Introduction: Words from the Editor

Jay Needham is an artist, writer/editor, and educator. As a multi-instrumentalist and visual artist, he creates sound art, music, productions for radio, visual art, performances, and installations that activate listening as a vital component of artistic perception. Through his works, he explores themes of militarism, surveillance, family archives, ecology, and autoethnography that are often informed by his life-long experience with hearing loss. Needham’s approach to art and scholarship is decidedly transdisciplinary, reflecting his belief that necessary and lasting artistic messages can be crafted through the combination of attentive research, artistic intent, and the risk involved in working toward change. His installation documenting the sounds of Neotropical rainforests is on permanent display in the BioMuseo, designed by Frank Gehry, in the Republic of Panama. His writings have been published in Exposure, Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, and Leonardo Music Journal. Professor Needham is a member of the Humanities and Social Science Expert Group with the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), as well as a member of the Library of Congress’s Radio Preservation Task Force. He is the director of graduate studies for the MFA program in the School of Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He received his MFA from the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts.