MILES SCHARFF

 

 

Born 1999

Physics and Music Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, 

Pittsburgh, PA, (BSA), 2022

Sound Art, Columbia University, New York, NY, (MFA), 2025

Lives and Works in New York, NY

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MILES SCHARFF (b. 1999) is a sound artist and improvisor working with radio electronics, sound sculpture, video, spatial audio, and performance. His current research explores how everyday objects double as involuntary antennas, absorbing and re-broadcasting stray electromagnetic and acoustic signals. Spawned by telecom and other industrial systems, these accidental relay points become unlikely portals for intimate acts of listening. Scharff sees them as case studies along a continuum that stretches from the epistemic rigor of Western science to its détournement by conspiratorial and fringe-spiritualist cultures. He builds devices and software that stage, record, and recontextualize these object–signal interactions, transducing latent fields into audible and kinetic forms; granting physical presence to phenomena that usually escape perception, situating them in relation to our bodies, architectures, and ecologies. His aim is not to affix a definitive truth, but to materialize the unseen so that it can be examined—critically and sensorially—within the complex infrastructures that shape contemporary experience. 

 

Scharff has exhibited at New Uncanny, Fridman Gallery, Wallach Gallery, SK Gallery, Alice Holt Forest, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and the Rube Goldberg Foundation. He is the 2024 recipient of the Genelec Dr. Ilpo Martikainen Audio Visionary Scholarship and was awarded the 2025 WYN Best International Prize at Minor Attractions.