Obscura Day, Dunedin

In response to its international call-out for guided tours around unique and fascinating collections, I volunteered to organise a New Zealand chapter of Obscura Day, a global event hosted by the online 'cabinet of curiosities' Atlas Obscura.

The event took the form of a tour around the back rooms, obscure cupboards, and dusty hallways of the Physics department of Otago University, Dunedin, and was co-hosted by teaching fellow Paul Yates. Not a public or official collection, the many fascinating antique teaching aids and unique machines in the Physics department's current possession were pulled out for the perusal of a select group.



These included the Beverley Clock, which runs on its own atmospheric pressure, and the Transmitter used by Professor Robert Jack in the first radio broadcast of a music programme in New Zealand, transmitted from the very same department in 1921.



These items would indeed make a incredible private museum, although sadly soon after the tour the collection was broken up and auctioned off, with the Robert Jack transmitter saved only at the eleventh hour from sale. This priceless piece of New Zealand radio history now resides in Dunedin in the collections of the Otago Settlers Museum.

thanks to adroit shutterbug Markus Gradwohl for many of these images. more photos of the tour can be found on Flickr, here











& here is an interview Zach Pontz (from CNN online) conducted with me via email about the event :

1) Are you from New Zealand? What do you do for a living? What's your age?

My name is Sally Ann McIntyre, and I am a 35 year old, Australian born independent curator, writer and broadcaster who has based herself in New Zealand since 1991. I have a family background in New Zealand, with both my parents growing up here. My current day job is teaching in the English and Media Studies department at Massey University in Wellington, and currently I am involved in a variety of projects and networks relating to radio, sound and media art. These often tie New Zealand networks with those based elsewhere. For example, with co-producer Gilbert May, a broadcaster with Radio One, in Dunedin, I commission NZ programmes for the Radia global radio network, which is a peer-to-peer community of radio stations (including Resonance FM in London, and Radio Zero in Lisbon) that facilitates artists and broadcasters making independent, experimental and exploratory radio, with a focus on radio as an art medium. These stations are based in local broadcast communities, and use internet file sharing to pass their radio programmes around the world, taking turns broadcasting each other's shows.

> 2) how'd you come across Atlas Obscura and become involved in Obscura Day?

I became aware of the Atlas Obscura initially via my fondness for its precursor website, the Athanaeus Kircher Society, and through keeping in touch with what was happening when the Kircher site went offline. I've been studying Museum Studies lately and both of these sites seem to me to be a really interesting reinvention of the Renaissance idea of the Wunderkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosities, which is a precursor to the modern idea of the Museum that attempted to be a total collection of the world's wonders, from one collector's perspective. This idea seemed obsolete for centuries afterwards - the hubris of attempting to collect the world, and the eclecticism and personalisation of this model being two things that didn't appeal to the increasingly specialised and discipline-oriented Museum theories and practices that sprang up after. But I'm deeply interested in how globalisation and the internet seem to be leading us toward a return of the Wunderkammer - this idea of Museum practice becoming virtual, that the objects are gone, but you can still log your collection as a series of virtual sites or items - and I love Atlas Obscura's take on the tourist trail as a series of wonders, with an eccentric, curiosity-driven and personal bent.

> 3) What are the personal benefits you gain from the website and how do you think you benefit from it as opposed to a regular book guide?

I think that the Atlas Obscura couldn't really exist in the way it does without the internet. It is a globalised way of looking at the local that really respects locality, but respects its distribution via the internet as a form of peer-to-peer communication device, which is really the way it should be used, ideally, and this is of course something which other forms of media - the one-to-many models – cannot do. This seems to me to be one thing that artist's projects lik Atlas Obscura can offer the world and its forms of communication right now - the sense of possibility of framing things differently, to expose forms of knowledge and ways of thinking that aren't part of the dominant way of looking and talking about the world.

> 4) How has the web and social media helped you communicate as pertains to the site?

I'm highly suspicious to some degree of social media, although i do use it. The accessibility of Obscura Day's call for organisers was brilliant, though, and seemed a very good match with the Physics Dept tour, which is why it was so great when Dylan seemed enthusiastic about my suggestion. I feel very privileged to be working with Atlas Obscura, but at the same time, am enjoying the peer-to-peer, user-driven feel of the site, and its inclusiveness in terms of being involved, with people who i have never physically talked to but sharemany ideas with, on this side of the world. A lot of my work is involved with various types of distance-collaborations with networks of radio makers around the world, and this seemed a natural extension of that process. It was also great to consider the physical manifestation of the Atlas Obscura's virtual space, and I was happy to be able to tick a box for that in NZ, as the Beverly Clock was alreadylisted on the site, and to integrate Atlas Obscura into my own local community, as well as exposing the wonders of this intriguing place to the rest of the world. This to me seems to be the big triumph of this way of working, and of the internet as a facilitatory for collaborative work.

> 5) Can you tell me a bit about your Obscura Day trip?

The Obscura Day trip I have organised is in Dunedin, which is a University town in the South Island of NZ, with a very interesting history of intellectual endeavour, and subcultural (musical, artistic, and DIY inventor) vitality. Paul Yates and I will be leading a select group around the hidden wonders of the Otago University Physics Department, where Paul teaches, and poking around in the history of the field as it has occurred in Dunedin. There are some incredible things there, the Beverly Clock, for example, which runs on atmospheric pressure, and is in many ways a precursory foray into contemporary ideas around environmentally sustainable mechanisms, and the transmitter built and used by Professor Robert Jack, who was an early radio pioneer in New Zealand. He used the transmitter in 1921 to stage the very first broadcast music programme in NZ history. Paul will also conduct a few science experiments and demonstrate other machines for the audience - so i'll be a real science-nerd affair!

port-o-port for radio futura

a live radio project programmed and presented by Sally Ann McIntyre for RADIO FUTURA, the official radio station of the FuturePlaces 2009 digital media festival, Porto, Portugal. Port-O-Port is a night of live radiophonic performances simulcast from the future, from the physical location of Chicks Hotel, Port Chalmers, New Zealand (8-10pm), to the previous morning in Portugal as a breakfast show (8-10am).

'Lines of Flight : a Sonic Community', inaugural NZ transmission to the Radia network, broadcast live at Enjoy gallery, Wellington

To celebrate the transmission of the initial NZ contribution to the international Radia radio art network, Enjoy Gallery kindly agreed to host a live Radio Cegeste MiniFM simulcast of the programme, to its gallery space in central Wellington.

This transmission, a documentary on the Lines of Flight festival, was narrowcast as it went to air at 9:30pm on Radio One 91FM in Dunedin, on the Radia programme on the station, which has already been playing the shows of other stations in the network, and is regularly hosted by my co-producer of this documentary, Gilbert May. This was followed by live performances by artists in and around the Enjoy Gallery space : Sam Hamilton and L A Lakers working together as ".,", Campbell Walker's Haulout Seal Orchestra, and Wellington based duo Discomedusae.

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.fm site here.

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 University, 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 'artisan' taken back to the drawing board to be re-transfigured 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, preferring 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 draughtsmanship 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 (2007) discusses Hall's incorporation of transparencies around the economics of art making, and 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 studio 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 counter-measured by its containment within the delineated 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 landscape 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 conceived 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 proclivities, 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 predecessors, 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.

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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"

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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.

Audible

I curated the audio art exhibition Audible for the Physics Room Contemporary Art Space. Artists were Rachel Shearer, Richard Francis, John McCallum, Phil Dadson, r a d i o q u a l i a, and Wendyhouse. A sound show without spatial or imagistic works, the 'listening booths' were especially comissioned for the exhibition, and designed by Valentin Tinc. Audible's works were also broadcast as a series of programmes for Radio New Zealand's Revolutions Per Minute programme, hosted by Matthew Leonard.

the physics room site has a record of the show here