- Pierre Nora, 'Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire'
Extinction, while conceptually aligned with silence, has mediated histories that trouble and extend what listening to - and looking at - such silence might entail. As a media artist I find it valuable to speculate on the concept of "witnessing" extinction through the archival histories of media, and how this might relate to cultural understandings of memory and materiality.
What, for instance, is the cultural value of a near 100-year old visual or aural recording of an extinct species? Does it have a special status, when a whole species is dead? What is the relationship of modes of witnessing to preservation, outside of the 'building awareness' rhetoric of environmental discourse? Can there be a discussion of this beyond the conflation of "rarity" with the commodification of nature?
What, for instance, is the cultural value of a near 100-year old visual or aural recording of an extinct species? Does it have a special status, when a whole species is dead? What is the relationship of modes of witnessing to preservation, outside of the 'building awareness' rhetoric of environmental discourse? Can there be a discussion of this beyond the conflation of "rarity" with the commodification of nature?
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On the 10th March I played a gig organised by Tim Panaretos at a little venue called The Burrow in Fitzroy, that helped me extend some of these thoughts. For this audio visual performance I worked again with filmmaker and projectionist Campbell Walker, and I also worked with one of the primary texts that has deeply informed my ongoing investigations into the archival sounds of extinct birds and how they provide clues to the materiality of field recording.
Campbell and I were both continuing prior explorations into the connection and divergence of the sonic and visual aspects of the "actuality," the ontology of all film as 'documentary.' For me this meant exploring the minor science of live transmission and its interaction with (and problematising of) the materiality of 'fixed' media representations of extinction within sonic storage media, taking one artefact as an instance of the wider subject of reified representation of the extinct more-than-human.
I wrote about what we were going to do as follows: This performance’s focus on the instabilities and minor politics of micro-radio, and the relationship of the long history of mediated representation to species extinction, will be accompanied by video projections by New Zealand filmmaker Campbell Walker, reworking the only extant film footage of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, photographed on the 1935 expedition to the Singer Tract in Northern Louisiana in search of the bird by Arthur Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg. Original Recording Date: April 12, 1935
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The soundtrack to Arthur Allen's 1935 footage of the Ivory Billed woodpecker is commonly understood to be the only audio recording of this species in existence, and its concurrent images the only visual recording.
The soundtrack to Arthur Allen's 1935 footage of the Ivory Billed woodpecker is commonly understood to be the only audio recording of this species in existence, and its concurrent images the only visual recording.
As an "image of extinction" this footage shares shelf space with David Fleay's footage of the Thylacine, shot at roughly the same time, in 1932, and it's instructive to compare the two. One major difference is that there is a soundtrack in the 1935 recording of the American bird, although this in itself points to a tantalising and rather mysterious elision, that borders on the arbitrary: optical film-sound technologies could also easily have been used in the 1932 recording of the extinct Tasmanian marsupial. Sometimes it's the contingency of history that reveals its brutality, and in the case of the Fleay film the silence of the Thylacine seems monumental, totalising, unanswerable. This is something I have tried to trouble in related projects elsewhere. In contrast, the sound of the woodpecker's plaintive 'kent' call is starkly audible on the optical soundtrack of Allen and Kellog's film, albeit infused with the dust and grain of history, the noise of an imperfect capture.
In the past I have understood radio cegeste as a project that gathers gestures curatorially (as 'libraries'), and its attitude to sonic objects as akin to a form of a-effect that involves erasure and re-manifestation - using transmission modalities to transform objects via electromagetism, taking them out of the world in their reified form, and transforming them through the particular magic of radio into vibration. This works very well when it comes to dead bird museum specimens, especially extinct ones. It also has its promises as a method around re-mediating archival media materials. In prior projects around the representation of extinction I've been working with ideas around absence and elision. This performance, also, approached a set representation of extinction, in order to destabilise it. The fixed image, which becomes near-iconic (as it is "all we have left"), also collects other cultural significances along the way (for example, to some minds, the Allen/Kellog footage is also "representative of a lost era of American wilderness"). To my knowledge no-one's approached or written about this document specifically as a media artefact.
In the past I have understood radio cegeste as a project that gathers gestures curatorially (as 'libraries'), and its attitude to sonic objects as akin to a form of a-effect that involves erasure and re-manifestation - using transmission modalities to transform objects via electromagetism, taking them out of the world in their reified form, and transforming them through the particular magic of radio into vibration. This works very well when it comes to dead bird museum specimens, especially extinct ones. It also has its promises as a method around re-mediating archival media materials. In prior projects around the representation of extinction I've been working with ideas around absence and elision. This performance, also, approached a set representation of extinction, in order to destabilise it. The fixed image, which becomes near-iconic (as it is "all we have left"), also collects other cultural significances along the way (for example, to some minds, the Allen/Kellog footage is also "representative of a lost era of American wilderness"). To my knowledge no-one's approached or written about this document specifically as a media artefact.
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Perhaps, in separating the image from the optical soundtrack, and also introducing blocks of black leader and temporal disjunctures into the flow of its naturalistic images, Campbell's re-composition of the Allen/Kellog Ivory Bill visual footage perhaps represents this haunting more accurately, outside the seamless flow of images and their sound-synch. It also points to the fact that, despite being the only extant footage, it is also partial, and non-monumental. Arthur Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg's recording of April 12, 1935 was not the last sighting of the bird. This sighting was 10 years later. It wasn't filmed. There was in fact an 'endling' that escaped mediation. This bird was captured in drawings and descriptions, but not by visual or sound recordings:
On one level it's quite funny thinking about the idea of EVP as a genre of sound. Why emphasise ghosts at all, when all media is haunted? We don't have to search far for "ghost voices": there are so many within recorded media - as many have pointed out, it's an essential property of recorded sound. In that sense, the scratchy, imperfect, noise-infused and textural grain of the Allen/Kellog Ivory Bill recording is one of the best EVP recordings i've ever heard. And in some ways it's distinctly aesthetic, capturing and entwining the fates of the extinct bird and the fragile and mortal nature of sound recording media. But in another sense, while the bird is literally a ghost voice, it's so pragmatic as to be almost unnoticeable, couched as it is within the scientific tropes of ornithological recording. It is nothing remarkable, just another bird call, until you know the narrative.
Perhaps, in separating the image from the optical soundtrack, and also introducing blocks of black leader and temporal disjunctures into the flow of its naturalistic images, Campbell's re-composition of the Allen/Kellog Ivory Bill visual footage perhaps represents this haunting more accurately, outside the seamless flow of images and their sound-synch. It also points to the fact that, despite being the only extant footage, it is also partial, and non-monumental. Arthur Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg's recording of April 12, 1935 was not the last sighting of the bird. This sighting was 10 years later. It wasn't filmed. There was in fact an 'endling' that escaped mediation. This bird was captured in drawings and descriptions, but not by visual or sound recordings:
"The logging rights to the Singer Tract had been sold to the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company. The National Audubon Society mounted a campaign to save the Singer Tract but it only accelerated the rate of cutting. The Chicago Mill and Lumber Company had no interest in saving the forest or compromising with John Baker, the president of the National Audubon Society. Baker wanted to buy the rights to the trees and obtained a pledge of $200,000 from the governor of Louisiana for that purpose.
The lumber company refused the offer and the Singer Sewing Machine Company, which still owned the land, refused to intercede. Richard Pough, who later became the first president of The Nature Conservancy, was sent by Audubon to search for the remaining ivory-bills in the Singer Tract in December 1943-January 1944. In a letter to John Baker he wrote, "It is sickening to see what a waste a lumber company can make of what was a beautiful forest." He found one female ivory-bill in a small stand of uncut timber, surrounded by destruction.
The artist, Don Eckelberry, who also worked for Audubon, went to the swamp in April 1944 looking for the bird Pough had spotted. He found her at her roost hole and spent two weeks watching and sketching her. Eckelberry's time in the swamp is the last universally accepted sighting of one of these birds in the United States."
The lumber company refused the offer and the Singer Sewing Machine Company, which still owned the land, refused to intercede. Richard Pough, who later became the first president of The Nature Conservancy, was sent by Audubon to search for the remaining ivory-bills in the Singer Tract in December 1943-January 1944. In a letter to John Baker he wrote, "It is sickening to see what a waste a lumber company can make of what was a beautiful forest." He found one female ivory-bill in a small stand of uncut timber, surrounded by destruction.
The artist, Don Eckelberry, who also worked for Audubon, went to the swamp in April 1944 looking for the bird Pough had spotted. He found her at her roost hole and spent two weeks watching and sketching her. Eckelberry's time in the swamp is the last universally accepted sighting of one of these birds in the United States."
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Sometimes it's the silence of history that reveals its brutality, and sometimes its the trace of what's missing. But if there's nothing here now but the recordings, what is the voice's significance, in relation to the bird itself, the species actively destroyed through expansion, resource extraction, and the packaging of the extinct nonhuman as nostalgia through "the myth of wilderness"? If we look at and listen to this footage, which is a recording of a time and a place, we see something else. The Ivory Bill's movements, when slowed down, as they are in Campbell's re-mediation of the 1935 Allen/Kellog footage, are very clearly responding to human observation; these movements are revealed as not "natural" but enacted in relation to observation, to the presence of the camera. The bird itself is revealed as the witness, a transceptive presence that can't be reduced to human representation, and one that haunts the human subject observing it. It can be seen seeing us, looking back at us looking at it, through those 100 years.
Sometimes it's the silence of history that reveals its brutality, and sometimes its the trace of what's missing. But if there's nothing here now but the recordings, what is the voice's significance, in relation to the bird itself, the species actively destroyed through expansion, resource extraction, and the packaging of the extinct nonhuman as nostalgia through "the myth of wilderness"? If we look at and listen to this footage, which is a recording of a time and a place, we see something else. The Ivory Bill's movements, when slowed down, as they are in Campbell's re-mediation of the 1935 Allen/Kellog footage, are very clearly responding to human observation; these movements are revealed as not "natural" but enacted in relation to observation, to the presence of the camera. The bird itself is revealed as the witness, a transceptive presence that can't be reduced to human representation, and one that haunts the human subject observing it. It can be seen seeing us, looking back at us looking at it, through those 100 years.
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