Miles Scharff

Bio: Miles is a sound artist working with radio electronics, sound sculpture, video, spatial audio, and performance. He has exhibited work at New Uncanny, Fridman Gallery, Wallach Gallery, SK Gallery, Alice Holt Forest with Sensing the Forest and Forestry England, The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and The Rube Goldberg Foundation. He is a recipient of the 2024 Genelec Dr. Ilpo Martikainen Audio Visionary Scholarship, and has a paper published in the TEI 2025 conference. Miles received his bachelors in Physics and Music Technology from Carnegie Mellon University, and will receive his MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University in 2025.

milescharff.com
instagram @mjsmiles99

I investigate the leakage of telecommunications infrastructure, how every object in the path between sender and receiver is penetrated, interacted with, moved through by electromagnetic signals. The radio has been heard through dental implants, shrapnel embedded in the skull, bedsprings, pots and pans, wireframe glasses, and old pipes. Listeners in these examples were often suspected of hallucination. Every object is an antenna, a reflector, or somewhere in between. These instances of leakage sit in the gaps of knowledge, between end users, a space considered formless to the architects of the signals that traverse it. I see these sites as case studies in the rift between scientific or authoritarian truth and personal experience. When instances of leakage go unaddressed and unexplained, established logic systems are re-appropriated to fabricate an explanation, sometimes in ways deemed as conspiracy theory. I seek to document and fabricate these interactions between physical object and invisible signal through the creation of devices and systems in order to witness them through listening and re-contextualization, allowing for invisible systems and phenomena to be confronted and considered in relation to our bodies and environment. These investigations are not about distilling some form of truth, but to physicalize an extrasensory experience such that it can be placed in a critical lens.

Miles Scharff

the taking apart, the sawing in half, 2023
Acrylic, steel, microwave transformers, electormagnetic microphones, handmade circuitry, transducers
84" x 48" x 48"
Courtesy of the artist