On the night of May 11, 2024 I heard the lightning birds singing through the geomagnetic storm, mediated perceptive effects of the extreme solar weather hitting the earth's ionosphere.
There was a nigh-perfect conjunction of elements that catalysed this listening/recording session; a conversation had reminded me it was World Migratory Bird Day; there had been coronal mass ejections from the sun that Wednesday and Thursday. I hastily bought some replacements for broken cables from the local Store DJ outlet and drove with my generous photographer companions to the Victorian coast.
First we went to the beach, but it was too close to the powerlines, so the textures of sferics were overlaid by the ubiquitous drone of the grid: a loud blaring hum at 50HZ. There were also so many cars and a lot of people taking photos with phones and cameras on tripods and sticks, and stumbling through the dark they looked at me with my less familiar equipment, translators for another aspect of the radio spectrum, with my eyes closed, looking like I was fishing into the sky. I wish I could have let them know what I was hearing.
We went further to try and get off the grid, as the night got later. At midnight until approximately 1am on the 11th-12th May I stood in freezing winds, positioned over the crashing breakers on a desolate viewing platform at Pyramid Rock on the coastal outcrop of the nature reserve on Millowl/Philip Island, among the cries of penguins and the more dedicated and hardier of the photographers, looking out toward the luminous electrical wavering and undulating of eerie, flickering streamers of light, traveling to us from the southern magnetic pole: Tahu-nui-a-rangi, the aurora australis. Earlier these had been brighter still; a glaucous curtain of shifting colour in the visible green/pink/red spectrum that danced in the black under the pinpoints of stars.
What did the green veil and flickering fires of Tahu-nui-a-rangi sound like? Crowding like massed distant flocks on the border of listening, the lightning birds from the other world were singing. Unearthly, distant, teeming, eerie, static-filtered, polyphonic.
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Aurora australis is not normally seen (or heard) from the vantage point of the Victorian coast.
This fortuitous listening experience, and the recording that emerged from it, comprises some of the field research for a work called ion and bird (a test transmission for the Atlantic flyway) which I will be presenting for the dual contexts of live performance and broadcast on June 15, at the culmination of my upcoming artist residency at Wave Farm/Radio WGXC 90.7FM in upstate New York, 7-17 June 2024.
This work emerges from a thread of thinking probably sparked when, decades ago as a literature student, I first read the speculative, utopian imaginings of Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov's "The Radio of the Future" (1921), where early radio was interpreted as "this stream of lightning birds," and a future radio art was imagined as follows:
"Where has this great stream of sound come from, this inundation of the whole country in supernatural singing, in the sound of beating wings, this broad silver stream full of whistlings and clangor and marvelous mad bells surging from somewhere we are not, mingling with children’s voices singing and the sound of wings? Over the center of every town these voices pour down, a silver shower of sound. Amazing silver bells mixed with whistlings surge down from above. Are these perhaps the voices of heaven, spirits flying low over the farmhouse roof?"
This poetic manifesto and futuristic imaginary is perhaps a foundational text in radio/transmission art circles. My performance for Wave Farm will be part of a wider project that revisits Khlebnikov's Radio of the Future - and specifically his mention of the "lightning birds" - as a text that moves toward less centralised media, and more-than-human imaginaries.
It draws deeply on conversations I've had within the radio arts and wider arts/academic communities, initially, and perhaps particularly, with a spark catalysed by a generative (and generous) comment made by the artist David Haines after a talk I gave at the Whanganui Aotearoa Digital Arts symposium in 2009, about how artistic research might approach scientific data on magnetoreception, avian neural pathways, and the question of how birds listen. I was also inspired by multifaceted research into sky media Jacob Smith was conducting through what eventually became his podcast series Lightning Birds, (and in our conversations also led him to the Khlebnikov poem, with which he went on to title the series). I have also been energised by Kate Donovan's research into magnetite and more-than-human radio ecologies as a way of "doing radio otherwise". And indeed, this short list is the tip of a much larger iceberg of influences, experiment, and thinking.
Here is more the information on the upcoming project from the writeup on the Wave Farm website below:
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ion and bird (a test transmission for the Atlantic flyway)
Radio is sky. It sings through the mouths of birds on their journeys who navigate by infrasound and listen to the aurora as the sound of the lightning.
Radio is terrestrial. It is in the rocks, in the earthquake prone and mountainous zones of Te Wai Pounamu the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand where the small birds called pīwauwau, or Rock wrens, speak a language that is almost too high for human hearing.
Migratory birds use magnetoreception, detecting the Earth’s magnetic field, as one of their tools to navigate on their long-distance journeys. With a frequency range of hearing considerably lower than human listening, certain species also orient through low-frequency infrasound, along coastline and oceanic landmarks that may serve as orientation beacons. ion and bird considers the links between this still indeterminate set of techniques within the embodied senses of birds, known since the nineteenth century and once mythicised as the “sixth sense,” and the sonic expression of bird songs and calls. In tuning in to less audible sky narratives and correspondences, it considers collaboration and communication with non-human species, intelligence beyond human perception, multispecies media histories, and radio as translation between worlds. As the VLF radio receiver converts the aurora's radio waves into a frequency audible to the human listener, and the crystal radio set harnesses tiny crystals of the minerals pyrite and galena within the simplest type of functional radio receiver, so may the navigational abilities of birds, emerging in part from magnetite-based receptors in beaks, or quantum sensing in avian eyes and ears, be understood to make audible a vibratory, embodied strata of forces that normally remains inaudible.
Using an expanded palette of electroacoustic and radiophonic instrumentation including bird-tracking telemetry systems used with migratory shorebirds on the Atlantic Flyway, and with an ear to more-than-human material histories of radio transmission, reception, and locality, ion and bird will tune into an aesthetic correspondence between bird vocalization and space weather, considering how the otherworldly chirps, crackles, and squeaks created by geomagnetic storms in the Earth’s ionosphere resemble the contact calls of migratory birds, and the phenomena referred to as the electromagnetic or auroral dawn chorus, sounds remarkably like birdsong.
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All aurora images by Campbell Walker.
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