pulse of the January 6 Capitol riot.
Rick Prelinger, Emerit Professor of Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz, is an archivist, filmmaker, writer and educator. He began collecting “useful cinema” (films made for specific purposes at specific times, such as advertising, educational and industrial films) in 1983. His collection of 60,000 films was acquired by Library of Congress in 2002, and since that time Prelinger Archives has again grown to include some 40,000 home movies and 7,000 other film items. Beginning in 2000, he partnered with Internet Archive to make a subset of the Prelinger Collection (now over 9,700 films) available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world, and his feature project No More Road Trips? received a Creative Capital grant in 2012. His 35 Lost Landscapes participatory urban history projects have played to many thousands of viewers in San Francisco, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere. He is a board member of Internet Archive and frequently writes and speaks on the future of archives. With Megan Prelinger, he co-founded Prelinger Library in San Francisco in 2004. Since 2016, he has been researching and writing about useful radio.
The Other Spectrum A Transmission Art Performance by Anna Friz and Jeff Kolar
Anna Friz and Jeff Kolar have collaborated together for more than a decade on various musical and radiophonic projects around the world. Taking a deep dive into Rick Prelinger’s radio listening archives as well as their own, Anna and Jeff create a radiophonic world that traverses historical and live shortwave, UHF and VHF bands; from air traffic control to citizen’s band, from encrypted security systems to emergency scanners. Employing actual and sampled radio together with electronic instruments, the artists tune and detune the ordinariness, the urgencies, and the intimacies of everyday radio communications, exploring the musicality and the geographies of transmission ecologies.
Jeff Kolar is a sound artist, composer, and founder of Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform established in 2010. His work, described as “wonderfully strange” (John Corbett) and “characteristically curious” (Marc Weidenbaum), activates sound in unconventional, temporary, and ephemeral ways. His solo and collaborative installations and performances often investigate the mundane sonic nuances of everyday electronic devices. His work has been exhibited internationally at the Smithsonian Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, CTM Festival for Adventurous Music, Radio Revolten Radio Art Festival, and reviewed in The New York Times, The Wire Magazine, Red Bull Music Academy, and more. He has ongoing collaborations with Anna Friz, Jennifer Monson, Zeena Parkins, jonCates, and NRRF Radio Collective.
The Conduction Series is broadcast live on the first friday of every month from 15-16:00 Eastern Time on WGXC in Upper Hudson Valley, New York; and is syndicated on Radio MonteAudio in Montevideo, Uruguay, Radio Tsonami in Valparaíso, Chile, Radio CASo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, CITR FM in Vancouver, Canada and New Adventures in Sound Art in Ontario, Canada.
The past months have been fully research-oriented, thanks to the most generous support of a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship from Sept 1 2023-Aug 31 2024, and subsequent support from the Arts Division and the Office of Research at University of California, Santa Cruz. Travels have taken me to Chicago, to Atacama desert in Chile, to Upper Hudson Valley in New York state, and to Germany and Austria. I’ve also been able to invite collaborators to Santa Cruz to continue thinking through projects based on the west coast, such as ongoing work in the CZU burn scar with Gabriel Saloman Mindel.
Together with Rodrigo Ríos Zunino under the title We Build Ruins, we have been working since 2017 in the industrialized areas of Atacama desert in Chile. This year we returned in April for another stint of production and inspiration, along the way performing live audiovisual concerts at the Parque Cultural in Valparaíso, Chile and at the Lab in San Francisco, and presenting an audiovisual installation as part of a group show celebrating the Rydell Fellows at the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz. I’m currently working on a solo radio art work entitled Children of the Sun to be completed at the end of the summer as part of this desert research, and Rodrigo and I continue our work on a feature length film plus installation works and an artist book.
And a bit of unexpected good news: Revenant, which I created last year for ORF Kunstradio (the long running radio art program on the cultural channel of Austrian national public radio), won the Karl Sczuka Prize in 2024! Many thanks to the jury and to Südwestrundfunk for this honor.
As part of the 2022-2023 cohort of Rydell Visual Arts Fellows, I have new work on exhibit at the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz California, from January 18- March 24, 2024.
These works are part of a longer art research project entitled We Build Ruins that reconsiders the history and fate of the industrialized Atacama desert in northern Chile, by simultaneously understanding it as a place once covered by water, as an arid environment described by rare geologic and organic systems, and as a high-altitude mining site transformed and abused by devastating infrastructures. Robotic extra-planetary modules such as the Mars Rovers and Perseverance have been tested here as the conditions and geology serve as ready analogs for Martian environment and terrain. The mining techniques currently being developed in Atacama are also contributing to a neoliberal imaginary for eventual off-planet operations.
I seek to re-frame the common narrative of deserts as ‘wastelands’ made productive only through industrial exploitation, and to shift the goals of both earthly and extra-planetary inhabitations away from dominion and extraction, and toward listening and adaptation. This trio of works includes a multi-channel audio work, a single channel video projection created together with key project collaborator Rodrigo Ríos Zunino, and a series of photographs arranged as a dual screen slideshow, which consider the contrasts between different orientations to being a visitor, and perhaps one day a guest, of the Atacama desert. The video features glimpses of an ‘Earthsuit’, or clothing that I knit and wove by hand from materials found in the desert (undyed sheep’s wool, plastic bags, twine, cassette tape) that are intended to be both practical but adaptable, not a spacesuit that completely insulates its wearer from the elements of a place but a suit continuing life on damaged Earth using materials at hand.
My colleague Zac Zimmer, Associate Professor of Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz, wrote this short text for the exhibit:
Listening and Adapting in the Age of Extraction: Two figures, two suits, two ways of being.
We have ancestors in common, but Margie the Martian returns to Earth for the first time, and finds an all-too familiar landscape: the inhospitable desert. Contained within her spacesuit, armored against a hostile environment, Margie carries her own atmosphere with her. She has practiced for this descent her entire life. This is the terrifying inversion of terraforming: the moment that Earth becomes Mars.
The Earthsuit’s weave is a pattern of hospitality. It, too, offers some protection against the formidable beauty of the Atacama, but its mesh of Andean wool and plastic bags is permeable and open to adaptation. An Earthsuit is a tool for listening, sensing, and emplacement. It is a garment for the visitor who wishes to move through the Atacama’s grooves across all scales: the cracked earth of a desiccated ancient seafloor, the artificial valleys between tailing piles and mountains of evaporated salt, and the tire-tread patterns of heavy machinery. Embraced within the knit and the weave, whoever wears the Earthsuit will find the stillness necessary to integrate into landscape and soundscape.
