Gregory Whitehead ((Nantucket, MA) [1] is a writer, radiomaker and audio artist based in Lenox, Massachusetts.
Contents |
Allen S. Weiss considers him to be a major international figure in the fields of audio and radio art, from the 1980s to the present.[2]
Active in cassette culture during the 1980s, his early works include Disorder Speech (1985), Display Wounds (1986), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1987), The Pleasure of Ruins (1988), Writing On Air (1988) and Reptiles and Wildfire (1989). In 1991, RRRecords released a 7” vinyl record titled Vicekopf.
Selections from his early voice works, which he called “castaways”, were released on CD in 1993 by the Dutch label Staalplaat, who then released a CD version of his seminal experimental radio documentary, Dead Letters, which had first been broadcast in 1985. Two additional radio plays, Shake, Rattle, Roll and Degenerates in Dreamland were released on CD by the V2 Institute for Unstable Media in 1995. Shake, Rattle, Roll received a BBC Award at the Prix Futura competition in Berlin.
Other works produced these years were widely anthologized on audio or radio art CD magazines such as Tellus, Aerial and Revista de Arte Sonora.
Whitehead collaborated with Christof Migone on the 1995 radio play, The Thing About Bugs, for New American Radio. Other radioplays from the 1990s include Pressures of the Unspeakable (1992), Nothing But Fog (1996) and Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered (1997), which he produced for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Pressures of the Unspeakable received a Prix Italia award.
Since 2000, Whitehead has produced numerous plays and documentary essays for BBC Radio, including The Marilyn Room (2000), American Heavy (2001), The Loneliest Road (2003), On One Lost Hair (2004), No Background Music (2005), The Day King Hammer Fell From The Sky (2007) and Bring Me The Head of Philip K. Dick (2009). The Loneliest Road and No Background Music (featuring Sigourney Weaver) both won Sony Gold Academy Awards.
Dead Letters was included in the sound section, curated by Stephen Vitiello, of the Whitney Museum’s American Century show in 2000, and his Mister Whitehead Are You There? was included in the Whitney’s Bitstreams exhibition of digital art, in 2001. His video installation, Delivery System No. 1, was shown at Location One gallery (NYC) in 2001, and his multimedia installation, The Bone Trade, was exhibited at Mass MOCA in 2003.
Whitehead has also been a frequent speaker at various conferences and festivals, including Radio Without Boundaries, Third Coast, Megapolis, Boundless Sound, School of Sound, and Airborne. He is the author of numerous essays on subjects relating to the poetics of radio space, and he is co-editor of a groundbreaking anthology of sound art and radio texts, Wireless Imagination: sound, radio and the avant-garde (MIT Press, 1994).