Enjoy gallery hosted a live Radio Cegeste MiniFM cast of the initial NZ transmission to the Radia network, to its gallery space in central Wellington.

the event comprised the simulcast transmission of a documentary on the Lines of Flight festival, as it went to air on the Radia network from Radio One in Dunedin, alongside live performances by artists : Sam Hamilton and L A Lakers working together as ".,", Campbell Walker's Haulout Seal Orchestra, and the duo Discomedusae.

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Radia Season 20 :: Episode 231 :: from Radio One Dunedin, New Zealand

Lines of Flight - A Sonic Community

This, the inaugural contribution to the Radia Network from Radio One (Dunedin, New Zealand), offers an impressionistic account of the biannual, and somewhat secretive, experimental music and film festival "Lines of Flight". Running in Dunedin since 2000, "Lines of Flight" has provided New Zealand improvisational and experimental musicians with an intensive platform for performance and interaction and has organically evolved a space for a much stronger formation of a sound practioners' community. Although the improv./experimental scene from which the festival grew - recall the musicians associated with the labels Metonymic and Corpus Hermeticum in the 1990s - has changed considerably since the festival's beginnings, Lines of Flight has become a kind of default constant, a fluid forum, a relatively regular 'symposium' for many in that evolving scene.

Radio producers Sally-Ann McIntyre (a.k.a. 'Radio Cegeste') and Gilbert May took the opportunity which the 2009 Lines of Flight festival offered to interview a number of the organisers and performers (particularly those who have had a long standing relation to the festival) to obtain their reflections on the history and significance of the biannual event. Combined with an equally partial selection of music, a limited and impressionistic editing process provides a far from comprehensive, yet nevertheless enlightening, introduction not just to the "Lines of Flight" festival, but to a part of a wider New Zealand scene.

[Featuring: Peter Stapleton, Kim Pieters, Peter Porteus, , Bruce Russell, Matt Middleton, Dean Roberts, Rachel Shearer as well as samples from Sleep, Flies Inside the Sun, Birchville Cat Motel, Handful of Dust, Crude, Eye, Rotor Plus, Tillakaratne and Adrian Hall's Red Carpet. Many thanks to all involved....]

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the event is archived on Enjoy's weblog here

and on the radia site here

"the bird sings with its fingers" : Alphaville and Orphee

Chris Darke's 2005 book on Jean Luc Godard's 1965 film Alphaville contains some great lines on the relationship of Godard's sci-fi noir masterpiece to Cocteau's own prior re-contextualisation of the Orpheus myth, and on the Orphic poetics of the filmic / radio relationship.

from the chapter entitled Orpheus unbound :

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"In Alphaville, Orpheus, bard of Thrace, the poet and singer of classical myth, undergoes one of his most unlikely reincarnations as Lemmy Caution rescuing Natasha von Braun, his Eurydice. As they flee together he tells her, with inverted fidelity to the myth, not to look back at the underworld they've escaped from. Godard's version of the myth dwells heavily on its earlier cinematic treatment in Jean Cocteau's Orphee (1949). When he filmed Orphee, Cocteau was adapting his play of 1926 as well as updating the myth by dressing it with all the trappings of modern life. Cocteau's Orphee (Jean Marais) hangs out at the Cafe des Poetes, is conveyed to the land of the dead in a chauffeured limousine (which passes through a negative-printed landscape) and receives communications from the dead poet Cegeste (Edouard Dermite) via the car's radio. In Orphee, radio and cinema are technologies transfigured, machines that communicate mediumistically with those who know how to listen and see, those with the capacity to tune into the other-worldly wavelengths on which myth broadcasts its messages from beyond. The strange communications that Orphee picks up are a kind of morse code in blank verse - 'L'oiseau chante avec ses doigts. Une fois. Je repete. L'oiseau chante avec ses doigts. Deux fois. Je repete...' ('The bird sings with its fingers. Once. I repeat. The bird sings with its fingers. Twice. I repeat...') - and they echo throughout Alphaville, either as aphoristic fragments from the mouth of a machine in the questions that Alpha 60 poses Lemmy, or when Lemmy narrates, in voice-off, his taxi ride with Natasha after they have left the Institute of General Semantics:

Lemmy (off): As the radio was issuing its traffic programme, Natasha spoke to me in her voice of a pretty sphinx...

The words 'joli sphinx' ('pretty sphinx'), thrice repeated on the soundtrack, work with the mention of the car's radio to reprise the mysterious communications in Orphee. There are also numerous visual invocations of Cocteau's film, from the negative-printed sequences already discussed to the scenes in which the inhabitants stagger through the corridors of Alphaville as the city self-destructs, clinging to the walls like the deathly denizens of Orphee's 'Zone'. Paul Eluard, too finds a place in Godard's Orphic myth as the figure of the dead poet whose words are brought to life by his messenger-surrogate Lemmy Caution. All of which indicates that, for Godard, the myth of Orpheus serves a greater purpose than merely homage. In 1962 Godard was already calling on Cocteau's film as providing a definition of cinema as 'the only art which, to use Cocteau's phrase, "films death at work". The person one films is in the process of aging and dying, so one films a moment of death at work'. Over 30 years later in episode 2A of Historie(s) du cinema, Seul le cinema, the reference has changed slightly (Cocteau's name has gone missing) but the aim is still to give a definition of cinema in terms deriving from myth and poetry: 'Cinema authorises Orpheus to turn round without causing Euridice's death.' For Godard, cinema not only shows but also conquers death.

Myths as we know never die, they just assume new disguises. Claude Levi-Strauss observed that the interpretations of myths 'are themselves instances of the myth, prolongations or variations of its narrative logic'. So it is with Orpheus, who has been busy reinventing himself since he last plucked his lyre. In a brilliant essay that anatomises the place of this myth in Godard's work, Jacques Aumont claims that the director has often returned to Orphee, and in Alphaville, Allemagne annee 90 and Helas pour moi (1993) he finds the film's "disguised remakes". Orpheus is the 'code name' for cinema which posesses 'the power to look behind itself and, in the same look, to bring history forward and to make it disappear'.

"Filmed, the past freezes, but can die no longer. [...] such is the horizon of the Orphic metaphor: the cinema is that which endows us with another memory... Cinema remembers everything, virtually and sometimes for real, but it has changed our way of remembering ourselves, changed the contents of our memory, changed memory itself."

In Cocteau's film Orphee is guided through the Zone, wading in slow motion through the limbo between the lands of the living and the dead; 'time is the wind he must walk against'. Could it be the same wind invading Lemmy's hotel room at the end of Allemagne annee 90? If so this wind makes twins of Orpheus and Benjamin's Angel, both of them traveling in time, continually turning to look back at where they've come from, caught at the moment of crossing a boundary, one passing from the darkness of the underworld to the light, the other propelled forward from Paradise by 'progress'. As Aumont acknowledges, the Orphic metaphor for Cinema at work in Godard's films is ambiguous. In having looked back at the past, cinema casts its light forward in time as well: cinema 'projects'."

- Chris Darke, Alphaville pp. 94-6

another excellent excerpt of the text (which also has a brief discussion about the cultural semiotics of a gated community just outside Sao Paulo called, fantastically, Alphaville) is available here

radio cegeste presentation at critical-digital-matter, the 5th Aotearoa Digital Arts symposium

RADIO CEGESTE short presentation for the 5th ADA Symposium, 28 June 2009

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apologies to Zita for also doing exactly what she suggested to presenters not to do, and bringing my own laptop....

...hi, I’m Sally Ann McIntyre. In the time permitting I’m going to present a brief overview of - and some associated thoughts around - a performance I did here in this very room on Friday – which coincided nicely in time with this symposium – and hopefully might be of interest to this community, considering I’m jumping on lines of thought that have come out during the symposium concerning post-Tetsuo Kogawa radio practices and questions of NZ and remoteness.

The event in question was an net radio icecast to a festival called Noise! 2009, at the Ontological Theatre in downtown New York, which I was invited to while in discussions about setting up a New Zealand presence in the radia network of distributed radio art stations and producers. This festival was organised by the New York state transmission arts organisation free103point9. The programming for each of this festival’s four nights began with one performer casting in from somewhere around the globe. So, in practice this saw various transmitted presentations from localities as far flung as New Zealand and Greece turned into data and streamed, in order to emerge again, combining with on-site performances by local practitioners in the space. The respective dispersed performers were transmitting to a performance venue for experimental music and sound art to listeners they couldn’t see, which most had never been to, and remained invisible themselves. All this dis-location does interesting things to the notion of 'live' performance, taking it back to a situation very much like traditional radio broadcast, in which you have no idea who is at the other end of your transmissions. So here, as there, I’ve chosen not to use any images, in the service of emphasising that sense of focus on listening. As Allen S. Weiss puts it in Phantasmic Radio:

“Radio is, a foriori, the acousmetric medium, where the sound always appears without a corresponding image.”

radio cegeste is an artist project which is also a functional one-woman radio station. It emerges out of a multi-faceted history of working as a broadcaster, a DJ, a writer, and a curator of sound, art, and sound/art projects, and is part of my ongoing search to both engage productively with these forms and contexts, and to make some some kind of personal sense of the variety of my outputs and interests, to, as Samuel Beckett says, "find a form to accommodate the mess". I’ve been doing radio cegeste formally since December of last year, 2008, and it has been largely 'live' or event based in that time, with site-specific performances conducted via the broadcast source a very low powered Mini FM transmitter and some commercially purchasable small hand held receivers, which demark a very localised transmission area, probably about 150 metres at the most optimistic. I am programming this station on a fairly sporadic basis to include a variety of shows, and here I am following the thoughts of the Japanese radio artist and theorist Tetsuo Kogawa when he says:

“For as long as radio has been considered as a means of communication, as a means for the circulation of information from one place to another, mini-FM has been different. How can you define radio that reaches a small audience in a very limited area? It could be possible to define it as a kind of performance art. Perhaps radio art might be a more appropriate term for mini-FM. But it is not quite adequate because mini-FM is still radio.”

the transmitter I use – this is it here - is something I made in a group workshop with Tetsuo in 2006, when he was invited to New Plymouth to be part of the exhibition From Mini FM to Hacktivists – a Guide to Art and Activism, curated by Mercedes Vicente for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Doing a workshop and emerging with a radio transmitter was itself a form of participation in and engagement with Tetsuo’s practice, and in that sense every time I use the transmitter, which has an object-status and is a kind of multiple, I am engaging in a material appropriation of his very specific technological reaction to a certain set of media conditions in Tokyo in the 1980s, when the Mini FM movement became a way of addressing the monolithic nature of the hierarchies of public media in that city. The set of conditions found in that time and place are about as far away as you can get from the current situation I find myself in, based loosely, if nomadically, in the sparsely populated south island of New Zealand. But using Kogawa’s ideas and materials, and taking that act of making further into usage by turning my back, however temporarily, on established broadcast media to engage with a more localised, performative, 'hand-made' or even 'craft-based' form of radio-making with the transmitter, I certainly consider the history of its use, and the politics of that usage to be embedded within its materials.

I was talking to someone connected to this symposium last night, who mentioned, when I described my project, that radio was over as a medium, and this is of course true in one sense, but his statement also brings up the idea, which i'd like to speak to, that the point of disappearance of the commercial use of a medium is a place where the artistic re-investigation of it can be most illuminating, and which can be a window of critical focus that can serve to cast light on the use of media in general – as Kogawa once again points out at the beginning of his essay Toward Polymorphus Radio :

“Throughout its history, despite efforts by the Futurists in the 1920s, radio has been considered largely a means of communication rather than an art form. Therefore, it is ironic that just as traditional forms of radio are in decline, its possibilities as an art form are reaching extreme potentials. If, as Heidegger suggests, extreme possibilities are reached at the end of something, what then ends with radio?”

I thought in terms of addressing the theme of this symposium – critical digital matter – and in the context of ADA in general, one interesting thing to very briefly talk through would be that sense of end point, and the use of obsolete or near obsolete media and its relation to materiality.

in its manifest form radio cegeste certainly isn’t a digital media project – ostensibly it’s about as far away as you can get, with a technological base in the simplest of hand made lo fi DIY electronics, and a manifest performative or situational base in narrowcast radiophonics. The project is digital in the most simple and offhand of ways, which might seem almost facetious to mention; reflective of the fact that in New Zealand in 2009 I live with the everyday accessibility of basic domestic digital technologies, and the associated fact that the project wouldn’t exist in its current form without the portable office, edit suite, storage and playback device which is my laptop computer. Even without the prospect of icecasting, I use domestic digital media such as an ipod and mp3s in playback, and gather my field recordings on a digital chip recorder, and the aleatory nature of each performance is informed by the amount of physical electromagnetic traffic which the transmitter reads, competes with, and which bleeds as noise into its improvisational soundscapes.

in another and very real way radio cegeste also wouldn’t really exist in the form it does without an awareness of its placing in digital contexts, and is a comment on them to some degree. The question - which I do get asked - 'why not just do a podcast?' can probably be answered with the thought that one of the key features of many contemporary technologies is their drive toward increasing standardisation and commodification.

If the mainstream usage of radio as a communicative broadcast medium belongs to the history of Modernity, then its ghostly recurrence in critically minded radio art projects like radio cegeste is also a re-analysis of that history, and in this context probably ties somewhat into what Nicholas Bourriard calls the Altermodern. He explained this in 2005 in the following way :

“‘Altermodern’ is a word that intends to define the specific modernity according to the specific context we live in – globalization, and its economic, political and cultural conditions. The use of the prefix “alter” means that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end, and alludes to the local struggles against standardization. The core of this new modernity is, according to me, the experience of wandering — in time, space and mediums.”

then he goes on to say “We have to get out of this dialectical loop between the global and the local, to get rid of the binary opposition between globalization and traditions

[...]

Artists are looking for a new modernity that would be based on translation: What matters today is to translate the cultural values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network. This “reloading process” of modernism according to twenty-first-century issues could be called altermodernism, a movement connected to the creolisation of cultures and the fight for autonomy, but also the possibility of producing singularities in a more and more standardized world."

Jonathan Crary talks very eloquently about this situation also in his book, Suspensions of Perception : Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture :

"...at the end of the twentieth century, the loosely connected machinic network for electronic work, communication and consumption has not only demolished what little had remained of the distinction between leisure and labour but has come, in large arenas of western social life, to determine how temporality is inhabited. Information and telematic systems simulate the possibility of meanderings and drift, but in fact they constitute modes of sedentarisation, of separation in which the reception of stimuli and the standardisation of response produce an unprecedented mixture of diffuse attentiveness and quasi-automatism, which can be maintained for remarkably long periods of time

[...]

what once might have been called reverie now most often takes place aligned with preset rhythms, images, speeds and circuits that reinforce their relevance and dereliction of whatever is not compatible with their formats... the question of how and whether creative modes of trance, inattention, daydream, and fixation can flourish within the interstices of these circuits

[...]

it is particularly important now to determine what creative possibilities can be generated amid new technological forms of boredom."

I hear radio cegeste as radio reconceived as a mobile medium, a medium which is artist driven, and body-sized. Its technological and spatial constraints are strategic; their technical simplicity, and fragility makes radio technology transparent to its listeners, and their scale – deliberately restraining things down to the portable and localised – is a downscaling of the technologies of radio to the size of intimate space. partly these limits are practical – I tend to be quite nomadic, so the essential question is – what can I take with me? - this then becomes a structural organising principle for the work, a kind of formal constraint, which in stripping things away to allow space, engages with the aesthetics and history of minimalism and a certain form of poetics, as well as political ideas around the accessibility of media and DIY. Doing radio cegeste constantly reminds me that no matter how mobile we get, human life remains tied to specific spaces, times and places – and that shifts in media do not actually destroy the placed materiality of human existence.

I’m inspired in this by other people working in experimental ways with radios around the world, such as Ricardo Reis of radio zero in Portugal, who wrote in a recent email to the radia mailing list:

“It seems to me that right now the new emergence of local/community/art radios (is it a renaissance or just my wishful thinking?) is another way of fighting and holding ground against a more and more every-where look alike culture. Notice that I'm not saying that is something done with such aim in conscience.

This kind of niche promotes the existence of works that are in themselves individual and so more closely related to the environment the artist is moving in. Generally this means also a more in touch contact with specific cultural references, and so, extending, some sort of lighthouse/anchor on a more desolated cultural landscape...”

this attention to the "environment the artist is moving in" is something that comes through in many ways in the content of radio cegeste performances - unfortunately I haven't yet done anything in a lighthouse, but I have played back field recordings of empty gallery spaces collected over a few hours in Christchurch, which were then transmitted as a 5 minute event-score project for a local artist run space, and I’ve collected field recordings of 80 year old men speaking about the architectural history of Port Chalmers, which were arranged as part of a transmission not far from the place where they were gathered. Other forms of attention to locality are connected to the inclusion of the audience and the engagement with particular music subcultures. I have handed out receivers to audience members, and I have played the transmitter as an instrument in situations involving improvised music, in collaboration with (other) experimental musicians. I’m also planning a radio station for native birds, which looks at the cultural history of the birdsong in NZ broadcast, and thinks through connections around of the idea of the birdsong as territorial imperative and the notion of mini-FM as bounded radio.

So, the project’s awareness of its technological, physical and historical placing informs its use of media, and its aim is transparency around the social, the economic and certainly sometimes the ecological ramifications of that use – for example here I have a solar panel which can power the transmitter quite adequately on a sunny day, replacing the 9 volt battery I normally use. In these aspects, and in its priviliging of the moment of live presence over recording, the project engages with the concept of "slow media", a borrowing from the Italian Slow Food movement which, like the latter, addresses the need for the preservation of local traditions and attention to detail within the expedient commercialism of a fast paced globalised context, and is described as follows in an article by Helen De Michiel:

"The concept of "slow media" characterises a practice that all members of the media arts field hold in common: we share the ability to do a lot with little. Our work, which is framed by a fast-moving, fickle, and overstimulated communications industry, is done slowly and deliberately"

I introduced radio cegeste as an 'artist project', and now I feel like I should qualify that slightly. You could say that as much as the station is about post-Cage authorlessness, the whole concept of having one’s own personal radio station, one that is mobile, that can be staged anywhere you go - on a bus, in a shopping mall, on a deserted beach - is also very much about the strategic recovery of artistic subjectivity, its personalisation within media structures as a way of tempering the sometimes sterile and passive aspects of today's saturated media contexts.

radio cegeste in this way is a perfect artist project for someone who has worked mainly within cultural frameworks as a commentator, a DJ, an organiser, and a listener, with, as an old english teacher once put it, "building hoops rather than jumping through them", and it extends all these things into the more personalised, or centralised space of production, while remaining pleasingly blank in it's authorial gesturing. In this way the project helps me to continue to ask – if not to answer - the question of whether (artistic) subjectivity is an antiquated notion at the beginning of the 21st century, or just something that requires new conceptions. I'm certainly engaging with 'the death of the author' in quite a deliberate way, and via formations which include everything from Roland Barthes own idea of the text as a space where 'a variety of quotations blend and clash', to questions around musicianship in the situations in which the transmitter becomes a noise music instrument, and which necessitate a certain amount of intentionality, although because I’m engaging with improvised music the ideal is always to give away intentionality.

to return to the event which began this talk, the internet radio cast to the Noise!09 festival, i was thinking afterwards about the ways in which the exciting prospect of a radio link to the other side of the world, a radiophonic hole to China, or a 'radio wormhole' as Zita Joyce might put it, extends a historic situation we are very familiar with, in terms of the presence of communication technologies being a way to address isolation with connectivity, something deeply embedded in Antipodean culture. This recurs - a few years ago you may remember there was an advertisement on NZ television which depicted the bucolic scene of a small boy alone on a pristine, isolated beach, dragging a flax flower, until he noticed a rope in the waves. Pulling on this rope, which trifurcated, the boy was shown dragging recognisable Metropoli – Paris, and New York among them - impossibly large and distant Leviathans looming toward his coastline, in an near-comical semiotic clash. The ending shot shows the boy standing triumphant on a rocky pinnacle, with his audience of cities, to the voiceover “the isolation age is over” – this was an advertisement for the New Zealand telecom network’s broadband service.

There is a wonderful passage from a 2002 interview with two ADA related artsts, radioqualia's Honor Harger and Adam Hyde, in conversation with Zita Joyce for Log Magazine issue 10, which speaks fairly humorously to this sensibility :

Adam - Also coming from New Zealand we had no intentionality of an audience. Because coming from New Zealand, you have no audience and the mythos surrounding creating music in NZ is that actually the best music is created by people who don’t give a fuck who’s going to listen to it. So from that the fact of having an audience is necessarily secondary to making good art.

Honor - So the whole idea of there needing to be people listening to the broadcasts has never been an issue for us. For a lot of people that really raises the question of why broadcast then. For us, the question is why not?

Another, perhaps more poignant take on such mythologies is found in the liner notes to a five part radio series commissioned by Kunstradio, and curated by radioqualia, called ISOL:

"Isolation and migration work in symbiosis. Geographical remoteness meant inhabitation was contingent on long journeys. Argonauts navigated firstly from the South Pacific, and laterly from Europe to arrive in New Zealand. In the 1920s radio began to further erode isolation, by connecting New Zealanders firstly with each other, then with their neighbours, and and finally with the world.

But the intervention of air travel, broadcasting and digital technologies does not completely nullify the impact of sheer physical distance. In an itinerant world criss-crossed by fibre-optics, copper wire and invisible latices of radio waves, isolation still causes a cultural lag. The huge watery spaces between New Zealand and the rest of the world still seem to slow down the speed of the information revolution. Isolation causes a kind of info-drag. But the distance from the super-highway, though often frustrating, can have it's advantages. Culturals fads and trends have less impact in a country where they arrive 3, 6 or even 12 months late. Indigenous phenomena can sometimes be left to incubate and evolve entirely localised peculiarities in the absence of the distraction of international influences. Consequently, experimental New Zealand music and sound art from the 1980s till the present day has developed its own evolutionary quirks entirely specific to the country. In comparitive isolation, experimental sound manifests specific auditory adaptions, distinctive sonic qualities, unique phonic mutations, and new interpretations of the pervasive themes of isolation, distance and remoteness."

This 'rare bird' mythology of a lack of audience being productively strategic holds, in its way, within the very small peer based communities of New Zealand experimental music culture. It can also be said to function with another obsolete medium without a visible audience – poetry – which the name radio cegeste is a reference to – specifically, the name of a character from Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphee, who is a dead poet who speaks through the car radio. My work in such underground and marginal artforms means I am fairly used to working in small communities, which doesn't necessarily mean working without feedback or with only the faintest signal flickering across the sea, it just means a lack of acknowledgement from the wider culture, which is both why the intimate spaces of performance are quite rewarding, and why in terms of casting out to that mainstream culture for listeners, asking the legitimising question “is anyone out there?” seems the wrong approach. Indeed it is a more fertile strategy, visible now more than ever perhaps, within the work of organisations such as ADA and the Audio Foundation, as well as a variety of related grass roots artist initiatives, to value and cultivate the small but concentrated communities we do have at hand, and to see the potential freedom in working within artforms in which the pressures to be commercially viable simply do not apply. The prospect of building these immediate localities, while at the same time utilising more lateral community-building opportunities presented by technologies such as icecasting, and networks such as radia, seems both excitingly new, and familiar as a footnote to the long history of artists distributing their work via similarly non-hierarchical networks of exchange, and perhaps here we consign the small lost child, the "pale intruder on an unknown beach", as Peter Jefferies once put it, to history. Or perhaps not. There was a recording of my voice speaking a poem by Jack Spicer buried somewhere in my cast to the New York festival the other day, so I’d just like to leave you with that, as part of a short re-broadcast of some of the performance from Friday.

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Jack Spicer - Thing Language

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises

Tougher than anything.

No one listens to poetry. The ocean

Does not mean to be listened to. A drop

Or crash of water. It means

Nothing.

It

Is bread and butter

Pepper and salt. The death

That young men hope for. Aimlessly

It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No

One listens to poetry.

wunderkammeren, strings and static...

the evening of the 3rd of July saw me embarking on further collaborative sonic explorations with Black Boned Angel guitarist, Stumps drummer, Sandoz Lab Technicians multi-instrumentalist and general improv polymath James Kirk.

taking the opportunity, while i was in Wellington, to build on some investigations begun in Dunedin at Lines of Flight last May, we began to clarify a method around the minimalist use of strings and static, finding an instrumental base in radios, erhu, violin, and melodica, and a manifest expression in small summations of broken melodies, careful fragments and drift, with a vaguely Sandozian-eastern feel.

Harnessing the effects pedal James uses with Black Boned Angel added a whole new sonic palette to my violin, with drones like arctic ice and deep space becoming the backing to a delicate foreground of whispering acoustics and feathery aetheric scratchiness...

I recorded about half an hour of audio. a fairly sketchy edit snipped off this, called 'from the pencil area' is listenable here

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"... we each discover our own silence, we each recreate silence as a metaphor. From noise to silence, from panic to quiescence, from catastrophe to calm: the very existence of silence both depends on noise, and permits noise to exist"

- Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio

"I have become increasingly preoccupied with atmosphere. Somehow I wanted to move what I'm doing (intention) towards this notion of atmosphere, an activity where we're not aware of technique, of instrument, of playing, of music even, but instead as feeling/sensation suspended in space, perhaps what Feldman meant by music as time, energising to the air, making the silence (unintention) audible."

- Keith Rowe, liner notes for Duos for Doris

"white and aimless signals" : icecast to free103point9's Noise! festival at the Ontological Hysteric Theater, Manhattan

The 26th of June was a rainy Friday in New Zealand's capital city, and the aether was filled with reports of Michael Jackson's death (at 11am that day, NZ time), as I prepared a 2pm radio cegeste transmission to the other side of the globe from a lecture theatre at Victoria University of Wellington's school of architecture and design.

My half hour set opened the second night of New York state transmission arts organisation free103point9's Noise! 2009 festival, held at the Ontological Hysteric Theater in Manhattan. This festival had a local/global distributed element, as each of its four nights began with an artist casting in their performance from another location somewhere around the globe.

The dislocated present-ness of being live at such a distance, when combined with the bounded locality of Mini FM, fragmented the live immediacy of the radio cegeste project in fascinating ways, and the two sided anonymity of the performance, in so many ways like a traditional radio broadcast, framed the sonic content.

This was a palimpsest of noise and archival material, including laptop-mixed location recordings of New Zealand natural and cultural spaces, theremin, music box, the activation of aleatory airwaves, and live and recorded/transmitted violin, as well as some guest appearances by some of my favourite etheric ghosts: '80s one hit wonder The Buggles ("in my mind and in my car / we can't rewind we've gone too far" as Cocteau might have been thinking when writing code-transmission for Death's black Rolls Royce) and fleeting Cegestions of the electromagnetic poetry channel of Jack Spicer

the first half of this performance can be heard here

radio cegeste with Motoko Kikkawa at NONE

the first public unveiling of the violin / radio duo with Mo Kikkawa on the 20th of June came at the end of my two month stay in Dunedin, as the closing act of a gig which umbrellaed a variety of new combinations of artists from NONE's dynamic, vibrant improvised music community.

i've posted the second part, or more correctly the 'encore', here

a video of the first part of the performance by Edie Eves is on vimeo and also to be found blogged at the free103point9 newsroom here

thankyou to Markus Gradwohl and also to Edie for the wonderful documentation, and to Matt Middleton for such a fittingly aphoristic recall of the event's ghost-on-the stairs driftscapes (whose bogan aether-spectres appeared less as the ubiquitous air-guitar solo than in the form of the opening organ refrain from Andrew Lloyd Webber's 'Phantom of the Opera', incessantly wafting in from some obscure, unpluggable radiophonic wormhole) on the ever-readable Crude blog :

"Radio Cegeste - Stairwell install - Ghost channels - Bogan Ghosts scream for Stairway to Heaven - Fine-tune my Runes - Droppers und Spoons - Motoko/Vapour/Viol - Ether transmit - Aurorae, Weather, Morse - European Venous Forum - Estonian Volleyball Foundation - Quantum Rind - "

Dunedin winter DIY

DIY preamp building on the coldest night of the year... many thanks to electronics wunderkind Nigel Bunn for his inventive circuit bendings...

"rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined...." : residual vistas : alexandra bridge, lake te anau, queenstown

residual vistas, imaginary landscapes: three undated hand coloured framed photographs found in opshop on St Andrews St, Dunedin, June 2009

"My working hypothesis was that any reasonably long memory - like every collection - is more structured than it seems at first. I think that a collection of photographs, taken apparently at random, or postcards, chosen on the spur of the moment, reaching a certain size, will start to draw a route, a map of the imaginary country inside us. By systematically looking through all these images, I am sure to discover behind the apparent disorder a secret map, like one of those treasure maps in stories about pirates."

- Chris Marker

owls do cry : field recordings in the grounds of seacliff asylum, dunedin

a field trip to the grounds of the old seacliff hospital on the outskirts of dunedin produced some recordings of local birdlife, and associated reflections on Janet Frame's history on site during the most troubling period of the writer's life. Her first short story collection The Lagoon and Other Stories was published while she was a patient – advance copies arrived on 4 March 1952. Nine months later, in December of the same year she was scheduled for a leucotomy at Seacliff. As Michael King puts it in An Inward Sun – the World of Janet Frame :

“Nine Months later, when Janet was once again committed in Seacliff, the book may have saved her life – or, at the very least, her intellectual and artistic life. There medical staff informed her that she had been selected for a dreaded leucotomy operation (the same operation known in the United States as a lobotomy). This intervention severed the fibres connecting the front part of the brain to the rest of the cerebral cortex. Most patients who had the operation experienced a reduction in anxiety; some were rendered vegetative. In Janet’s case, momentum towards this outcome seemed unstoppable. John Money advised against it. But Lotte Frame was persuaded to give written consent. Within days of the scheduled surgery, on 26 December 1952, newspapers around the country carried a story headed ‘Writer Wins Prize for Prose’ – Janet had won the Hubert Church Award, New Zealand’s only literary prize for fiction or non-fiction prose, for The Lagoon. And the superintendant of Seacliff, Dr Geoffrey Blake-Palmer, took her off the operation list. ‘I’ve decided that you should stay as you are. I don’t want you changed.’”

built in the 19th Century, the Seacliff hospital buildings were structurally unsound from the beginning, and after the relocation of the hospital staff and patients to Cherry Farm psychiatric facility in the 1950s, various uses for them were mooted but never realised, and they were left to slowly decay.

birds however have found their home here in abundance. in a improptu lo-fi tribute to Messiaen, and perhaps Sebastian, and certainly the people who once wandered the grounds here, some spontanious human-bellbird imitations were also recorded...

Kikkawa/McIntyre/Noyes

the fertile creative laboratories of Dunedin's NONE community continue to provide ample avenues for collaboration, and opportunities to test out the creative instrumental potential of transmission art as one blip on the experimental music spectrum. An improvisatory exercise with violinist Motoko Kikkawa and percussionist Lee Noyes on June 6 lasted for over two hours.

This was the first time i'd used the kitset Theremin as part of the radio cegeste setup.

with many thanks to Lee for the photos.

string chamber static...

collaborative improvisational activities with Japanese born, Dunedin based violinist Motoko Kikkawa, involving transmitter, hand held radios, violin, and voice are proving fertile ground, and bouncing fruitfully off my solo 'bowed airwaves' violin/radio experiments.

As with the latter, I am finding with this as yet unnamed duo that the tonal similarities between violin and radio static, and/or violin-broadcast-through-radio-static can be breathtaking. Woven in with Mo's vocal range and her violin (as opposed to what should probably be called my "anti-violin" in this context) things become more interesting still.

Mo was involved in the Tokyo Grand Guignol group (which included Yasunao Tone, Otomo Yoshihide, et al) as a teenager, and is now a dynamic part of many NONE associated bands including the duo Tsunami No Orikata (with Toki Wilson), The Readytronics (with Toki Wilson, ISO12, and Rachel Blackburn) and the wonderful Piano Queen Rainbow Star Telephone (with pretty much everyone).

For the purposes of this particular project, she plays Suzuki-trained strings and vocalises (both in Japanese and in some unearthly ur-language), and I call up the ghostly debris of signal from the aether, transmit various instrumental field recordings, and sympathetically scratch away on the 'deconstructed' violin at points.

There's an interesting interplay, almost a call and response, between her all-acoustic input and my end of things, which is mainly lo-fi electronics. Sometimes a creakily noise-infused signal of a radiophonic voice or a theremin sound will act as catalyst for a live vocal equivalent, and transmission of violin sounds will mingle with live violin. We have hit some great synchronicities and disjunctures in this manner.

Our second event/experiment/broadcast with this instrumental setup was conducted in the stairwell of NONE on the afternoon of June 4. more than the usual amount of thanks to Toki Wilson, who was drawn out of his fever-dreaming sickbed to take the following roving video footage...

MacKinnon/McIntyre/Noyes

a collaborative improvisation session on the afternoon of May 30th at NONE with Lee Noyes and Alex MacKinnon produced a 55min recording, an excerpt of which Lee considered strong enough to post to his blog on NetNewMusic, calling it 'Art, I see you Lately in your Energy', here

he had this to say about it:

-----

A new track:

10:22.402min excerpt from 55min improvisation recorded 30 May 2009.

AlexanderMacKinnon: Guitar/FX/TapeSampling/Electronics (Centre-Right Channel)
SallyAnnMcIntyre: Violin/ContactMics/BroadcastRadio&Recievers (Right Channel)
LeeNoyes: Percussion (Left Channel) & Processing/FeedbackElectronics (Centre-Left Channel)

First meeting by this group of NoneGallery, Dunedin-based artists. Further work, both as an ensemble and with Recordings should yield a release sometime 2009.

"Parsing through ether"

the regent theatre 24hour booksale

the regent theatre 24 hour booksale is a bit of an institution in Dunedin. set in the grand environs of the centrally located old proscenium palace, it seems like the whole city comes out for the event. the live music played here in the past has included such under-appreciated milestones as the set by Alastair Galbraith committed to tape and released by Bruce Russell on Xpressway in 1987 as side A of 'Hurry on Down', Alastair's first solo release after The Rip. Alastair has this to say about that release on the website of his label, Emperor Jones:

----

"One side of it was recorded live at a gig to benefit the Regent Theatre, a large theatre in Dunedin that the owners never stopped doing up. They would get musicians to play for nothing for 24 hours over a Friday and Saturday. It was a chance to play to a horribly mainstream audience of people browsing through second hand books that had also been donated to the theatre. I really stupidly agreed to do a 3am performance and went to sleep and woke up at 2:30am and went down there with Bruce. He recorded the whole thing, but I was under the influence of something very strange, I can't remember what, and when I listen to it I can tell that I wasn't fully awake. The other side was a result of Bruce coming to the warehouse where I was living at that time and asking me if I'd written any songs. I said I'd written about eight or nine and he said 'play them all to me'. I played them one after the other for him and he recorded them on a walkman. I honestly thought he was recording them for personal listening, but he released it! It was good of him, but within a few months of it being out I said to him that I never really knew at the time it was recorded that he was going to release it, and that I would quite like a go at giving him something slightly better, and so there was a first and second edition. Just prior to this, a friend who was an elderly woman I used to do gardening for (and I had known since I was twelve) had asked me out of the blue what I would most like materialistically, and I thought for a while and said 'a four-track recording machine'. Later, she came back into the room with a cheque that was almost enough to buy a second hand one. So I was learning how to record myself at that point and was able to give Bruce slightly better versions of some of the songs."

----

wandering around making location recordings of this year's booksale I was able to capture, if not a Galbraith in the making, at least the odd aural spectacle of an elderly female voice reading a medical textbook section about the eye, and a briefly sketched out history of the booksale's cultural import by the woman who wrapped my finds in newspaper, as well as a slightly earlier conversation with the poet David Howard, which ended with him being asked, and refusing, to read to the collected silently browsing audience, and nominating me as a likely alternative.

thanks, David...

last gasp of the DJ

I was offered an impromptu DJ slot at the legendary Dunedin experimental music festival Lines of Flight on Friday, filling in for Peter Kirk, who hosts the experimental radio show A'sides for Betaville, which I have been sporadically involved with since its beginnings in late 2007 on Lyttelton's independent broadcast station Volcano 88:5FM. Despite being currently fairly uninterested in live DJing (apart from the prospect of developing a no-electricity set with wind up gramophones), the challenge of providing a segue from artist to artist, something i'd become used to thinking-through on a regular basis during my organisational involvement hosting monthly events with the Borderline Ballroom experimental music group in Christchurch from 2007-8, led to something pleasingly minimal, near-inaudible, and raw, heavy on field recordings and live outtakes. While I didn't go in the A'sides direction of maximalism and kept everything gesturally restrained to the laptop and a single CDJ, a lot of the audio was sourced from my archive of bootleg recordings, many featuring people present in the room, with the general idea of not competing with the music, but providing a convivial, yet stimulating ambience. Less cegeste than 'suggest' for a night, I was privileged to be able to provide such transitions for the sounds of Peter Wright (Christchurch), Crude (Dunedin), EYE (Dunedin), and the wonderful Xe (Auckland - (Rachel Shearer, Guy Treadgold, Sean O'Reilly, and Dean Roberts)).

imaginary media / the legacy of professor robert jack

In the “Second Introduction to an Archaeology of Imaginary Media,” Eric Kluitenberg writes that one of the tasks of the discipline of media archaeology is to scour the historical archive – “stories, drawings, prints, films, songs, advertisements or quasi-philosophical imaginaries” – for the utopian dreams of potential or possible media forms that might “compensate for the inherent flaws and deficiencies of interpersonal communication."

Siegfried Zielinski, one of the first scholars to use the term "media archaeology," breaks down the category of imaginary media into three groups of phenomena in his essay in the same text, "Modelling Media for Ignatius Loyola":

untimely media: media realized in technical and media practice either long before or after their invention

conceptual media: media sketched, modeled or drafted but not actually built

impossible media: media which cannot actually be built but nevertheless express ideas which impact the factual world of media

Slavoj Zizek’s book on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Organs Without Bodies, argues not only that the emergence of the New is Deleuze’s central concern, but that for Deleuze, the New only emerges through repetition. In other words, the creation of something truly new always involves a kind of repetition. What is being repeated, though, “is not the way the past ‘effectively was’ but the virtuality inherent to the past and betrayed by its past actualization”. In other words, imaginary media present us with a series of possibilities for actions in the present precisely because they never fully appeared in the past.

By way of positioning the political project of media archaeology, Zielinski writes:

"[T]he main purpose of this archaeological work is to counter current tendencies towards standardization and universalization in the interest of a uniform global market with the rich variety of variants offered by bygone eras. If archaeology is the principal method for this special form of historical research, then variantology is the tactic (in the Foucauldian sense) by which individual genealogies are to be unravelled from its wealth of varieties."

---

visiting the University of Otago's physics department with Nigel Bunn the other day (he was picking up a trolleyful of oscillators which, no longer used in the classroom, were going to be thrown away), we were shown around the labyrinthine environs of the teaching facilities by Paul Yates. the chance find of Robert Jack's transmitter sitting in a cupboard - the actual machine used in the first NZ broadcast, c.1921 (an exceptional imaginary moment in the history of our communications media), was predicated, after a wonderful, rambling tour of all sorts of nooks and crannies of obsolete technologies and teaching aids, by the statement, "oh, you might be interested in this"

... well, yes. I was.

an excerpt from Robert Jack's original broadcast can be heard here

the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography entry on Prof Jack can be found here

a timeline for New Zealand communications history can be read here

environmental radio : radio d' Oiseaux

radio d'Oiseaux is a solar powered radio station for New Zealand native birds. Currently a fieldwork project, it will eventually manifest as series of radio cegeste site specific performances.

as an "environmental radio" and conceptual media project, radio d'Oiseaux looks at the links between transmission, locality and territory.

as a sound-site, the birdsong is a place of trauma and nostalgia in NZ, a situation helped along by its long association with public broadcasting. the public outcry a few years back at the intended removal of field recordings of native avian species, long a temporal marker for news reports on Radio New Zealand National, provided weighty evidence of its cultural place. The presence of bridsong as ‘soundmark’ can be percieved as displaying a memorialising or museological function. To replay already-extant sound has its own embedded politic - the loop itself is a ‘territorialised’ refrain in Deleuze’s terminology – here, Radio New Zealand's treatment of the sounds of birds is a paradigm reiterated in cultural terms by the replay of songs sent to radio stations by record companies. Instead, to deteritorialise this medium’s approach to art, we might learn from talking to the animals.

--

“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”.

“An excess of environmental noise produces sloppy listeners. We no longer listen to the radio, we overhear it. It stays on, shielding us from the coarseness of modern life. Radio has become the birdsong of the twentieth century, decorating the environment with “pretty””

- R. Murray Schaeffer and Bruce Davis, “Wilderness Radio”, in Radiotext(e)

repetition and difference

my arrival back in 'the dead city' to witness the final performance of Christchurch experimental supergroup Grunge Genesis in the week noise guitarist, G'n'G member and amateur ethnomusicologist Richard Neave was preparing to leave the country for another Orientalist foray also produced a subsequent flurry [Apr 18-25] of last-minute home recording sessions, a concentrated creative space and an accompanying wealth of material [RN: koto, shamisen, shinobue, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, violin, voice / SM: violin, Mini FM transmitter, field recordings, transistor radios, music box, voice], which I am currently trying to get my head around... there are a couple of preliminary edits (named 'die tote stadt' and 'intaglio') posted in mp3 form here. perhaps it sounds something like the missing link between Ent Lang's "cold, a harvest" and Michiyo Yagi... I am excited about this collaboration.

“…the domestic insects of which I am going to speak are mostly night-singers, and must not be confounded by the Semi (cicadae).... the Japanese find as much difference between the notes of night-insects and of cicadae as we find between those of larks and sparrows; and regulate their cicadae to the vulgar place of chatterers. Semi therefore are never caged. The national liking for caged insects does not mean a liking for mere noise…”

- Lafcadio Hern, Exotics and Retrospectives, 1898

(species of spaces, 00:1)*

a radio cegeste programme was broadcast as a 5min acousmatic / radiophonic event score, as part of the marsupial gallery project PRANK ETUDES WRONG PETCHERA KTCUTCHHA, at Maca’s burger bar, High Street, Christchurch, Saturday 21 March 2009, 8pm-9pm.

broadcast material was comprised of 8 discrete 5min field recordings collected while doing the rounds of Christchurch’s gallery spaces between 2:45 and 5:05 on Wednesday 18th March 2009. these recordings were then layered / arranged as a new conglomeration in a 5min performance for Mini FM transmitter and two small receivers.

a fairly bad quality recording of the live performance, complete with crowd noise, stand up comedy, and recognisable laughter / heckling from certain christchurch experimental music scene stalwarts, is here

the PR read as follows:

radio cegeste reflects on questions of gallery spectatorship, the temporal attention given to art in the era of the preset, and the general notion of art as sound-byte entertainment, with a radio station designed for marsupial gallery’s peripatetic project series. for this station, a series of field recordings of empty gallery spaces in the city in question, christchurch, recorded in the days before the event, will be layered in the five minute time span of the set and combined with the live radio waves present in the space itself, which is located close to the original location of the first manifestation of the high street project, christchurch’s longest running project space. in this way, radio cegeste hopes to overhear some ghosts as she reflects on the changes in new zealand project-space culture since the early 1990s.

the evening’s performers (in Progressive Order as 5 minute sets) are: 1 HEAVY TURKEY 2 MIRK 3 CRECHE 4 SATANIC TEA TOWEL 5 RADIO CEGESTE 6 I DON’T SPOOK EASY 7 TRAINING 8 RICHARD NEAVE

------------------------

* featuring the sounds of:

1. (18 March 2009, 2:45 – 2:50pm) / SoFA Gallery. group show ‘Masters 08’ : Kim Lowe, Marie Le Lievre, Robin Neate, Cristina Silaghi

2. (18 March 2009, 3:02 – 3:07pm) / Christchurch Art Gallery car park entranceway. Subsonic series : Campbell Kneale : ‘First Titan’ 2009, (15:59)

3. (18 March 2009, 3:10 – 3:15pm) / Christchurch Art Gallery foyer.

4. (18 March 2009, 3:20 – 3:25pm) / The Physics Room. main space : between-show installation; side space : the vestiges of Tony Delatour : ‘B sides and Demos’

5. (18 March 2009, 3:55 – 4:00pm) / Jonathan Smart Gallery. group show ‘Optimism’ : Judy Darragh, Robert Hood, Nathan Pohio, John Pule, Neil Dawson, Anne Noble, Michael Parekowhai, Leigh Martin, Peter Peryer, Andrew Drummond, Anton Parsons, Hannah & Aaron Beehre, et al

6. (18 March 2009, 4:40 – 4:45pm) / The Brooke Gifford Gallery. Peter Ireland : ‘Cultural Studies 101’, and Darren George : ‘Whare Puka Puka’

7. (18 March 2009, 4:50 – 4:55pm) / Paintlust. foyer space, outside gallery opening hours.

8. (18 March 2009, 5:00 – 5:05pm) / The High Street Project. Robert Hood : ‘The Wrecked Kilometre’

'in morning, reverberant' published in GDS #28

[the Australian literary magazine Going Down Swinging has accepted my poem in morning, reverberant for its 28th issue, to be published in the first week of June]

-----------------

in morning, reverberant

The memory of a precise colour in the street bounces back on another country, another distance - endlessly.

- Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

as a day unfolds silently and very fast.

as a dawn colour flooding in the lesser lamps and overtaken.

as a boundary of lit shards breaking in radial lines opening to graph the bay and further it.

as a creeping tungsten flared line of warmth and thaw through those eyes already open to it.

as the picture of a street which flutters down a street.

as description and commentary mainly recorded off-site.

as a repeated series of opening blinds cut into dark into light into dark/lit cutting.

as a sequence of bricked pillars arcing the potential for that part of the narrative.

as location footage gathered around this time of day over an indefinite period.

as happening again and again reinforcing the arbitrary site as centre of seeing.

as fiction and nonfiction trees that enable me to go on counting them.

as a never ending loop which drives by like an expected bus on time.

as a sequence of easily memorisable patterns.

as the tendency toward valuing certain small objects.

as a story most likely to be happening now that it is.

as lemon slice and coffee in the cafe breaking into speech, as one city into the memory of another.

as overlaid archival material of birds' upflight from the square as device of remembrance.

as worlds experienced while roaring inside the wild whiteness of feathers.

as angling in with desire's mathematics of storm.

as motioned with you as utterance, shoulder to shoulder.

as the attempt to know, eyes closed, and precisely.

as this detail, a material formerly unembodied, unheard or unpublished.

as nothing existing outside of this recording.

as an instant of what went before and failed to capture it.

as knowing even within the experience that it is already.

as an instance of what we were and merely.

as a series of copies or distortions.

as a repetition turning into and within the excess of language's unravel.

as replay of sequence in rolling sight.

as the same actors every time, the same speech, the same.

radio free NONE / the book of margins

an improvisatory radio cegeste broadcast was recorded on the afternoon of the 11th of February, in the main gallery of NONE, at 24 Stafford street, Dunedin. For just over an hour, my transmissions were channelled through the instruments, bodies and sensibilities of None denziens and multitalented improvisers Alex MacKinnon, Toki Wilson, and Edwina Stevens.

For most of this time, the Mini FM transmitter was activated in a no-input and hands-on manner, effectively treated as akin to an unwieldy, unstable Theremin, although a small amount of playback material, sourced from recordings made the day before at a group violin/cello improv jam session with free-string group Strork, whose players included Alastair Galbraith, John White, Alan Starrett, Motoko Kikkawa & Nigel Bunn as well as myself, crept into the last quarter of the session.

thanks to Alex for the recording. an excerpt of it can be found in Mp3 form here

McIntyre/MacKinnon/Bunn/Gorman

a half-hour excerpt of Pete Gorman's video documentation of an improvised radiophonic / lo-fi electronic / sound-light translation soundramble on Sunday 1st February, 2009, at NONE, Dunedin, with input as listed from:

Sally McIntyre – Radiophonics

Alex MacKinnon - Circuit-bent devices

Nigel Bunn - Hand-made light controlled synth unit

Pete Gorman - Hand-made quadtrature oscillators

is viewable here

radiophonics and noise in the Cannan Downs ambient zone

radio cegeste played to a clearing of trees and a smattering of listeners at sundown on New Years day in the Ambient zone at the Cannan Downs music festival, experimenting with layering mobile, small scale lo-fi radiophonics with the sounds of distant large PA systems belting out electronic beats, the occasional sounds of wandering danceparty hedonists, and the area's intricate natural soundscape. this event involved the distribution of radio recievers to audience members, tactile performativity of the electromagnetic spectrum, the playback of urban and natural field recordings through 8 channel speakers and via Mini FM transmitter simultaneously, as well as added input from the guitar of Dunedin based noise improviser Toki Wilson, whose instrument functioned as sporadic aerial for the transmitter's fragile signal during the last half of the set.

drift forms...

"landscapes are repetitions. on a simple train ride i uselessly and restlessly waver between my inattention to the landscape and my inattention to the book that would amuse me if i were someone else. life makes me feel a vague nausea, and any kind of movement aggravates it.

ah, let those who don’t exist travel! for someone who isn’t anything, like a river, forward motion is no doubt life. but for those who are alert, who think and feel, the horrendous hysteria of trains, cars and ships makes it impossible to sleep or to wake up.

(...)

erudition of the sensibility has nothing to do with the experience of life. the experience of life teaches nothing, just as history teaches nothing. true experience comes from restricting our contact with reality while increasing our analysis of that contact. in this way our sensibility becomes broader and deeper, because everything is in us - all we need to do is look for it and know how to look."

- Fernando Pessoa

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curtailed phase (lapsed townscape)

churn of detail:

an incomplete

sequence: grass

releasing buttercups,

60s grids

slackening to visible

kitsch, the town's

strained name

breaking greys

against turquoises,

khakis; a red

jacket drifting,

inhabited or abandoned

on a verge; scattered

concretes flower to glass-

sharded images

sloping against stained

air; tourists'

eyes fire

vanishing points of no

convergence:

stay, at the repetitive

edges of

what: shops

stopped wasplike

in amber-

glassed sunsets, veiled

glances stuttering the dust

of a flipbook

of tarmac, wooden

expanses slatted

with light, chipping

to sun's underlying

diagonals; celluloid

strata of a place-

name's fades

--------------------

the lake as read

to enter landscape,

as a simple leaf in water's

slow growth upon the eye : like

the river in winter,

its contained, cold rage

dotted with orderly

frost flowers'

mute and regular

specking, meshed

with banked reflectives,

pale grasses fringing

a thin, watery nausea

seeping as if

from the physical

act of being here : as breath

as current recirculates

the involuntary flinch

from description's

responsibility : from

attending as record

this terrestrial

dankness : as wet

bare branches,

where recognition's

ember cannot spark,

where observation :

where the actual act

of looking : freezes

& its derelict

collage of stoats,

lupins, erosion

rerouts the eye

to emptier signs

of fire : a sun faded

BBQ chip packet

wandering along

the roadside :

radio cegeste at Chicks Hotel, Dunedin

the inaugural radio cegeste live micro radio performance on 12th Dec 2008 involved creating a site-specific radio programme for the iconic, historically notorious Chicks Hotel, in Port Chalmers, Dunedin. a playlist of environmental and anecdotal field recordings collected around the Port Chalmers area within 24 hours of broadcast were played back via itunes, handmade Mini FM transmitter and hand-held radio receivers.

Nigel Bunn helped me collect the field recordings. Our sonic mapping exercise took in various indoor and outdoor, cultural and natural environments. Along the way I also talked to a church organist about trains, a publican about the artist Ralph Hotere, children exiting a school bus, and the Chicks Hotel proprietor Hector Hazard about his attempts to 'unlearn the guitar'.

I shared a bill with various improvised noise / sound practitioners and DJs from Christchurch and Dunedin : Adam Willetts, Dirt Room, EYE, and A'sides for Betaville. Kim Pieters took the following performance photographs.

Orson Welles' War of the Worlds 70th anniversary broadcast

with the help of of Plains FM programme director Petal Largie, I re-broadcast Orson Welles' classic elaborate Halloween prank and seminal intervention into radio space on the evening of its 70th anniversary, at 10:30pm on the night of Thursday October 30, 2008.

the original radio play is archived in its entirety on the website of its umbrella broadcast series, Mercury Theatre on the Air, here

this is the email i sent out about the broadcast:

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tonight, for those in the Canterbury region... a special Halloween broadcast... 10:30 - 11:30, Plains FM 96:9

Orson Welles’ radiophonic adaptation of H G Wells novel "The War of the Worlds" was originally broadcast as an elaborate Halloween prank on the 30th of October 1938, on the radio drama programme the Mercury Theatre on the Air.

Scripted as a series of increasingly worrisome news reports introjected into a simulcast of a live concert, the reports depicted an evidently real-time alien invasion of New Jersey, replicating the semi-documentary style of Wells' classic science fiction text for the medium of radio.

The legends state that listeners, used to transparent journalism, and led into the the drama of the incident by its flawless scripting, thought what they were hearing was actually happening, with mass hysteria the inevitable result.

Other commentators have pointed to the fact that the notion of a national panic, in which hundreds of thousands of people left their homes, and built makeshift gasmasks and sandbagged shelters protected with armories, may itself have arisen due to media exaggeration of the figures in order to dramatize the panic.

Welles' later career includes some of the major achievements in 20th Century American filmmaking. But War of the Worlds remains as a touchstone moment when art and life broke into each other to reconfigure our ways of thinking about media. As a study in simulation and crowd dynamics, the broadcast has been closely listened to by artists, sociologists, and the military ever since.

All over the world in the next two nights, creative radio makers are engaging with the spirit of this seventy year old radio play, with artistic interventions which shift the original collapse of the fictional and the real into contemporary formations.

Plains FM 96:9 wll simply be airing the original broadcast in its entirety, your chance to hear, over the airwaves, a proto-media artwork whose seismic shocks around the intelligent manipulation of its medium are still traveling to our ears.

Adrian Hall - Line Drawings 1971, at the High Street Project

my chance 'discovery' of a folder of mostly unexhibited drawings from the 1970s, while on a social visit to the home of the artist over a year before, eventually bore fruit in the show Adrian Hall - Line Drawings 1971, exhibited at the High Street Project, Christchurch, 15 Oct - 1 Nov, 2008.

the catalogue essay is below. it can also be read on the HSP's blog site here.

an interview with the curator was broadcast on 23rd Oct on Plains FM's breakfast show. it can still be heard here.

artbash's inimitable anonymous coterie of writers have something to say about the show here.

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Pattern Integrities : on Adrian Hall's Line Drawings

"As far as playing was concerned, I think there was a feeling that one played until the refinement of materials and responses was so subtle that there was no sound or physical activity at all. Certainly - as musicians and audiences could attest - there was a great deal of latent energy in those magically still AMM silences."

-Eddie Prevost, revised liner notes to AMMMusic, 1967, re-released 1988.

The 'open laboratory' of adrian hall's practice c. 1971 has been written up elsewhere - suffice to say that his Plasma Cast Iron Foam Company Presents Adrian Reginald Hall (PCIFCo) at Auckland's Barry Lett Galleries in July of that year, a mere four months after the artist's arrival in the country, was an exhibition recently discussed as a "ground breaking conceptualist project", and "an acute marker in the wider history of modernity" (Marcus Moore, 2007). As a 28 year old artist in residence at Elam School of Fine Arts, whose immediate history was Yale Univrsity, Hall's introduction of U.S. post-minimal and conceptual currents to a receptive Auckland art scene was conducted with as much material as conceptual ingenuity, the dirty word 'artisian' taken back to the drawing board to be retransfigured in object based works which incorporated the process-drives of the everyday, and the aesthetics of the workshop into their material schema. In the introduction to Action Replay Post-Script, the catalogue for a 1999 show which included among its works Adrian Hall's super-8 piece Studio Souvenir, Plasma Cast Iron Foam Co. (1971), Wystan Curnow describes the post-object's contra-figurative drives: "Post-object art replaces the inert picturing of things, ideas and events, prefering to simply situate or re-stage them in their actuality." The emphasis on "deskilling" in late modernist art discourse is given a particular materialist-marxist twist by Hall, the virtuoso draftmanship of the artist not erased by automation, but reconfigured as a politic of the hand-made.

Similarly any emphasis on the biographic deserves mention as a method, given Hall's treatment of the name as readymade - the artist's chance find in 1968 of a stamp bearing the name 'Carl A. Mears' - a pseudonym and persona he's used in many works and authored texts since. As a comment on the automation and commodification of personal identity the nom de plume Carl A. Mears becomes Hall's nebulous Rrose Selavy, standing in relation to his use of his own signature in many works.

Moore discusses Hall's incorporation of transparencies around the economics of art making into Hall's work, the overt economics of domestic and political life that comprise Check Piece, included here, sees the artist's signature becoming an act in the wider world that erodes its rarified gestural status, with this everydayness then being incorporated back as part of the wider narrative around the work. In Super-8 film Studio Souvenir PCIFCo Hall uses similar logics - the montage of footage of the everyday life, the friends, the objects in the sudio half complete, which was the backdrop to the making of work becomes the substance of the work itself. Like Check Piece, this biographical impulse is countermeasured by its containment within the deliniated frameworks Hall has set up as a set of constraints. References to measuring play through Studio Souvenir with shots of gridded wire and measuring tapes - both documentation of the materials of practice and a meta-statement of the structural logics of the film.

Adrian Hall - Line Drawings 1971 is itself a found object - one folder of drawings, executed in the space of the month (mostly) of October in that year, themselves "lost" and rediscovered in 2007, cast up as aide-mémoire , a set of memoranda to the vagaries of material history, they comprise some of the footnotes to the PCIFCo works.

Partly a subversion of the non-gestural elements of Minimalism, these works' starkly simple arrangements of lines, grids, planes, shapes and geometries are a decade-on discussion around the contentlessness of that movement, inviting the scrutiny of a close-reading which reveals a nuanced interplay between gesture and measure; threading back into minimalism's focus on pure materiality and mediumistic constraint, Hall unpacks the cultural, social and technological nature of the drawn line.

This aesthetic is described by Wystan Curnow's impressions of PCIFCo :

"Some of the works, such as 'Low Tide' and 'Silent Wall', assumed an ambiguous, even parodic relation to minimalism. Minimalism's analyses of perception necessarily encompassed the physical conditions for perception, and from this there followed critique of, or in Hall's case a satire on, exhibition conventions (opening night attendants wore T-shirts bearing the silly fictional company logo), and the art object's commodity status (wooden blocks rubber-stamped with Hall's signature were sold for 50c). The "cross-sections of orientations and levels" in Hall's show are not minimal in so far as they are semiotically complex, but they remain phenomenological."

This interest in interrogating the Minimal object's particular set of conditions is seen strikingly in the five 'stationary' works in Adrian Hall - Line Drawings 1971 : 'Far Est', 'Far Est II', 'Plain', 'Trimlines', and 'Vista' which execute their own kind of blank gesture, miming commercially purchasable lined paper, but on a larger than life size scale. All of the titles reference spatiality in some way, although some truck with the conventions of pictorial painting ("vista", "horizontal"), while others are wittily political ("red square"). All are an extended and elaborately twisted meditation on the notion of the hand-made. The funny thing about Vista is not that it mocks the wide, open expanses of landcape painting but that it manages to suggest, through a great economy of means, that the wideness and openness are themselves a historically based concept which has very little to do with the immediacy of the 'view' and more to do with the way it is concieved on the drawing board that we have, here, come back to, as one temporary resting place in the flux of figural history. This is a landscape sketch without the sketch, and this self conscious 'originary' moment, the pending 'moment of creation' is made electrically present as much as it is minimised as monumental. It's a little like the scenes in Peter Greenaway's film The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) when the portable grid is hoisted pragmatically over the landscape, de-Romanticising it and opening up a historic and technical sensibility about seeing.

There is a certain absurdist linguistic free-wheeling in their plotting and measuring, which comes through in the relation of the starkness of the lines to the semiotic tease of the titles, a situation which leaves them hovering on the border of concrete poetics, Plot for example, is a work in which short vertical and horizontal blue pencil lines have been ruled into succinct crosses, with extremely faint end-squarings, also in blue which suggest an invisible trace when aligned with Square and Red Square's more forthright proclivites, like the difference between a poem and a manifesto, or perhaps an intrigue ("plot") and an overt declaration of intent. This humour comes across as being authorless, as though arising from the materials themselves. If these are gags they pull the same historic leg as John Cage's 4'33", in its striking literality, its sense of near-incredulous simplicity, or Cage's equally structurally open-ended statement "I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry", whose evident austerities open out toward a state where "..form no longer limits itself to volume, but embraces an unlimited space in all directions...", as Deleuze says of Minimalism. This weightlessness and extension is also a temporal suspension, the "eternal music" of the Minimalists, such as the Tony Conrad violin drone, whose "endless variations of repetition" one commentator described as "scrambling (his) perceptions: at any given point the music seemed to have have been going on for hours, and to have only just begun." (Nick Cain, 2006).

Tracing a line through the works themselves reveals a microcosm of detail as one would find amongst a variety of species sharing the same microscope slide; or in the manner of William Blake's classic piece on micro-macro dimensionality: "to see a world in a grain of sand / and heaven in a wild flower / hold the universe in the palm of your hand / and eternity in an hour". They can be set alongside investigations by other artists working from the mid 1960s, working in pre-Op, post-Minimal ways with lines, gridded fields, moire patterns, and pencil traces, and achieving a similar sense of delicacy and presence, such as Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman. Hall's works were executed less than a decade after Marshall McLuhan had spoken of the "mosaic mesh" of television, and predicted that printed matter would be killed off by electronic media. Another three years before that, Nam June Paik, invited by Karlheinz Stockhausen to make a 7 minute participation in his 'Originales' series, performed 'Zen for Head', dipping his head in paint and dragging it as 'paintbrush' to smear a thick black line down a roll of paper, to create one of the iconic works of the Fluxus movement. Like Martin, Ryman and Paik, Hall's lines are not industrially manufactured, and their flawed repetition speaks to our historic moment, immersed as we are in the utter repeatability of the digital. It is interesting to consider that digital technology's analogue precessessors, despite their rhetoric of automation, produced objects as individual entities with their own quirks - the misprinted stamp, the photograph left too long in the developer - to realise that, compared to the present, art in the age of mechanical reproduction wasn't so precise, in retrospect. Lev Manovich traces the relation of minimalism to technological art:

"... it is interesting that a database imagination has accompanied computer art from its very beginning. In the 1960s, artists working with computers wrote programs to systematically explore the combinations of different visual elements. In part they were following art world trends such as minimalism. Minimalist artists executed works of art according to preexistent plans; they also created a series of images or objects by systematically varying a single perameter. So when minimalist artist Sol Le Witt spoke of an artist's idea as "the machine which makes the work", it was only logical to substitute the human executing the idea with a computer." (Lev Manovich 2001)

As if to further destabilise the notion of the monochromatic work being the 'end' of anything, the Line Drawings have foxed with age - even the ink looks 'of an era', such things belie the stark simplicity of their origins, showing a marginalia of history, the indexical trace of the temporal as an aleatory contribution to the work. Their showing at the High Street Project in 2008 incorporates this indexical trace gracefully into their initial set of analyses. If the dominant narratives of Modernity situate Minimalism as the object reduced to blankness, the last stage of its hold on us before being abandoned, Hall's Line Drawings stand as one more curious lingering on this borderline, one hand-scribbled footnote extending the page a little further.

Sally Ann McIntyre, October 2008

radio acoustic

under the Borderline Ballroom banner, I organised a special live radiophonic simulcast from iconic Lyttelton venue The Wunderbar, via local independent radio station Volcano Radio 88:5FM.

both I and the artists were interviewed about the initiative by Sage Forest for The Music Mix, a programme on Radio New Zealand, some mention of which can possibly still be found here

A'sides for Betaville's Peter Kirk designed the event's wonderful oscillatory wave-themed poster.

----

the BORDERLINE BALLROOM casts out live into the electromagnetic spectrum this month with a focus on experimental radio, broadcast as art, and artists engaging with the technology of radio.

Fusing radio broadcast and live performance, the Borderline Ballroom #17 incorporates three live solo artists and the radio programmes Borderline Radio and A'Sides for Betaville, in a live to air collaboration with Lyttelton community broadcast station Volcano Radio 88:5FM, which has been operating in the port town just outside Christchurch since February 2008, and whose transmission area is locally bounded by the crater rim.

The Borderline Ballroom #17 will be on-site at the Wunderbar in Lyttelton and simulcast live on the station's airwaves from 8pm.

Sunday 21 September 2008
the Wunderbar, Lyttelton
8:00pm - $5, doorsales only

with:

ADAM WILLETTS (Chch)

Adam Willetts is a musician and artist whose practice shifts casually between hi-tech and handcrafted as he explores relationships and interfaces between people, technology and popular culture. His use of DIY electronics, radio, computers and game controllers creates dynamic and surprising live performances that carefully balance elements of fragile beauty with violent eruptions of static, electromagnetic interference and feedback.

Adam has been performing and exhibiting throughout New Zealand and internationally since the late 1990s featuring at numerous festivals and exhibitions including Lines of Flight 2006 (Dunedin), TASIE 2006 (Beijing), S3D 2007 (Auckland), and Cloudland at ISEA 2008 (Singapore).

For September's Borderline Ballroom Adam will be performing new work for synthesizers and electrosmog.

MELA (Lytn)

Mela is Helen Greenfield (Barnard's Star, the LEDs, Miss Mercury)'s experimental audio/visual project which focuses on (revels in) the medium specific properties of a variety of obsolete media, and within which "layers of repeating melodies, gradually effected drones, and suitably unrecognisable beats create an imperfect but mellifluous musical microclimate."

For this Borderline Ballroom performance Mela will be eschewing the easy translation of digital imagery to debut her OHP-projected, hand-coloured, hand-made slides, layering them in vibrant colour fields which recall the exuberant, colour saturated direct-film paintings of Len Lye, and also investigating the aesthetics of the constrained gesture and broken things, saying "maybe Mela more closely resembles her equipment at the moment... but who copies who?"

I-RORY (Chch)

I-Rory is an eclectic multi-instrumentalist, "a... dilettante, percussionist and improvising musician who plays the stereo." Last seen in a solo capacity supporting Philip Jeck at the Borderline Ballroom #13, for September's performance he is promising to celebrate the politer pursuits of the season, to take listeners on "a sunday walk" and will be contemplating a "pitch invasion" with semi-automatic percussion, obstructed field recordings and attack, sustain, decay, feedback.

"Was a delight to absorb self in the digi-soup of I-rory. Using crude objects of both home-made and exotic qualities, I-rory evoked the sound plethorae of Zoviet France." -Matt Middleton, April 2008

A'SIDES for BETAVILLE (Lytn)

a radio show hosted by Peter Kirk every Sunday on Volcano Radio 88.5FM from 10pm - 12am, A'sides is radio in the classic tradition of late night experimental collage soundscape, a maverick creative broadcast practice begun on US college radio in the late 1970s, with precursors in earlier music/audio/collage works and sound experiments, whose prior local manifestations include Rotate Your State (RDU, 1991-2003), as well as various programs on the original Radio Lyttelton.

A'sides rides the drift of the late night dial toward a poetics of the medium, becoming a framework through which to listen in to listening, playing with radio as-playback, making audible the sound of broadcast and its sonic storage media. In its collaged craftings, found-cultural detritus jams with precious artifacts of high culture, the mp3 speaks to the tape loop and the gramophone, hand-manipulated op shop records of Russian folk songs and sea shanties (the record as readymade... the medium as the massage) bump tactilities and temporalities with recordings of historic avant gardists speaking on the creative process, and live streaming of internet radio art projects.

for the Borderline Ballroom, A'sides promises as much de-mystification of its process as it promises further inscrutability, staging live radio art as event, while retaining its intimacy of late night listening for those who understand that "the ears don't have eyelids"

----------------------

the BORDERLINE BALLROOM is a Christchurch-based initiative aiming to provide a regular live presence for performative audio experimentation which supports local practitioners working on the peripheries of music and sound, while offering a resource for national and international performers touring the South Island.

Tao Wells' THE SILENCE of NOT BEING FAMOUS, LISTEN

as part of Tao Wells' exhibition Art Aristocracy at Christchurch artist-run space the High Street Project (renamed 'The National Gallery' for the show's duration), the artist staged a one night performance with the above title, what he called "the debut of a new visual score for the playing of volume", in which radio cegeste was one of two artists invited to contribute a sound piece.

I put together a DJ set with a distinctly "90s ambient" flavour, due to the 1990s being a theme of Tao's exhibition overall, as well as preliminary discussions around his memories of listening to my show Rotate your State while a student at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury.

----

"A performance about volume and listening accompanying a visual score created for the event. The wonderful sounds and skills of Radio Cègeste and Ability Trauma feature. "

thanks to Tao for the photographs. basic information about the event can be found here

Kim Pieters' 'Wings Caught in the Tears of The Pool', at Bowen Galleries

Dunedin painter Kim Pieters' show of new works Wings Caught in the Tears of The Pool was exhibited at Bowen Galleries, Wellington, from 8 - 27 September 2008. all of the paintings' titles were taken by Kim from poems written by me, and exhibited with an appropriately non-explicatory catalogue text I wrote for the show.

Documentation of the works is viewable on the Bowen's site here

-----------------------------------------------

there are times when I have lost the characters in this day's fiction as living entities, she says. They pale and fall, and a space opens in which I am absence. I situate myself in my city with the eye of a foreigner. But all looking is foreign. The process of seeing is a series of symbols copied out of books, like markings on this white ground. A parody of some tabula rasa we have never known but in the expectation of it we have created a culture. The ruins have been reconstructed. Buildings are re-facaded. But I am, increasingly, a wanderer of junkstores, disconnected, picking over the cultural debris of a place, a time unknown to experience. The day's slow unreeling as though seen through rippled water

and all languages are foreign you said to me. I, equally free, am not I like a tree trunk, but the weeping tree that inhabits your work, its limbs trailing (like words?) off the page. and how to claim as "mine". the soft branching that leans in its partiality toward silence. not a striving for monumentality, oratory, presence. a distrust of the (meat eating) sun. which would claim the final. the partiality of languaging bodies "such as flesh holds it's sense of incompletion". the untongued inbetween. that you speak. that I

light stumbles into an eye's nodes and chambers. among these inscriptions and silences what body can we? body politic, body sexual, body of sparrow, flock, ant colony. where am I bisecting the swarming softness with words. how not to incise, dissect, stick the pin in, butterfly. but the book follows us home as though we know.

but the drama that exists in the white space. show don't tell, she says. make fluid the fragmented parts. lavish me with absences. exilic anxieties. finding and searching. sleep still travels through like a current, a electrical stream when the foot is stationed at point. like the foot of a snail the eye roots itself in the shelter of image. But you are blinding mentionings inside this sentence as though language were a brick series. As though there were a state of being (in a black jacket). A state of being cocooned (in parentheses). A state of looking from (a centre?) I will hatch, she says

into pure flashes and symmetries. But not metamorphosise, butterfly. Just prevail in the continuing of version after version of human, getting weaker and stronger in patches, like sunlight between buildings, like a sunrise sight out of window and lengthening. grainy, as though on a train, as though raining. these are our hands, our media. the ragged uprise and decline of light on horizons folds my eye into days a long gradient. symbols hang without referent, their white space a mental sea. to fill in the gaps or the gaps themselves are. unknown, new zealand. a hill sequence embedded. gold stutter. language accelerant, the whole rustling and flying. into light. collapsing words as though burning out. the frame.

it is something like writing without thinking, she says. treading these pale squares. a light catalyses a way of walling the silence. margins walked, alive with revisions. this language of visible things and of things that go. what thoughts are public and what. brushed under the appearance, a wall weeps papery foldings. four makes a room. an air shelter, like a body marked by eyes, by the broken parts of days.

The city writes to my eye, and I trace its scrapes of saying. All ground is water, she says. All streets are composed of paper. I have been drowned here, and walked up onto land where I was unknown, and walked into these crowds, and disappeared.

genetic noise [source text missing]

"It is by moving onwards, beyond the known, that No one and you, other reader, will hear the textual voice, which still remains to be heard, and which gives to each of us, after all, No one’s name.”

– first names of no one, in The Helene Cixous Reader, S Sellers (ed), p. 33, 1974

--

, this snow

is

falling

on you,

on where

you stand,

on where

you

stood

[deleted]

--

it

[barely audible] , it

--

, happens,

even

in the antipodes,

this snow

hits

your arriving-

place

--

as modulations in

the after-

image, the

partition-

ed, lit

sequence

of [absences]

on sky-

--

as winter came, has

come, now

from the

other. sided

from the one, and

pointed

there

--

to skies. cast

as [name?],

as [date?], strung

in the radio

as micro- weave &

wave,

as spoke

to no-

, to every-.

listening

--

-cast

as/to sea &

sky.

as/is to know

to list as

absent, see

[inspecific]

--

as cold is

not

a place it is

this ,[question]

NZ Experimental Film post-Lye at the Otherfilm Festival, Brisbane

i was invited to give a talk on New Zealand experimental film after Len Lye to the assembled guests of the Otherfilm experimental and expanded film festival in Brisbane, run by the Otherfilm collective (Sally Golding, Joel Stern and Danni Zuvela), on the 17th November 2007.

Otherfilm's focus is on the medium of celluloid, in its materiality, history, and the complex and multivariant use by artists of this 'obsolete' media form in the present.

As befitting a dinnertime discourse, discussion began with a screening of Len Lye's wartime film When the Pie Was Opened. I shared the day's bill with Dirk de Bruyn, Kerry Laitaia, and Jon Dale, and the festival with many other illustrious participants from the world of contemporary avant garde film, expanded cinema, and unabashed celluloid neo-materialism. more info here

"Film & food – art-forms usually subjected to industrial mass-production, but so much more scrumptious when hand-made with love. Break some bread with us as we nourish all the senses by honouring OFF07 special guest Dirk de Bruyn with a luscious retrospective screening & nutritionally-enriched talks on avant-garde film."

the full 2007 Otherfilm programme is here.

stray

in late 2007 Dunedin based painter, musician and video artist Kim Pieters set my poem stray (beneath the books of winter) to a series of sepia toned moving digital images of landscapes filmed along the road to her former residence at Purakanui, just outside Port Chalmers, Dunedin. The video-poem that resulted was named Stray. Jim Currin's Ray Off project provided the soundtrack, specifically the first two songs from the album Ghost Wolf of Thunder Mountain, released on his label United Fairy Moons.

poem originally published in Moria, vol 7, issue 2, 2004

--------------------------------

stray (beneath the books of winter)

what unpacks of wolves
where i find love the motioning toward
that toothy horde, child

to find the unfinding motioning
to find i
break unfounded

on a hot dry night, a pair
of children stepping
gentle sleepless pavements of grain

cracking up among bookstacks, gnashing along tall dry dreams
of summer riverbed
with a pet sun, in air
tough-husked like sugarcane

& along the wave
phrased crowds of blue

fossil-formed of many skies self-blooming
of many hands spooled long chain letters
yellow white, daisy drooling

dawn through the needle comes
pricking blood from the wadded
cotton, picking gold in the hair straw
a fluttered consciousness,

your fragile smile
knitting these terrible suns
together like friends

and their heat, an opening
between first child and second
roselike, your mother groove, breaking
birds of blood in every jowl & finger

and no i is where you would find
the mean, the centre the third
person i by any other

name: Descartes you can't stay here
was it in spring that the world rested
in its last apartness, a pivot
of matter defining on a lean

a bald assumptive, an old grey man on a park bench
feeding the pigeons

uncorking the wings of the brain
into grey papery feather sheaves and then

let the archive loose
toward a whiter sun, the bald naught of dawn
flown in a stormy litter of its leaving

a waveform of autumn crystalizing
under tarmac an edge

death like a kind of seasonal
misrecognising, i all wither am not to be said again i say
i say

beneath the books of winter, there are undone coming todays
unfruited blooming

in dawn lines, their graphism, forecasts
of your leaving and hers, and his, and in flocking all

to toothraw lines ragged indexical, patterns of land
and wrinkle and sky sites where unfamiliar horizon blues fray

'stations / a loop for paused morning' and 'jeanne d'arc / acousmatics of a beach, repeating', published in Brief #35

the Auckland based literary magazine Brief included two of my poems, stations / a loop for paused morning, and jeanne d'arc / acousmatics of a beach, repeating in its 35th issue, published in September 2007.

a pdf of the entire issue can be found here.

Jeanne d’Arc / acousmatics of a beach, repeating

small unpicked signal

sounding among a whiteness of gulls.

almost inaudible as (a smile?)

as wind noise, a relation to skin

that shifts to recall

its wall as a doorway

this body’s openness closed

around its own (function)

fiction of warmth

the small, mammalian sun

which declares an unbroken circle

of blood to the line of cold

sharpening the grasses

with frost

& climbing into

it’s (percussive) onslaught as though

trailing through snow:noise a picture

in the decay, a voice, the white trail

of song dropped from a mouth

once kissed or otherwise

oddly residual, the fish-hook barb

of a sweet, sharp taste

lodged in the dry

authority of the eye

(warming a circle, chilling a line)

sucking like a series of sweets

the forward moving field of air

in small glowing mouthfuls

propped more or less vertically against

wind, sound stipples and shards crashing against the body’s lines

trying to get to the thing

buried at the end of the bone

white nautilus of the

cochlear spiral

where once, in another season

at the end of the track, the blinding opening

of a bay, gaped like an unspeakable optimism

an (unlipped) hope,

gapped (in potential) suddenly

the soundtrack cuts out…. a launch of pauses at drift in a discman’s

dead charge animating the individual waves in the sea’s monotone…

memory loops against the words that seal the eye’s telescopic glaze

into distance…. but you have no telescope,

only this soft technology… (and there is no power point anywhere on

the beach)... only these words or parts of words washing up among the

types of grains these rocks are.... you move around its text until unable to

differentiate an image’s edge, this puzzle of a face mixed up with other

scenes and scraps… these beached salt-crusted ‘70s sunglasses, (have

they been out there ever since. (shipwreck?))... you move around its text

its midden of found shards, flints, shells, not trying to find an old order,

or yet able to found another... and in waves some subtitled decade ends

as another begins and begins…

----

stations (loop for paused morning)

on an uphill, lights

bend to accommodate

sunrise : we watch

without subtitles

the train window decoding

the morning :

gold-dusted shops

flattened, refracted

in the glass : a townscape

propped up

like an album cover

*

instabilities in vision, brittle silk

at the eye’s back, flags’ ragged narrative

fraying into wideness

& silence : not final

in the thud of this : wind, dull and open

against scarred plank-wood, salt-

pocked with a blunt

stubble of migrations, autumn

not yet winter, but this seasonal

loneliness that buds, that lengthens the sky

into fibrous lines, the very idea of a screen

pressed hard out of the pores,

meshes of duck flight

projected onto the inversion

of blue, no longer a colour but

this well, at the bottom of which

whatever you have lost

is still, somehow, visible

*

sit as yourself, as a series

of stills, of rings

in this chair’s

momentum, your hand-

held blindness refracted

overhead : trees, bare-

threaded reflectives

that slip clean through

the book to the optic

veinwork, the nerve’s bark

of rinded categories

cannot veil this landscape’s

skidded shorelines, its saline

tides crystallised :

*

paint backing

the eyes, peeling

a sight-worn shelf-

life of image :

ragged flagged

reading attempts

flick in patched

anthem of cones

and rods

shorting

into silence

…

*

some hopeful remark, phrased as preamble

for the sun, mirror-written

with unreliable

stylus, finger-

width in thick, breath-crusted glass,

its text dissipating already into a pre-winter

that seems to hang

in the window like a headache’s

white compression, amplifying the dull

recognition of lack – caffeine, perhaps? –

& the equally yawning anticipation

for its opposite –

shards of scenes shuddering

through the small still space

of your drifting image, its rolling

recurrence in windows full to brimming

lip of noise, the thin

electromagnetic shift a whine needling

brain’s greyscale, bleeding

its repeats over the aural

rim, lulled train-ride

autism of the muffled winter eye

crammed with impacted elsewhere,

its hivelike fill of image

syrup, soft pixels

of thick, trapped sun:

*

conversational partialities, like pocket crumbs,

dot the ground of a minute’s incompletion, a tension

stalled in shoulders, rush-released in cigarette smoke on the platform,

fluttering in the train’s collected stops.

anticipation’s drift sculpts the moving process of a moment

in the stills of windows, and how long

will the flared filament of this minute hold

through the brittle glass of your attention, will the thin

and frozen things unspoken, hang like smoke rings

their fragile framework in this pause

some disappearance sculpts an absence, which opens

still as immersion inside speaking, a name, dropped

stone thrown and spreading, sea change in a lung cell, in a face

self-stung by cold’s brisk, flinching knowledge:

*

it is not

seasonal

it is not

silence, this cold

that marbles

no : we are not

allowed that

cleanness, what

to say, and who

to speak

to : that place :

…

*

the pause, as after

a distant accident.

pooled ring of

handshakes, drawing back

to history. these tears

are screens, they

are not precious.

will we find a flow

that might clean

the ruined moment

from our hands,

from the hands

of the clock,

where inland seas

strain for an ear, a hearing

before the sirens start.

fastened to the second,

stapled to it,

our knowledge, these

remnant gestures

crouched in the bone

like fossilised

sunshine, as

artifice fails

*

pour and re-draw

of this enthrallment,

which is a scrolling

down the contour of

memory’s lathed

phonographic

flip, it scrapes

a surface

and over

…

'a gap, invisible in the photograph (lover's leap)', and 'field notes for love poems' (0:2), published in Landfall #214

2 poems of mine, a gap, invisible in the photograph (lover's leap), and the 2nd section of field notes for love poems were included in the 214th issue of the NZ literary journal Landfall. With the themeless theme of 'Open House', the issue was edited by Auckland based poet Jack Ross.

more info here

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a gap, invisible in the photograph (lover's leap)

to hear imperfectly

this bay : opening

as grey lines, as colourless

light and wide

shifting in the body

axis : keying an actual sun

in forests' verticality : in solar re

verberations before

such rushed