Strange Radio, Live! is an immersive lecture-performance in story and sound, part of an ongoing series of experimental radio narrowcasts and broadcasts about the stranger, nearness and distance, forced migration, displacement, home, and the intergenerational transmission of memory. Strange Radio’s point of departure is Holocaust postmemory in Vienna, Austria, a sonic portal for sensing experiences of strangers and strangeness in multiple unfolding contexts across the globe. Strange Radio, Live! weaves together personal documentary; disembodied voices and sounds separated from points of origin; fragile signals transmitted through radios and embodied reflections on memory, place, time, and radio—itself a strange medium. Postmemories bounce against histories, sometimes buried and inaudible, in new locations. Tuned into both utopian longings and wounds, Strange Radio is a fragile signal, a love song to radio as a medium, metaphor, and method of deep listening together.

Karen Werner is an award-winning radio artist, audio storyteller, and sociologist. Her audio pieces have been broadcast on community and public radio stations across Europe, North America, Australia, and Israel. They have also been part of numerous live events and art exhibitions. In 2017-2018, Werner created a series of public sound installations at Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier, including “Covenant of the Tongue” and “Zirkus,” which are sonic autoethnographies about Holocaust postmemory in Vienna. Her recent work is in live performance: sound installation meets documentary storytelling meets narrowcast radio transmission. Werner is a 2019 invited artist at the Kone Foundation’s Saari Residence in Finland and was a 2017-2018 Fellow of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. She received a Tending Space Fellowship from the Hemera Foundation from 2014-2016 for artists with a Buddhist practice.  She is on the faculty of the BFA in Socially Engaged Art Program at Goddard College in Vermont.

Werner’s work can be seen at: KarenWerner.net

Elizabeth Demaray is an artist who focuses on the interface between the built and the natural environment. In this vein, she builds listening stations for birds that play human music, cultures lichen on the sides of skyscrapers in New York City, and designs alternative forms of housing for land hermit crabs. These artworks often involve the concept of a biotope, which is a small environment where human and non-human populations overlap.

While in residence at Monmouth University, Demaray will present these projects and will lead a workshop on non-anthropocentric design. She will also be pairing with the campus to create a community-based project that embraces the idea of “trans-species giving.” According to Demaray, the concept of trans-species giving asserts that the commonalities between life forms are such that we may actually be able to give other organisms a “hand up,” notwithstanding our own cultural or species-specific assumptions about the natural world.

Demaray is the recipient of the National Studio Award from the New York Museum of Modern Art/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture, and was the featured artist at the 2014 Association of Environmental Science Studies symposium, Welcome to the Anthropocene. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and is an associate professor of fine arts and head of the sculpture concentration at Rutgers University, Camden. On the Rutgers, New Brunswick, campus, she is a work group advisor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and an advisor at The Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Rutgers University, in the Department of Computer Science, which is dedicated to supporting artistic practice in the fields of computer vision and machine learning.

Demaray’s work can be seen at: https://elizabethdemaray.org