People
New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.
Helen Thorington, Co-Director
Helen Thorington is founder of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (1981); founder and executive producer of the national weekly radio series, New American Radio (1987-1998); and founder of Turbulence.org (1996-). She is also a writer and composer whose documentaries, dramas, and sound compositions have been aired on radio, internationally, for the past thirty-five years.
Thorington’s productions for National Public Radio (US) were among the first radio art works broadcast nationally (1977). Since, she has been commissioned by RAI (Italian radio), RNE (Spanish Radio) and ORF (Austrian radio) among others. Her early dance compositions include Monkey Run Road, Blauvelt Mountain, and Valley Cottage for the Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Dance Company. Two of these works were revived for the company’s 20th anniversary performances at Jacob’s Pillow (MA) and The Kitchen (NY). Open Places was reviewed in the New York Times (1980). Thorington also composed the sound score for Barbara Hammer’s Optic Nerve, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial exhibition (1987). She received a New York State Council on the Arts Music Commission to create a second sound score for Hammer’s Endangered, presented at the Whitney Museum’s 1989 Biennial.
Since founding Turbulence.org, Thorington has created three works for the Internet, among them Solitaire, a narrative experiment that exploits the fun of a game and the challenge and satisfaction of telling a good story. In 1998, she initiated the multi-location networked performance, Adrift, that combined movement through 3D space, multiple narratives, and richly textured sound streaming between virtual and real geographies. With collaborators Jesse Gilbert and Marek Walczak, Adrift was presented at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; the tenth anniversary celebration of Kunstradio, Vienna; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City in 2002, as well as multiple times online. Adrift was supported by a Creative Capital grant.
Thorington is a 1995 and 1997 recipient of a Meet the Composer grant, and a 1995 and 1998 recipient of Music Commissions from the New York State Council on the Arts. She is also a 2001 recipient of an Emerging Forms for Digital Art Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Deep Wireless Radio Art Festival, Toronto, Canada, commissioned Calling to Mind which premiered there in May 2005. Two recent prizes include Winner, Aether Festival, KUNM-FM, New Mexico and Honourable Recognition, Prix Bohemia Radio Festival, Czechoslovakia.
Thorington has lectured on radio art, net art, and networked performance, including: MIT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age, Massachusetts Institute for Technology (2007); Digital Arts Weeks, Zurich (2007); Music in the Global Village in Budapest (2009); and Sounding Cultures at Cornell University (2011). Her writings have been published in numerous periodicals including Contemporary Music Review (2005, 2006); and Intermedia Art (Tate Modern, London, 2008). She has also been included in numerous exhibitions of sound art in the US and abroad.
Thorington is co-author with Jacki Apple of the recently published, limited edition, artist book, The Tower (2015). The Tower is already in the collections of the Huntington Library; MoMA NYC; Fales Library, NYU; Art Center College of Design Special Collections; The Getty; Virginia Commonwealth University Artist Book Collection; Frank Ellsworth Collection; and Baylor University Book Arts collection. Website >>
Contact: helen dot thorington at gmail dot com
Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director
Jo-Anne Green was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and emigrated to the United States in 1983. She has been Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. since 2002.
Green received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honors in Printmaking and Art History from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa); a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art from UMASS Dartmouth; and a Master of Science in Art Administration from Lesley University.
She volunteered for a Fund for a Free South Africa (FreeSA) from 1985 to 1992, where she co-founded Cultural Resistance to educate the American public about Apartheid. Cultural Resistance produced a monthly newsletter, organized video screenings, curated exhibitions, and was involved in Nelson Mandela’s first public appearance in the US after his release from prison.
In 1999, Green was instrumental in starting the Artist-in-Residence Program at the University of New Mexico’s High Performance Computing Center, which led to the founding of the Art Technology Center (ATC) at UNM. She was Grants Administrator and, later, Program Coordinator for both the ATC and the Arts of the Americas Institute. She returned to Boston in 2001.
Green has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Emerson College, Boston; and the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
She is also an artist, curator, designer, and writer. Her essay Parsing Truths was commissioned for Michael Takeo Magruder: (Re)mediation_s: 2000-2010; and her co-authored chapter Mixed Realities was published in Unsitely Aesthetics, edited by Maria Miranda. In 2013, she contributed an essay, Generative Systems: (Re)Producing Hands and Faces, to Sonia Landy Sheridan’s Art at the Dawning of the Electronic Era: Generative Systems.
Green has exhibited her paintings, prints, one-of-a-kind artist’s books, and installations in Johannesburg, S.A., Massachusetts and New York. Her first one-person exhibition, Well, as a result… was reviewed in the Boston Herald. Website >>
Contact: newradio dot org at gmail dot com
Jesse Gilbert, System Administrator
Jesse Gilbert is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of visual art, sound and software design, creating flexible frameworks that are activated in live performance, via network interaction, or in installation settings. Since 2010 he has primarily developed and performed with his software SpectralGL, an interactive listening instrument that generates real-time visual landscapes in response to sound. Building on his work as a composer, sound designer and lifelong technologist, Gilbert’s creative output probes the phenomenological nature of listening itself through a practice centering on improvisation and collaborative dialogue. Gilbert co-founded Dark Matter Media LLC in 2007, through which he consults on a variety of projects in the art and entertainment industries. He is currently the Chair of the Media Technology department at Woodbury University, and has taught interactive software design at both CalArts and UC San Diego.
Gilbert’s collaborative and solo work has been shown widely in the US and abroad; venues include Ars Electronica (Austria), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Färgfabriken (Stockholm), Laboral Centro de Arte (Gijón), RedCat (Los Angeles), Operadagen Festival (Rotterdam), Millenium Park (Chicago), Mostra SESC de Artes (São Paulo), Cemal Resit Rey Concert Hall (Istanbul), Festival International de Musique Actuelle (Quebec), Angel City Jazz Festival (Los Angeles), Roulette (New York), Sons d’Hiver (Paris), Saalfelden International Jazz Festival (Austria), Café OTO (London), Voll-Damm Festival Internacional de Jazz (Barcelona), Guelph Jazz Festival (Ontario), Heineken Jazzaldia Festival (San Sebastián), Axs Festival (Pasadena), Miami Light Project (Miami), Engine27 (New York), New Museum (New York), USC Pacific Asia Museum (Pasadena), Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon), Automata (Los Angeles), The Blue Whale (Los Angeles), net.congestion (Amsterdam), Whitney Museum (New York), Grand Performances (Los Angeles), Prototype Festival (New York), CEAIT Festival (Los Angeles), Kunstradio’s Recycling the Future (Austria), and PORT (MIT, Boston).
His work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Eyebeam Atelier, the National Performance Network, Turbulence.org, the Studio for Creative Inquiry (Carnegie Mellon), the Jerome Foundation, Creative Capital, the Markle Foundation, the Beall Center for Art & Technology (UC Irvine), the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Montalvo Arts Center, and the Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology (CEAIT).
Gilbert has collaborated with a wide range of artists and researchers across many disciplines, including: Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Mark Trayle, Carole Kim, Maile Colbert, Maija Garcia, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Motoko Honda, Timur Bekbosunov, Daniel Corral, Moses Hacmon, Oguri, Roxanne Steinberg, Pablo Molina, Leroy Jenkins, Pauline Oliveros, Helen Thorington, Marek Walczak, Scott Rosenberg, Aram Sinnreich, Arul Chib, Marie Sester, Amy Alexander, Grisha Coleman, Michael Bryant, Georgia Archer, Maureen Selwood, JR Hughto, Anne LeBaron, Nels Cline, GE Stinson, Nick Didkovsky, Dafna Naphtali, Tim Boykett, Atau Tanaka, Han Earl Park and many others. He studied composition with Mark Trayle, Wadada Leo Smith, Mort Subotnick, David Rosenboom, Sara Roberts, Tom Erbe, Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier, and Ron Kuivila.
Gilbert’s collaborative work with video artist Carole Kim was featured in Aspect Magazine Vol. 2: Artists of the West Coast. His online work was featured in Peter Traub’s article Sounding the Net: Recent Sonic Works for the Internet and Computer Networks in Contemporary Music Review, December 2005. In December 2010 he was voted a Finalist for the World Technology Award in the Arts and inducted as a new Fellow by the World Technology Network.
In 1994 Gilbert received a Watson Fellowship and spent a year studying music in Ghana, West Africa. His independent research, focused primarily on oral transmission of culture, has been a primary influence on his later work in electronic media. Website >>
Contact: jesse dot gilbert at gmail dot com
Board of Directors
Michelle Riel, President
Jeanette Vuocolo, Treasurer
Jacki Apple
Jack Ox
Last edited: December 1, 2016