The New Zealand Storm Petrel, transmission for 'Ground' exhibition, at Haus of Vovo

 

A work by radio cegeste is scheduled to be cast over the airwaves of a small-radius transmission art station embedded within Haus of Vovo, a project space in New Norfolk, lutruwita/Tasmania, in an exhibition entitled "Ground," opening next Saturday the 9th April and running until the 22nd May. It joins several other works gathered together on the theme of one of the four known fundamental forces of nature - electromagnetism.

My work "The New Zealand Storm Petrel" was originally released in December 2013 on the label Flaming Pines, within a series of small-run releases that saw sound artists focusing on particular species of birds. "The New Zealand Storm Petrel" is dedicated to its eponymous creature - a small, nocturnal, critically endangered pelagic bird endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand. It was thought to be extinct since 1850, and known only by a small number of museum study skins gathered by 19th Century collectors, until a series of sightings from 2003 indicated the presence of living birds and a previously unknown breeding colony.  

Within the exhibition "Ground" the themes of this piece become clarified and crystallised alongside other works focusing on the materiality of electromagnetism. The piece speculatively imagines the Petrel's non-human existence as an oceanic elemental creature at home in (un)earthly environments hostile to humans, completely off the radar and beyond the limits of Western Scientific knowledge.  Drawing on the sounds of the magnetosphere and speculating on the way birds listen, it makes a case for the oceanic space of avian existence - the bird as a kind of electromagnetic being, a kind of radio creature, orienting itself with coastlines and stars, the auroral chorus of natural radio and the magnetic poles of the earth. Using sounds from a 1919 pressing of a 78rpm record called "Asleep in the Deep," the creaking sounds of a damaged mid-19th century squeezebox accordion that breathes like the sails of a ship, and the unearthly sounds of electromagnetism from the upper layers of earth's atmosphere (among other sources), the piece follows the mysterious oceanic migratory currents of the Petrel, and celebrates its re-emergence - alive - as a 'lazarus taxon,' while also suggesting we can never fully "land" or "know" such a creature through means of scientific measurement, and that such desires are hubristic at best.

As the curator of "Ground," Tricky Walsh, writes in their catalogue essay: "...the Petrel is not only a reconstruction, but a reimagining of a species which has kept possession of its own voice, uncolonized by early collectors of the natural world. Petrel uses elements from the broader electromagnetic spectrum combined with the resonant vibration of strings. Here and there, VLF flickers and pops. The sound of lightning strikes and high-altitude discharge. The song of the auroral chorus, chirping its way into a dawn perhaps shared by this oft nocturnal, pelagic bird. Beneath this, a broader composition in static. The sounds of distant stars exploding; the raining down of ancient dusts. This is the sky which carries the Petrel – a dark landscape of magnetic creaks and hisses, of rapid oscillations between silence and enveloping drone."

NZ Petrel drawing by Tricky Walsh.