Jeff Cain is an artist and designer who works with sculpture, video, sound technology and performance. Jeff recieved his MFA in studio art from Cal Arts. His works have been shown in France at the Musee d'art Modern de Ville de Paris, as well as locally at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Track 16 in Santa Monica. Jeff is the founder and inventor of RHZ Radio, which was nominated for the Prix Ars Electronica in 2005.
Jeff Cain works with the disruption of the very air that surrounds us. His piece, Dead Air, documents the Santa Ana winds as they pass through the Mount Wilson antenna farm. “The inspiration for Dead Air actually came from some scientific data about high levels of electromagnetic fields (EMF), such as the ones near radio towers, as an influencing factor in rates of depression and even suicide.” Cain uses a stethoscope, which he places on the metal tubes that form the base of the towers, to record the confluence of wind and scraps of radio transmissions. These sounds, transported in the gallery through similar tubes, make visceral ubiquitous electrical disturbances. The levels of man-made EMF have increased to the point that these disruptions are an inextricable part of our surroundings, a collision of the natural and cultural worlds that Cain considers a now permanent part of our existence. “The cultural world has become our natural world. Not only do culture and nature influence each other, like the interplay of wind and radio in these recordings, but they become each other.”
