R. Lee Montgomery is an artist, educator, and luddite technologist with a strong appreciation for open-source technologies, fair-use creations, and seemingly obsolete processes.
Since August 2009, Lee has taught Electronic Art in the Art Department at the University of New Mexico. Classes taught include Intermediate Electronic Art and Broadcasting. Lee attempts to include his students in his own practice whenever possible, and in 2010 his students created weekly broadcasts for a Neighborhood Public Radio show at the Contemporary Museum in Batimore.
Lee recently completed a residency at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, NY where he continued his video experiments with commercial cinema and fair-use while also realizing a continuing fascination with what he likes to call “virtual cymatics” or the conversion of sound into image and image into sound using technology (instead of vibration).
Through the Broadcast Version project Lee distorts commercially “pirated” films through various digital and anolog processes. Video is sometimes run through homemade television transmitters into older distorted televisions in the spirit of Nam Jun Paik and Tetsuo Kogawa (whose circuit designs Lee has been known to use).
As founder of Neighborhood Public Radio (NPR) in 2004, Lee has traveled throughout the United States and Europe establishing low power community based radio stations (with numerous collaborators most notably, founding members Jon Brumit and Michael Trigilio).
NPR has been the recipient of grants from Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, CEC Artslink, the Creative Work Fund, and the Walter and Elise Haas Fund.
In 2008 NPR were included in the Whitney Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. NPR has also appeared at the Novi Sad Museum of Contemporary Art in Serbia, kuda.org in Serbia, The DeYoung Museum in SanFrancisco, Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago, Lui Velazquez space in Tijuana, and the ATC series at UC Berkeley among many others.