Detunement
Though research methods generally privilege modes of achieving ever-greater clarity to describe the world, methods that embrace fuzziness, noisiness, and dissonance can offer equally important insights. Noise, with its broad spectrum of elements and lack of stable form, might also be understood as being made of myriad tiny relational differences. Perceptual ambiguity may be generative of understanding a highly complex and changeful world as well as the coexistence of multiple worlds. Over the past two decades in her explorations of transmission ecologies and environment as media, Anna Friz has undertaken critical practices of listening and composition with an ear for uncertainty and for the ambiguities of sound. Her performance, installation and broadcast works consider how detuned modes of noticing and creation may help to understand both the seemingly totalizing forces of anthropocentric modernity and be expressive of subtle forces and relationships that exceed such neoliberal narratives.

Anna Friz is a radio, sound and media artist, who works with themes of transmission ecologies and the intimacies of signal space, land use and infrastructures, time perception and durational performance, and critical fictions. She has exhibited and performed widely across North America and internationally; in the past year new projects include commissions for German and Austrian national public radio, a permanent outdoor sound installation created for Wave Farm in upper Hudson Valley, New York, new video work for the Bienal Sur in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a live performance at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from York University, Tkaronto/Toronto and is currently Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. Anna is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow.