radio cegeste 104.5 FM is a mini FM radio station hosted as a platform for radio art by the Dunedin, New Zealand based writer and artist Sally Ann McIntyre. Its projects and programmes cohere around a loose set of circumstances and proclivities, including site-specificity, nomadism, the collection of sound libraries, phonography, museology, memory, the haunted materiality of absent presence, old buildings and other historic sites, psychogeography, the performative fragility of small-scale transmission, bird migration and electromagnetism, the complex idea of 'dead air', the recorded and transmitted history of birdsong (sometimes also as the making-audible of the texts of a New Zealand nationalism), and the possibility of an ecology of the radio that doesn't represent unstable systems as functioning in eternal homeostasis.
radio cegeste was originally named after the eponymous poet who dies in the first scenes of Jean Cocteau's 1950 film 'Orphee', and who transmits coded signals from the underworld via the radio waves (via a black Rolls Royce). the station thinks of itself as belonging to an important, if buried non-centralised 'minor' history of radio art, halfway between a 'paper radio', one critically aligned with mail art, and something approaching the 'receiver' of a tuned-in poetics of the aetheric ocean which Jack Spicer so eloquently outlined in his work (eg 'thing language' : "...aimlessly it pounds the shore / white and aimless signals / no-one listens to poetry".) radio cegeste believes strongly in the transformation of its own history as a modernist technology into a ghosting of and picking-over the debris of aspects of that history. it regards its own take on these critical histories as an ongoing series of colonial/modernist "ethers". it's current totem bird is the shining cuckoo, Pipiwharauroa, whose migratory flight along the exact routes by which Maori originally travelled to New Zealand from the Pacific is said to be no small coincidence.
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radio cegeste occurs in live and event based situations but is also occasionally a recording project. it has released material on the labels winds measure, Consumer Waste, and/Oar, Idealstate, Flaming Pines, and Gruenrekorder. Sally’s sound work also includes related ongoing research into the materiality of recorded silence, the history of birdsong transcription, and the hauntology of extinction as a trace within sound archives, including the use of pre-electrical sonic inscription and playback mechanisms, such as 78rpm recordings, phonographic wax cylinders, and music boxes, to bring extinct birdsong back to audibility. these projects have been exhibited in galleries and project spaces in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany and the U.S.
sally's practice also spans radio documentary, critical writing, and curatorial and organisational work. She has written critically for print media, and published a lot of poetry in small press literary journals. she's done radio since 1997, and since 2009 she has been involved as an Australasian curator for the international Radia network, which is a curatorial platform for peer-to-peer experimental radio art, commissioning many new works from sound and radio artists in the region. Her interests include environmental history, post-humanism, the history of museums, ethno-ornithology, island ecologies, avian electomagnetic navigation, obsolete technologies, the poetics of erasure and the trace, the possiblity of locality within the globalised, and the cultural and historical situatedness of listening.
contact: staticmansion [at] gmail [dot] com.
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