Sound Museum Collective
Sound Museum Collective (SMC) is an evolving nonmember collective that holds space to reconstruct our relationships to sounds. Through accessible workshops and skill shares, creative team projects, and community partnerships, SMC celebrates trans, nonbinary, and women sound artists and technicians. We demystify audio engineering and share in the resounding nature of sound. Our goals are right in our name. Someday, we hope to have a space that will not only operate as a workshop and free library, but will also be a place where we can curate and hold sound artists.
Awarded Grants
2020
Art and Change Grant (ACG)
Overview
Our project will be an archive of radio technology and it’s embedment in queer histories and futures. We will document the ways radio has been used as a tool in organizing for social justice, bringing marginalized communities together, specifically through the lens of LGBTQIA radio. We will be researching the 1997 shutdown of a West Philly queer radio station that addressed incarceration, safe drug use, and sex education.
The exhibition will be a documentary work on the history of queer radio, and a presentation of ongoing research into radio technology and futures. We will engage in two connected avenues of work: first, a research period where we collect written and oral histories, and second, a series of educational and exploratory workshops where we will learn about and build transmitters, as well as brainstorming ideas for the future of radio and its continued existence in queer milieux. The research period will culminate in the development of a sound piece utilizing archival recordings, which will serve as a time capsule documenting the voices and lives involved in queer broadcasting.
The goal is the final exhibition and workshop series will bring queer communities together around a shared history and technology that has defined and demarcated the boundaries of togetherness.
