Gregory Whitehead

https://gregorywhitehead.net

Inventor of the "wound diddler" and noted vulcrologist. Past director of the Broca Memorial Institute for Schizophonic Behavior and the International Institute for Screamscape Studies.
Gregory Whitehead has created more than one hundred radio plays, essays and acoustic adventures for the BBC, Radio France, Deutschland Radio, Australia’s ABC, NPR and other broadcasters. Often interweaving documentary and fictive materials into playfully unresolved narratives, Whitehead’s aesthetic is distinguished by a deep philosophical commitment to radio as a medium for poetic navigation and free association. In his voice and text-sound works, he explores the tension between a continuous pulse and the eruption of sudden discontinuities, as well as linguistic entropy and decay.
His plays have won numerous awards, winner of a Prix Italia for Documentary and a Prix Futura/BBC Award for New Hörspiel. Author of essays on subjects relating to language, technology and "the public".
Whitehead is co-editor with Douglas Kahn of the influential anthology of writings on the history of radio and audio art, Wireless Imagination: sound radio and the avant-garde, and the author of numerous performance texts and speculative fictions that explore the intricate aesthetics of radiophonic space, as well as critical essays relating to memory, violence and American identity. His writings have appeared in publications such as Ear, Public, Art & Text, PAJ, TDR, Resonance and Cabinet, as well as in numerous anthologies and themed books, such as The Politics of Everyday Fear. In January 2012, he initiated an online writing project, Desperado Philosophy.
While living on Nantucket Island in the late 1990s, Whitehead collaborated with Jay Allison and others towards the creation of a new public radio station for the Cape & Islands, WCAI. He also serves as an advisor for WGXC in the Hudson Valley, a station with a strong mission-based commitment to transmission arts.
As a vocalist, Whitehead has performed in a wide array of choirs and ensembles since his days as a boy soprano, and keeps an ear tuned for the world’s varied traditions of choral singing. He plays a dozen instruments poorly, and soprano saxophone passably well. He lives with his family in the Berkshires, not far from the farmhouse where Melville penned Moby Dick, and closer still to the Tanglewood of Hawthorne’s tales. He is a long distance walker, sea kayaker and student of the ancient game of weiqi.

Sendungen im ORF-Kunstradio:

4. März 2012: „The catastrophe class“
25. Dezember 2016: Radio Unbroken – songspiel für radio revolten

BIOGRAPHIES