Jay Needham
is an artist, radio producer and composer whose sound and visualworks are often concerned with the politics of borders and acts of listening.
Although he primarily centers his creative and critical practice on radio and the
transmission arts, screenings of his video series on memory and architecture
have appeared at festivals and conferences worldwide. 13 Buildings premiered
at the 9th. Videomedeja in Serbia with additional screenings at the Sydney Opera
House during d/art 2006. The series has been exhibited and distributed by the
Centre for Art and Technology, Finland on the DVD Flux Vol.1 and Vol. 2. The
second installment titled OPENED screened at the VIBGYOR Film Festival in
Kerala India and during the Simultan Video and New Media Art Festival in
Timisoara, Romania.
His radio documentary Listening at the Border was a special presentation during
Sonic Interventions at The University of Amsterdam in 2005. Broadcast on
numerous NPR stations in the United States, the work traces several years in the
life of an NSA sound spy. Additional programming events include Chicago’s
Steppenwolf Theatre and during Radiotesla as a part of War, at Tesla im
Podewils Palais, Berlin, Germany.
Other works include his micro radio work There and Back performed and aired as
a part of Particle/Wave during Pixel Ache 2005 at The Kiasma Museum of
Contemporary Art in Helsinki and t Tell Us Your Secrets during Waves at The
Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga 2006. A Slow Crash, his narrative work
for radio, aired and streamed as a part of New Media Scotland’s Resonant Cities
program and was released on Deep
Wireless II in 2005 by New Adventures in Sound Art.
Jay is a frequent collaborator with The Association Panamericana para la
Concervacion, a rainforest conservation NGO based in The Republic of Panama.
Writings and selections of his sound works appear in Hearing Places edited by
Ros Bandt.
He is currently producing, researching and composing a radio feature on his
family’s relation to the origins of the atomic bomb. A live FM performance of that
work premiered during The Radiophonic Biennale in Brussels in 2007.
Needham holds an MFA from The School of Art at California Institute of the Arts
and teaches courses in Sonic Arts, in the Department of Radio–Television,
College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University
Carbondale.
Work presented:
13 Buildings
In 13 Buildings, locative habitats become the topic of a conversation between two people united as friends but who are philosophically opposed.
