'Dead Silence: ecological silencing and environmentally-engaged sound-art'

Dr. Dugal McKinnon of the New Zealand School of Music gave this talk at the Adam Concert Room in Wellington today, about silence in ecologically minded sound work, in which he discussed two works I made during my Kapiti Island residency, Collected Silences for Lord Rothschild, and Huia Transcriptions. More of Dugal's writing can be read on his blog here.

The Crime LINKS in the Smoke

in response to Scott Flanagan's request for an artist book for his edition The Rose Collection, Campbell Walker created a bookwork called The Crime LINKS in the Smoke. 

It was made from pages of burnt books, sourced from the strewn debris of detective fiction covering the upper floor of the Dunedin second hand bookstore Raven Books, where I once worked, and Campbell did for a while as well. The owner, Paddy Rainsford, had been an avid collector of the crime fiction genre, with many rare and signed editions, but his collection had been destroyed in a fire the previous August. A year later, we had gone back to the shop, and Campbell had picked up the pages. The pages were physically cut, pasted and re-ordered into a new sequence in the unique book work given to Scott.

 

Campbell and I performed from a photocopy of the work on 19 September 2012 as part of the 2012 Octagon Collective readings series, at Circadian Rhythm cafe, Dunedin, New Zealand. the performance was captured on video by University of Otago academic and iterative poetry specialist Jacob Edmond:

Jacob also penned some thoughtful commentary on the work, under the title of Local Crime : Forensic Iterations in the Modern and Contemporary poetics journal Jacket2, which is readable here :

"New Zealand artist Campbell Walker’s 2012 work The Crime LINKS in the Smoke is an undead work that plays on the print book as both fetishized object and repeatable copy. The Crime comprises cut-up pages from detective novels that were burnt in the fire that destroyed Raven Books, a secondhand bookshop on Princes St in Dunedin, New Zealand. Walker’s book is a memorial both to a particular shop and to the town where it was located. Dunedin, the small city near the southern end of New Zealand where I live, is known for its penguins and sea lions but also for its crumbling Victorian grandeur. Now mainly a university town, Dunedin was once New Zealand’s largest and most prosperous city, and the energetic local cultural scene today springs partly from the spaces opened up by the slow urban decay of a city that never grew. Walker’s work links the fate of Raven Books and Dunedin to the fate of the print codex at a time when bookstores everywhere are closing their doors and e-book sales are increasing exponentially.

By singing Walter Benjamin’s celebration of the codex, Kenneth Goldsmith ironically acknowledged that the book today might just as well mean an e-book or an audiobook, as something made from trees and ink. Walker’s reiterated book seems, by contrast, to stress the material, albeit damaged, paper-based object in the mode of a range of contemporary bookwork art. Indeed, when displayed in the Christchurch Art Gallery (in a city whose past has been even more ravaged––as a result of a terrifying and tragic earthquake two years ago), the work very much takes on these qualities.
Yet The Crime does not follow so many recent bookwork pieces and treat the book as simply a fetishized object for nostalgia. By splicing together crime fiction novels, Walker also emphasizes the repeatability and interchangeability of the genre and its throwaway lines. Walker has also repeated The Crime by performing the work with sound artist and poet Sally Ann McIntyre. (Both McIntyre and Walker once worked in Raven Books.)

If one takes the various documentary digital images and performance into account, The Crime ceases simply to be a forensic record––a document of personal and local history that bears witness to the loss of a bookshop and to Dunedin’s urban decay. Instead, the work becomes about “burning” in the digital sense––the possibility of further copies and versions that unsettle and overlay notions of materiality tied to the paper page."

'selected radio memorials'

a suite of transmission works collected from the last few years' somewhat consistent low-level preoccupation with narrowcast radio and local seismic activity are to be included in Simulcast, a group exhibition of radio works running at the Audio Foundation's Auckland space from the 7th - 30th of March, also including work by Auckland artists Ivan Masic and Jay Hollows, and a 'radio wormhole' linking Auckland to central Christchurch, a sonic transfer of the everydayness of each locale opened up for the month's duration by my longtime Christchurch-based collaborator, University of Canterbury Media Arts lecturer Dr. Zita Joyce.

for Simulcast, radio cegeste has put together a playlist, including the transmission works dear friends who have died are all talking to me tonight / all at once, and a private swamp is where this tree grew feathers once, a radio memorial in four movements, which which will be 'exhibited' in the radio-space of the Audio Foundation's new online and low-power FM radio station, AFM 88.3FM and on site via receivers tuned into the signal in the physical exhibition space.

An edition of 10 lock-groove lathe cut records, collectively entitled modified radio memorial #1 (a fissure in the line of a public silence) has also been made especially for the exhibition. These ten transcriptions of the radio silence broadcast 1 week after the Christchurch earthquake of February 2011 are all individual, cyclic extensions of public radio silence, a mourning ritual which included birdsong, prayer, and the extended diatribes of public radio shock jocks.

I also wrote a piece for the catalogue (which was slightly different in its published form):

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how to listen to nothing : the radio memorial as ‘gap music’

it’s misleading to think about radiophonic space in sculptural terms, as a space to be “filled” with sound. (…) Radio space is more a series of cultural, social and political relations, to be engaged in some way. (…) The politics of making creative radio are similar to the politics of working in any other kind of public space.

-Gregory Whitehead

In the past few years, I’ve been increasingly re-imagining radio space as sitting somewhat specifically within its material apparatus of reception and transmission, one consequence of engaging with the active and creative use of the airwaves as a medium, is to see it as no longer analogous to, locatable within what can be perceived of as a neutrality of site. Attuned to the mobilities that the narrowcast potentials of the medium of Mini FM allow, I find myself mostly drawn to leave the studio behind, to wander off into the wilder, stranger landscape of radio waves, following the trail of a ‘plein air radio’ (art) practice befitting of a more nomadic sensibility, one increasingly attuned less to objects than to the way tecnologies of transmission activate the gaps and silences between them. Within this more fluid way of thinking about, of positioning radiophonic time and site, the radio programme itself can be reconfigured as a durational, event-based structure unbounded by the metered temporalities of an imposed radio-clock, and accommodating of the silence disavowed (the dreaded 'dead air') on the public airwaves. What emerges is sometimes more akin to a form of sited readabilty and decipering approaching a de-monumentalised land art, a genre of non-spectacular (even 'failed') nature documentary, or sometimes a form more aligned with, if not the same as, improvised sound performance. Any way you listen to it, this is radio that also listens to itself. That tends to be tangibly, if temporarily mapped out as a series of fleeting, roughly circular territories, constellations of localised significances, docking points within the conglomerate palimpsests of materialities that cohere more abstractly around it, that meet it, as cities, architectures, groups of bodies, discourses, forests, entertainment environments, human and non-human languages, disaster events. Such programmes become akin, from one perspective, to a soft criticality of such structures, in their sketching of a series of domestically scaled rooms, body sized portals which open in moments as interventions or understandings, counter-memorials, and then close again, often without anyone in the room noticing, although someone might have heard something in a lecture theatre in a city on the other side of the world. Jack Spicer perhaps anticipated these uncanny modalities best in the 1940s when he wrote of the poet as radio receiver, an Orphic presence, tuning into transmissions as the gap music of the universe: “the ocean does not mean to be listened to / a drop or crash of water / it means / nothing … aimlessly it pounds the shore, white and aimless signals / noone listens to poetry”. [1]           

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[1] jack Spicer ‘thing language’

after bexley

“Thus, too, the sites of many villages and towns that anciently existed along the rivers, or on the lower lands adjoining, were concealed by the water and the mud it brought with it. The sedges and reeds that arose completed the work and left nothing visible, so that the mighty buildings of olden days were by these means utterly buried.”

 -Richard Jefferies, After London, Wild England, 1880

“No-one seems to be cleaning up the silt in Seabreeze Close any more. The grey slop that burst through roads, lawns and homes has redefined the landscape of the Bexley cul-de-sac, obscuring driveways in dusty mounds and piling up in the corners of abandoned living rooms. Nature is already reclaiming this street, where all but four houses have been abandoned.

– ‘Seabreeze Close going back to Nature’, The Christchurch Press, 17/2/2012

 the audio recordings comprising After Bexley were captured by Reuben Derrick and Sally Ann McIntyre on two field trips into Bexley on 11.9.2012 and 13.9.2012, and re-sited within a small-radius programme transmitted at the Physics Room’s gallery spaces within the same week, on 15.9.2012. They can be seen as a response to the idea of silence, itself co-opted as memorial a mere week after the earthquake event of 12.51pm, 22.2.2011. As Prime Minister John Key put it at the time, “two minutes as a sign of unity for the people of Canterbury who are enduring a tragedy beyond what most of us can imagine." (The New Zealand Herald, 27/2/2011)

Different nations commemorate differently, reflecting contestations over the meaning and significance of traumatic events. As an indicator of the way new Zealand understands public grief, there were many striking things about this truncated memorial silence, aligned here with ‘the unimaginable’, one being how the radio represented it : in Auckland at the time, I recorded various stations, on one ‘the silence’ was represented as birdsong, on another, prayer. A year later, on the anniversary, there was even bagpipes. Dead Air, it seemed, was not allowed. People had to know the radio was on. 

In his 1987 essay ‘Radical Radio’[3], R. Murray Schafer wrote speculatively of a project he called ‘wilderness radio’ which would, as he put it, “put microphones in remote locations uninhabited by humans and broadcast whatever might be happening out there: the sounds of wind and rain, the cries of birds and animals – the uneventful events of the natural soundscape transmitted without editing into the hearts of cities.”  



But just as our concept of ‘nature’ has gravitated toward a forced questioning of the notion of the inherent stability of ecosystems, and the questioning of the very existence of ‘remote locations uninhabited by humans’, within the current global media environment, the afterlife of modernist communicative structures, such as the medium of radio, can no longer realistically include this kind of centre-periphery model of distributed listening, in which home becomes the receptacle for an aural appreciation of the untouched wilderness, the bucolic comforts of situating “what is happening out there” as entertainment within a zone of domestic restfulness. If, through its own lack of centrality, burgeoning obsolescence and displacement as popular entertainment medium by the internet, its own sounds being numbered among the endangered audible worlds a classical acoustic ecologist might wish to preserve, Radio has largely been left in a commercial wasteland, ripe for marginal activity, and reinvention.

Might we shift the idea of nature being passively received on the radio by listeners, this centre-periphery model of broadcast, toward rendering these listeners active receivers within a sonic locality? Such an approach can be seen in the work of Tetsuo Kogawa, who has since the 1980s developed the concepts of narrowcasting and micro-casting to describe a more nomadic, embodied radio : “Our body has no ‘home’ (substance) but is interwoven with rooms, tools, city… Our body is no longer the centre of the world but it could be a pressure point. And every point has its own singularity”. 

 
Radio Cegeste is a micro-radio project station built in a workshop with Kogawa in 2006, and its series of programmes has been developed and performed in bounded spaces, from urban shopping malls, to gardens, to biosecure ecosanctuaries, critically engaging with small radius transmission as a form which, as one commentator put it, “takes field recording back to the field”, localising the transmission, and recognising radio as a medium which, while no longer centralised, can see artistic and critical potential in an analysis of place-based specificity, and allowing its environment to ‘speak back’ as receiver.

‘After Christchurch’, this project could have been called, but perhaps ‘Christchurch’ is a term that is not currently usable. For all the talk about heritage, some places haven’t survived long enough to have a memory. Take Bexley, for example, or specifically the subdivision made up of Seabreeze Close, Waireka Lane and Kokopu Lane, which contains around 60 homes, built over the last 5-10 years on land reclaimed from the nearby wetlands. Going out to this ‘forgotten’ locale, the city seems atomised, in process of becoming something else, the rupture of the events of 2011-2012 meaning also a destabilisation of the notion of ‘home’ as the place where events do not occur. 

After Bexley? when does it end, that identity? The event of its ending is historical. But a kind of listening, in which there is perhaps very few human ears present, stays after it. It sounds like silence, but it has no boundaries. The distant rumble of cars along the motorway, not a constant drone, frames it, as do the sounds of honking waterbirds in the wetlands behind. Closer in, we initially see an interiority has gone, the houses emptied out, thin, almost on the verge of non-existence. In some, the outside has come inside, whole ecosystems flourishing in living rooms, bathrooms drowned by silt. Some have already been erased, the fragmented pottery shards and wilding garden vegetables which mark the cleared sections with traces like instant archaeological digs, the atomisation of the built environment, still resolutely hanging on to visibility. But as the wind and the rain occupy structures no longer perfectly square, these become Aeolian shells for wind, structures of amplification, like musical instruments, containing and framing the sounds which are those that will still be here, once the houses are gone. It is as though the houses themselves have become a process. Through animal alarm sounds, territorial markers, the presence of the recordists themselves wandering through the area is noted. Like car alarms in the city.

 

Transmitting these sounds back into the city, we hear them not as silences but through the understanding that this is the sound of “a specific present - that is, a sound chamber for the resonances of an event of thinking,” (Ranciere). Bexley takes its place, its non-place, in the movements of air. Here we can hear Christchurch anew, the re-staging of a moment of this city’s current life as something like nothingness. What is at stake here? The momentary articulation of an emptiness, a volume of silences, where the cancellation of “the everyday” allows for a listening more aligned with the experience of wandering, of drift, through the abandoned spaces themselves. The gap widens, through what must seem for the residents of such spaces an eternity of indecision and waiting – the houses are sinking, the wetlands, drained, are reasserting themselves. But there are signs in windows : “we are still living here”.

 
 After Bexley is not ‘information radio’ or ‘message radio’, but something analogous to what we still think of as ‘silence’. It is the sound of what is there, now the map has been inverted, the wilderness has come into the house. It is the experience of the non-spectacular, as the silence bursts its banks, its framing in a two minute memorial. The site specificity of playback of the ‘silences’ in question opens up one area of the city’s built environment into another. But this in itself is not a channeling of a periphery to a centre, more a sharing of specificities, non-monumental moments. We use the radio already used as part of another aspect this project, we look for linkages and accumulations, we situate this temporary, shifting soundscape within an ephemeral, fleeting context. The Physics Room is now itself de-centralised, however temporarily, itself active within a more provisional site. But then, with the whole idea of a centre in flux right now, and with mobile projects perhaps being more appropriate critical responses, perhaps we have a chance to listen more closely to something, in this gap.

Sally Ann McIntyre, 15.9.2012

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1. http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/christchurch-earthquake-2011/12-51/our-people/6414258/Sticking-it-out-in-Seabreeze-Close

2. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10709086

3. R.Murray Schafer: "Radical Radio" in: Festival for a New Radio, 1987, New York.

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gull lines, at a slope of conduction (for waiorua shoreline, violin and shortwave)

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"As every child knows, the shell has its own song, which is the song of the sea, the rising and the crashing of waves. Only later, at about twelve, does one learn that one has been listening to the blood rushing in one's head." - Philip Kuberski, 'The Persistence of Memory : Organism, Myth, Text'

"The subject of the listening or the subject who is listening (but also the one who is “subject to listening” in the sense that one can be “subject to" unease, an ailment, or a crisis) is not a phenomenological subject. This means he is not a philosophical subject, and, finally, he is perhaps no subject at all, except as the place of resonance, of its infinite tension and rebound, the amplitude of sonorous deployment and the slightness of its simultaneous redeployment – by which a voice is modulated in which the singular of a cry, a call, or a song vibrates by retreating from it (a “voice”: we have to understand what sounds from a human throat without being language, which emerges from an animal gullet or from any kind of instrument, even from the wind in the branches: the rustling toward which we strain or lend an ear)." - Jean Luc Nancy 'On Listening', pp. 21-22

"An elemental concert / all the more delightful for its restraint and reflective bent / has been playing there through all eternity for no one. / Since its formation through the spirit of persistence / which blows now and then from the skies / and acts upon a boundless platitude / a wave / rolling in from afar unimpeded and unreproached / finally for the first time comes upon someone to speak to." - Francis Ponge, Sea Shores, from 'The Nature of Things'

"To me the islands were felt, not said, and although these islands had their voice I would never learn how to speak with it. I could only describe it with my own. Just as I could try to write it down, even though I knew there were no New Zealand words possible in English letters, only the traces of its sounds left in our language where we'd made our attempts." - Hamish Clayton 'Wulf', p. 225

Walking along the coast of Waiorua bay, at the North end of Kapiti Island, I arrive at the site of a decommissioned coastal warning light tower whose few remnants - a lichen-encrusted concrete foundation and various planks scattered around the stones - are slowly biodegrading, becoming indistinguishable from the rocky beach and plentiful driftwood heaped in drifts metres high, in some places including whole trees, as the seasons of rain and sun take their toll.

It seems the text of history is crumbling, its memory of human inhabitation falling away as the rapidly re-foresting island claims all traces, a complex palimpsest underneath its current identity as a place where New Zealand’s remaining birds can replenish their populations without pressure from introduced mammalian predators. But the traces are everywhere, if you look closely, if you listen. For instance, before the lighthouse existed, this coastline was the site of the battle of Waiorua (aka Whakapaetai), dated at 1824, in which Ngati Toa fought off, against the odds, the re-claiming of Kapiti from displaced tribes returning from the mainland, warriors arriving in myriad Waka over the sea, never to return. As one commentator puts it "Perhaps 2,000 men with a great fleet of canoes assembled on the beaches of the coast, and, when the time came one day before dawn, converged on the North end of the island, one wing from Otaki and one from Waikanae. Hundreds of canoes 'darkened' the water, perhaps the largest fleet to go into action in the long history of Maori warfare in New Zealand." (Barbara Macmorran, 'In View of Kapiti, Earliest days to the late 1970s, p.30) Writing about this event in his poem ‘Sanctuary of Spirits : a Pattern of Voices’ poet Alistair Te Ariki Campbell says of Kapiti: “This island is alive with ghosts. / Tonight, every leaf is an ear / attuned to your heartbeat...”, a folding of the present into the past, figuring the shoreline as threshold, as space-between.

 Returning to the site over a few weeks, I make location recordings, I take a radio and search the shortwave, finding a paucity of signals registering in the aetheric sea, and just before midnight I play the violin in the freezing winds, folding the sounds of the instrument into the wider instrumentation of the place, its harsh tonalities, shrieking seabirds and the ongoing crash of the waves, the night calls of forest birds. It seems that sometime during this process the violin itself loses its memory, or perhaps regains it, becomes tidal and avian, full of a voice tuning into the site, in and out of signal.

I imagine it is the sound of the site speaking to itself, but of course, it is my own unfamiliar voice that rings in my ears, my own listening that I am listening to.

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gull lines, at a slope of conduction (for waiorua shoreline, violin and shortwave) was recorded during early May on Kapiti, as a contribution to the Time Inventors Kabinet (TIK) festival of ecological media arts (11 - 13 May 2012) in Brussels. It emerges from my current research into the area of Kapiti Island, supported by Creative New Zealand and the New Zealand Department of Conservation.

Both as a contribution to this festival and within the wider parameters of my current project, the piece extends the sounds of a remote place to listeners in the heart of an urban sphere across the other side of the world, taking as part-provocation R. Murray Schafer and Bruce Davis's concept for a 'wilderness radio' : “the plan was to put microphones in remote locations uninhabited by humans and to broadcast whatever might be happening out there; the sounds of wind and rain, the cries of birds and animals – all the uneventful events of the natural soundscape transmitted without editing into the hearts of the cities. It seemed to us that since man has been pumping his affairs into the natural soundscape, a little natural wisdom might be a useful antidote”. (R Murray Schafer, 'Radical Radio' in 'Sound by Artists', ed. D. Lander & M. Lexier, 1990)

(It should of course be pointed out that Kapiti is in fact inhabited, albeit sparsely, as many such places are).

folding a coastline into a shipwrecked space, track contribution to 'Somewhere on the Edge', Gruenrekorder 100

My contribution to german label Gruenrekorder’s 100th release, a compilation of field recordings entitled 'Somewhere on the Edge' released in early May 2012, is entitled 'folding a coastline into a shipwrecked space' and is available for streamed listening or download, here.

here are my notes for the track :

"Kapiti Island is a bio-secure nature reserve, home to some of the world’s most critically endangered bird species, located 3 miles off the coast of the North Island of New Zealand. This unmanipulated field recording was made near the border of the island’s offshore marine reserve on the afternoon of 31.2.2012, while walking around the coastline of the north end of the island, where the beach is difficult terrain, rocky and piled with driftwood several metres high. Inhabiting this landscape from the physical position of the listener as walker and beachcomber, means shifting focus from the wide observational vista toward the specific and small. It is perhaps easy from the spectatorial and ideological distance of the mainland to read this island coastline as uninhabited, wild, pre-human, but a sustained immersion reveals many structures and traces. Aeroplanes break the fiction of natural silence, salt-wind weathered signs announce, ‘no landing here’, giant reflectors on the hills warn those looking from the sea of the protected marine reserve border, and the beach is strewn with ambiguous historic signs and remnants delivered back to the land by the waves. Looking for such signs, I noticed a small broken buoy washed among the rocks. I placed a microphone within it, like a hermit crab trying on a new sea shell. The sonic interaction with this structure’s reverberant space saw its abject, cast-off materiality transform into a temporary protective position through which to grasp the environment, filter to the harshness of the wind and nearby sea and the lilting sounds of native birds in the vicinity."

radio cegeste / lee noyes 'to orient themselves with coastlines' released on idealstate recordings

with the prospect of the Radio Cegeste / Lee Noyes live collaboration coming to an end for the foreseeable future upon Lee's relocation from Dunedin, NZ to Gothenburg, Sweden in the final days of 2011, his decision to release two site-specific recordings we had done in the previous months as a four-track album on his own idealstate label resulted in to orient themselves with coastlines (ISR2-12), in an edition of 100 copies. With the official release date as the 7th january 2012, these are at the time of writing available at the idealstate site, and via French distributor Metamkine.

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"Much of what I like about this album is its feeling of hidden discoveries and the way that, for much of the time it sounds less like a deliberate attempt to make music as it does a chance exploration around the sonic detritus found amongst the long wave radio bands. While in places the extremities of the sound get very harsh indeed and certainly keep you from relaxing into any kind of apathetic relationship with the CD there is also a feeling of it just existing in the room as it plays, forming another layer on top of the sounds of every day life. It is as fascinating to listen to as it is enjoyable and not much like anything else I have heard before."
-Richard Pinnell, review in The Watchful Ear, January 2012

"Had this emerged from N[Q], I wouldn't have been surprised. There's a similar level of restraint, of allowing the phenomena to stand on their own for extended periods, a minimum of overt manipulation or gestural activity. Snatches of voices, a violin melody (I recognize it, but can't place it), swarms of other generally low-key detritus come and go, very much giving the sense of drifting by, being momentarily captured, then going on their way."
-Brian Olewnick, review in Just Outside, January 2012

"A Lilliputian music that exists beyond the ambit of its origins. A dense wash of light pulled from the interference that surrounds interference."
- Patrick Farmer, in his January 2012 sampler for Sound and Music

"At times the recording seems to be searching for survivors like a rescue team that has found the spot of a submersion, but no debris. It’s the sound of magnetic currents and the feedback of stars, the empty pockets between what is said and what is meant, the unexpressed words, tumbling into silence. As such, it’s an intensely lonely recording, a record of dropped connections, missed opportunities and shipwrecks, one in which the invisible protagonists, attempting to orient themselves with coastlines, find the geography to be as intimidating as the lack of land. [...] there’s more going on here than simple field recordings; disorienting samples and live musical elements are woven in as well. The birds may sound live, but there’s a good chance they’re not; the rain arrives from a pre-recorded source, and the foghorn is an accordion. This additional layer of detachment – the thought of environmental sounds not being environmental – adds to the sense of dislocation, making the screech at 8:05 of “to check their homeward progress” feel like punishment: the friendliest response one receives is the sound of feedback, the crossing of wires. One wonders if a traveler in space might feel the same way, encountering a friendly voice only to discover it to be an echo of a distended, long-lost radio show."
- Richard Allen, review in A Closer Listen, February 2012

'a private swamp / was where this tree grew feathers once' : a radio memorial in four movements

"It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.”

- W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

"In my beginning is my end. In succession / Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, / Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place / Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. [...] Houses live and die: there is a time for building / And a time for living and generation / And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane / And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots / And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto."

- T. S. Eliot, East Coker (from 'Four Quartets')

When the city I had lived in for 15 years started shaking in late 2010, and, through the ensuing ongoing seismic rupture and human attempts to understand and manage it, began changing its known shape, I was faced with a seemingly monolithic problem, that of not being there to experience the everyday life of this (d)evolution. I knew the risks of distance : that it would be easy, as some expats had already decided, to "never go back", to be too afraid of the trauma of this experience to risk 'making real' the destruction of their own individual and collective past. But I had come of age in this city : I had walked its streets and explored its abandoned buildings and factories, I had lived in its spaces and built my own private and shared languages there. It seemed that if I was to begin to deal with the cataclysm that had happened my task would be to retrieve and revive these strategies, to break the problem down into its smaller constituent, human-scaled elements, and the only way to do that was to not treat the city as a screen, to watch and listen to news reports and struggles from afar, but to walk into it. The question, I knew, would emerge more fully in the walking itself : how to enter a city which has simultaneously become too closed and too open to allow movement through the known passageways? Where doors are flung wide in places where doors never were, in walls, in hillsides, in lines of shops, in the earth? Where the locking of doors is an official decree, and a regime of control reigns, but the doors one finds are too numerous to be controlled. These doors, they are small, they are patient, they are often clandestine, they are multiple. For the city is no longer a unity, it no longer has one gate, one identity, one name. It has no key, it has a broken lock one must find new tools to decipher.

In the waning days of 2011, I walked around the city of Christchurch sketching, in a private mapping exercise, a re-calibration of the destroyed city I no longer recognised, layering the old with the new in my memory. I say destroyed but I may perhaps more accurately say unknown, as the changes in terrain, the ruptures in the fabric of the recognisable, were layering up as successive quakes resisted any kind of new map solidifying itself. The territory was changing faster than any map could catch it. This process of the continual un-knowability of the city was noted vividly by its residents, and was by no means over : two earthquakes on the 23rd December, a magnitude 5.8 and then soon after it a 6.0, shook the street I was standing on, their arrival to be followed by swarms of smaller quakes in the days after. Walking around was an exercise in experiential disorientation as the lack of familiar landmarks bred an atmosphere of collective memory loss and the ongoing quakes literally caused the terrain to crumble as you watched it.

To walk these streets I formerly knew 'like the back of my hand', was akin to walking down a hotel corridor in a dream I often have, in which decayed green doors with brass numbers rendered near-illegible by verdigris bracket a passageway that stretches on to infinity. Trying one after another of the doors and finding them barred, without warning the dreamer may find herself on the outskirts of an unknown town in a swampy marshland, or in a dank basement room with a single small cracked window covered in cobwebs. It felt like the city was my dream when, in only one example among many, a towering structure stumbled upon in the park, staffed by territorial, growling officials whose threatening tone seemed to come from a more military context than those I was used to in this place i'd walked through a thousand times, was, I found out later, the Telecom Christmas tree, lights broken because of the quake. Bombastic and forlorn at once, its spindly presence over the night trees punctured the sky like a useless transmission tower, broadcasting nothing, representing nothing.

Perhaps to counter such bizarre, black-comedic and distinctly alienating experiences, on two days, the 27th and the 31st December, I visited four houses I had once lived in. The intention was to re-situate within the four avenues, as a site-specific, localised transmission, the audio I recorded at the sites of these houses, their layered memory-map. It seemed appropriate to make a radio memorial, like a mobile to hang invisibly in the air, a small thing to mark this enormous year's passing, by recording these spaces in 2011, and re-transmitting them in the early days of 2012. This presented moments of fraught emotionality in which I found myself in tears (some inaudible in the recordings in question), and illegal transgression of safety limits and boundaries. All of the houses in question are located within the grid of the central city, known locally as 'the 4 avenues'. One of them, in Dublin St, was still, as far as I could tell, inhabited, the others were in various states of ruination, in particular a large two story wooden Victorian era house on Durham St, my first flat, which once provided tangible evidence of many lost formative moments, now an unanswerable pile of rubble. The two houses still vaguely standing were perhaps even more poignant, one, in Salisbury St, crumbling and unstable as a house of cards, with triple-brick internal walls having fallen through into adjoining apartments, one pile of bricks heaped between two armchairs, its rupture seemingly having arrived like a glacier entering the living room, and on Churchill St, a one story house with my room's beautiful stained glass windows and tiled Victorian fireplace still miraculously intact, had been left eerily, emptily abandoned, its back door flung wide open. In preceding days I had been talking to people about the sounds of the post-quake city, from the densely violent sublime cacophonies of breaking glass as the buildings fell, to the sounds of quakes approaching across the water or hitting the side of the house "like a bus", and how the birds had left completely for two weeks after February 22nd, but then they had returned. But inside both of these latter abandoned houses, I found a quality of silence, not even the sounds of an ordinary day going on outside, the adjoining streets largely without cars.

Far from the everyday life-hum of earlier times, the urbanscape seemed deserted. An artist friend still living in the largely abandoned inner city showed me the copy of W. S. Burroughs' Interzone he was currently reading, rescued from the lost private archive of a legendary local musician and collector, its back cover torn off, remaining pages stuck together with liquefaction. The book had become newly relevant, a potent symbol of the city's own liminal state - how, I thought, could you read anything else? My friend expressed his incredulity at the initial official statement 'to keep the grid' of the four avenues - it was obvious that this stamping of the land with its own settler-culture, regimented past was not going to be possible, if you actually stepped outside to see, hear and feel the tidal flow, the crash of breakers, within the affective, lived experience of the place itself. Instead, we discussed the importance of the small moments of process, the importance of time, to allow for the vernacular languages which will eventually emerge from these new spatialities, the coming-into-being of a new map that it was not yet possible to see. There was a counter-monumentality to all of this. Outside in the Garden City, wildness was taking over, in the absence of people, native pigeons, or Kereru, had migrated from the nearby botanical gardens and flapped down major inner city streets, white convolvulus and bright crimson opium poppies flourished in the terrain vague of abandoned sites that had once been at the polarised edges of Christchurch's socio-economic world, the gardens of expensive century old homes, or multi-bedsit dives : from the angle of this present, it was now no longer possible to tell the difference.

On the day of the Radio Cegeste transmission, Monday the 2nd January 2012, there had been 41 earthquakes in 24 hours. I had originally wanted to locate myself in the Salisbury street house, for various reasons : it had been the last place I had lived in, its dramatically tenuous hanging on to the edge of its own verticality - still upright, but only just - was certainly pretty evocative, and lastly because the landlord, who had bought the building because she had loved it and flatted there herself when she was younger, had once told me of the rumored ghosts in windows, and the colonial era story of a butler murdering a maid in the room upstairs from mine. However, after a particularly nasty shake of 5.5 the night before, I had decided this location was too dangerous. Recording 5 minutes of audio with a portable device within unstable buildings was one thing, but a sustained period of time in which one couldn't leave in a hurry seemed too much to ask of the precarious lower level rooms of Salisbury Street. Instead, I went to Churchill St, and conducted a transmission for just over 15 minutes, crouching on the dust-covered floor of my old bedroom. The house's emptiness seemed to record a moment of violence which was no longer immediately accessible experientially, but cycled in re-play endlessly in the silence, as the whole structure, its piles gone, wavered and swayed subtly under my feet. Its lived history was like a screwed up piece of paper in a corner. Not blank, but overwritten to the point of illegibility.

As the field recordings permeated the space, the experiential temporalities of all the places in which I had collected them, the slices of audible time taken at different moments, impacted subtly on each other, to form a conglomerate time-structure, which almost sounded like silence. As a sound library (albeit one of an ephemeral, partial, fragile and tenuous nature), it part-replicated the truncated memory-forms that exist in archival and museological contexts, where, removed from the sites and temporalities of their lived use, objects sit in a strangely a-temporal non-space, but contrarily, in its transmitting back, in its framing as a de-monumentalised radiophony, this sound archive also released something into the air, fleetingly, as a temporary private memorial that shifted with the space itself, that didn't attempt to speak for a generalised experience of the quakes, which became, for me, a way of re-claiming the mediated experience I had been in thrall to, passively seeing and hearing from a distance, a way of saying goodbye to the ghosts of what had been, and a welcome to those yet to come. The impossibility of a 'shared experience' within such wide-scale experience of trauma, of truly understanding, for example, the experience of my father, when, sitting on his lunchbreak in his city's central public city square (the very name of which, until now - 'Cathedral Square' - speaks to attitudes of permanence) on the 22nd February 2011, he heard the din of a million windows breaking and saw the Cathedral spire twist and fall in front of him as he stumbled toward it - this also becomes the impossibility of the city itself to symbolise its experience via one image, its new status, in fact, of being a city without a central image ('Christ Church'), in this unhinging from names, when so many personal stories are thriving, when so many small domestic spaces and private domains and the stories around them have changed forever, and will keep changing, again, faster than any map can catch them. In this, I have tried to get away from the currently heated conversations around the preservation of heritage buildings and monuments, of large scale, important architecture, and dwell in the imaginary of the humble, the domestic, the personal. In the actual spaces of my own past, without sentimentalising or misrepresenting them. It felt somewhat akin to the transmission modalities which Sarah E Kanouse's excellent essay Transmissions Between Memory and Amnesia, speaks of :

"radio’s persistent present-absence, the gap between transmitting and receiving, the impossibility of unaided reception mirrors what Andreas Huyssen has called the “voids” of memory—spaces pregnant and damning in their emptiness, spaces that materialize through absence an incommensurability of time and experience, spaces that speak silently and with authority on that which has been deliberately erased but for which there is no substitute. The ontological gap of radio takes on an alarming dimension—a testament to the impossibility of reconciling with the past, of cosmetically undoing past injustices and, by extension, it points to our powerlessness to reverse the effects of our own present actions. Radio’s dissipating, disjunctive, and self-effacing characteristics make it function quite differently from physical monuments, whose permanence tends to veil conflict and violence in “the stasis of monumentalized and pacified spaces,” as W.J.T. Mitchell observed. The witness is left straining to hear what she is being told she cannot really hear, really understand, really encounter, that she is both moot and mute and left with the voids of what once was. [...] At the heart of the radio memorial is, in fact, this struggle: struggle to listen, communicate, and remember, struggle to place what would conveniently be forgotten in a tightly policed public sphere, struggle to bridge the gap between remembering and forgetting, transmitting and receiving. By performing the shifting and imperfect nature of public memory, the radio memorial foregrounds what is true of all monuments: that their significances shift with time, distance, and interference, that they are as much sites of forgetting as remembering. Unlike the monument, however, radio makes no pretence that memory could function otherwise." (Kanouse, Sarah, 'Transmissions Between Memory and Amnesia," Leonardo Journal of Arts, Sciences, and Technology 44(3): 200-206.)

Since the 2 minutes of official silence a week after the February 22 2011 earthquake, I have been interested in the way in which silence is used as public memorial. In a previous work, I looked at the broadcast-radio representation of this silence as birdsong and prayer. Here, in this house-sized transmission on 104.5FM, well outside the official media channels, a more potent silence, in which no-one speaks, becomes analogue to the gap, the door, which radio as a medium, its tangible and intangible materiality as waves, can open in our own experience of the present, to let the unspoken and marginalised through. The layering of the spaces of Dublin, Durham and Salisbury, as well as a previous moment of its own existence on the other side of the year's dateline, into Churchill St, opened up a momentary portal where the invisible, the impacted strata of the missing and forgotten, could make itself known, it both evoked a sense of time traumatically suspended, but also one of time moving in slow eddies, in non-linear motion. I was acutely aware of my own vulnerable, experiential, embodied time, as I crouched on the dusty floorboards and tiptoed through the space, expecting at any moment the violent disruption of the piece's small world, via a quake, an official presence, looters, or the building's own collapse, tied as I was to the duration of the transmission, the illegal 'pirate radio' nature of which wouldn't be easy to explain to any of the likely interuptees. During the transmission's heightened, alert-drenched duration, it seemed the city itself had stopped, and this moment we were living, on the other side of the calendar, in a new year, was in fact on pause. At one point I realised I was holding my breath, and upon resuming breathing, this normally inaudible bodily process seemed impossibly loud. But conversely, the piece was not about the 'drama' of earthquake - it didn't attempt to replicate or capture the experience of trauma, but spoke instead to the aftereffects, the life that must go on without epiphany, the awfully human scaled ordinariness of experience within and after any 'unthinkable' crisis situation. Appropriately, it was only when going back this second time that I realised in Churchill St's living room there was still one trace of the previous occupants : a clock had broken, and was blankly ticking out the same moment, in audible suspension.

The adrenalised rush after finishing the transmission dissipated, as I wandered back down Salisbury, leaving me feeling slightly abject again, as I looked around at the rubble where the streets I knew had once been. But mourning takes a long time, and I hadn't really been looking for catharsis. I realised, that just as the city was sketching itself I would re-make and re-situate this work, also, in new forms, beyond this initial gesturing toward a restless site-specificity. That building meaning into this experience was the key, and that the ongoing, evolving nature of those frameworks was important. Nearby was the site of the building that had housed the Caxton Press, which had been demolished after the February 22 quake. The year we had just left, 2011, had been the 100th year since Caxton-published poet Allen Curnow's birth, as I had already been reminded by the significance of the final lines of his poem The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, first published in 1943 in the collection Sailing or Drowning , to a friend who had given birth to her first child in this quake-strewn year.

The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch

The skeleton of the moa on iron crutches

Broods over no great waste; a private swamp

Was where this tree grew feathers once, that hatches

Its dusty clutch, and guards them from the damp.

Interesting failure to adapt on islands,

Taller but not more fallen than I, who come

Bone to his bone, peculiarly New Zealand's.

The eyes of children flicker round this tomb

Under the skylights, wonder at the huge egg

Found in a thousand pieces, pieced together

But with less patience than the bones that dug

In time deep shelter against the ocean weather:

Not I, some child born in a marvelous year,

Will learn the trick of standing upright here

- Allen Curnow

The day of the transmission I visited Delia, and she was indeed standing, with a little help from her mother. I had been reading earlier in the day that the response to earthquakes by parrots includes a kind of pointing behaviour which sees them twist almost upside down on their perches, and was intrigued to note that Delia also loved hanging upside down. I wondered if her centre of gravity, as a 'child born in a marvelous year', as a human who would grow up with this geological revelation, this notion of the earth as vulnerable, as part of her most fundamental affective experience, was a bit more fluid than mine, just as I had started to wonder days earlier if the feeling I had experienced on the street, of the earth not being as solid, of the idea that the myth of stable time, of a stable earth was gone forever, was a knowledge that I couldn't unlearn, once it had occurred. Did I want this knowledge? It's not a question I can answer. A few days after returning to the city I now live in, I still wake up at night listening, during the day I still listen to the earth more carefully, waiting for it to speak under me, it is no longer a solid flat surface, but a wave, a depth, its shifting of plates skating over a fire-y fluidity, an atomic re-adjustment of modalities. Perhaps this is what we all have learnt, in our own ways, as we become distrustful of monuments. Of permanence. Of grand statements. Knowing the artworks and architectural forms, the symbolic and social structures that will show this experience to us, will take the task, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote, "not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people". And that the 'minor literature' of Christchurch will take years to emerge, as we keep listening to the invisible forces and presences that spiral around us, as small moments and processes learn how to come into their own. But also, that there is no hurry.

[with thanks to Campbell Walker for additional photography and general support, and to Nathan Poiho, Adam Willetts, Zita Joyce, Delia Joyce Willetts, Dave Imlay, Maryrose Crook, Toshi Endo, Ina Johan, and Myles and Suzanne McIntyre]