Jason Geistweidt awarded MAAF Individual Artist Grant from Wave Farm

Building on current radio-art and telematic-media practices, QSL utilizes automated photography, analog-data transmission protocols and radio marine faxes to look at localized climate conditions. Seasonal and site specific, the installation will conduct a time-based performance that oscillates between live and archival images of ice formations to discuss our planet’s past, present, and future. Remote cameras with small single-board computers will be pointedly staged in Buffalo’s Main Light on the shore of Lake Erie, to capture, encode, and transmit environmental data driven by lake-effect process.

Shifts in the frozen landscape will be imaged and converted to a slow-scan analog signal (WeFax) to materialize as panoramic images printed by a mechanical installation of radio-faxes. This backup environmental technology–designed to receive news, meteorological reports, and emergency communications at sea–are like most analogue fax machines and print out information onto a roll of thermal paper. MAAF support will facilitate installation in gallery settings in both Buffalo and Manhattan, NY, where audience participation will be explored through the assembly of the received thermal prints to make wall objects and other ephemera.

The Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF), a regrant partnership with the New York State Council on the Arts, supports electronic media and film organizations, as well as individual artists, in all regions of New York State. For individual artists, MAAF provides support for the completion and/or public presentation of new works in all genres of sound and moving image art, including emergent technology. Grant awards assist artists in completing new work, reaching public audiences, and advance artistic exploration and public engagement in the media arts.