My contribution to the exhibition involved a formal re-framing (and re-composing) of two ephemeral and temporal mini FM transmission works. Made a decade apart, these pieces converse together across time within the durational space of the exhibition, finding a shared focus on the ontology of transmission as a formal mode through which to attempt to grasp the wider slippage, liminality and material-structural changes of two disaster events. Ongoing questions come up for me when listening back to these works: how do we remember - or memorialise - traumatic events lived through, how to not reify them when attempting to grasp such intangible shifts? Can radio / transmission art modes work formally to mark these while honouring their ungraspability, to bring them into earshot, to frame them as an alternate archive of experience?
The first of the pieces is called a private swamp was where this tree grew feathers once: a radio memorial in four movements; it is from a set of works I was making in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when I first began operating the radio cegeste project, and was originally transmitted in January 2012. Alongside its companion pieces, modified radio memorial #1 (a fissure in the line of a public silence), After Bexley and dear friends who have died are all talking to me tonight / all at once, this work was an investigation of radio/transmission art's formal capacity as a mediator for the archive and a potential site-specific mode, and an interventional spatial response to a particular set of transformative events: the seismic force of the many thousands of earthquakes that, starting in 2010, ruptured Ōtautahi Christchurch, New Zealand, forever altering the city's architectural and social fabric. Several of these works were exhibited together as "Selected Christchurch Radio Memorials" in the show Simulcast at The Audio Foundation March 7-30, 2013. All were radio cegeste transmissions (i.e. mobile, small-radius mini-FM) that re-distributed collections of field recordings as narrowcast transmissions, intervening into architectural spaces, approaching small-scale transmission itself as a mediator of and structural intervention into the poetic and political architecture of the airwaves, and as a creator of archives.
'a private swamp.' was always the most private and ritualistic of these bounded re-castings. Functioning as a re-collection and re-transmission of the silences of four of my rented flats, some of which had been destroyed in the quakes, the transmission was not initially intended for a public outcome, and, remaining unrecorded, didn't really exist apart from the documentation (an essay and photographs) that anchored it in time as an event, and the set of four field recordings, each five minutes long, taken in the four flats, that were transmitted for the work. As such, the work for Seventh Gallery was re-composed from the fragmented remains of the 2011-12 transmission, much as that had been responding to the fragmented remains of the four houses themselves in 2011-12.
In the gallery I re-contextualised these recordings as a new transmission on the original frequency: radio cegeste's 104.5FM, alongside the essay I wrote about them, and several photographs taken of the site-specific transmission. The recordings could be tuned in within the space by anyone on their own device, although four small transistor radios also channelled the silences of the four flats. These were arranged in a small geometry, vaguely approximating a street map of the spaces themselves. One listener, on the opening night at Seventh Gallery, came up to me and said that he'd appreciated the "architectural" aspect of this arrangement within the transmission space of the four radios, as a conduit to the the way that the four rooms were entering another room in the present.
To re-visit this project now seems timely, if not conclusive. The quakes continue to reverberate through other life-events as a murmuring learning of site and substance that never seems quite complete, even as the topicality of media moves and forgets. Zita Joyce and Susan Ballard recently revisited the radio cegeste quake transmissions as a group in their 2022 essay "Seismic media: art and geological co-creation in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand," where they write of 'a private swamp’ and 'After Bexley':
"Sally McIntyre’s radio work as Radio Cegeste 104.5FM hovers in this space of memory, briefly populating physical spaces with a spectral past. Her transmitter translates the acoustic energy of silent sites into electromagnetic energy, radio waves that are shifting and imperfect, difficult to receive clearly, prone to interference, like memory itself. Two of McIntyre’s works have particular resonance in the space opened up by the earthquake, as they use electromagnetic energy to displace, translate and reinterpret the sounds and silences of post-Quake Christchurch; a mediation of the after effects of the seismic. In the personal performance memorial ‘A private swamp / was where this tree grew feathers once’, McIntyre used a simple mini FM transmitter to record the interior spaces of houses she had previously lived in. The recordings were ritualistically framed, exercises in close listening, observing the movements of a building, its acoustic qualities and the silence beyond it. On the 2nd of January 2012, she transmitted the sounds of those houses all at once into one of them – one chosen because after 41 aftershocks in the preceding 24 hours it felt most stable. McIntyre described the work as a ritual of releasing layers of memory, ghosts and the remains of these spaces that once sheltered her, one of which had been reduced to rubble. The work was a radio memorial, a ‘mobile to hang invisibly in the air’, and a process of reclaiming the earthquake experience. McIntyre layered spaces and the times of memory and recording, into a single long meditative moment: a moment that was full of the anticipation of its own end – the fear that another wave of seismic energy would finally bring down the walls around her. (...) By bringing together memory, place and seismicity, these artworks both engage with the effects of the earthquake and respect its impact. They engage with histories of the city, integrating the past into the post-quake present and future. They also reflect the new geological expertise of living in a seismic city. Earthquakes have happened here before, but not in this way: able to be mediated by new technologies of recording, storage and transmission."
I understand this period of radio cegeste's work as the systematic creation of a set of alternate archives: the recording as a library or index structure. Sean Cubitt writes of the archive that "in archive aesthetics we confront temporalities that extend backward and forward into times we experience both as sensory things here, now, in front of us, and also imaginatively as emissaries from the past to the future of which we form only one moment. To the extent that the aesthetic is also ethical (...) it ties us into networks of obligation which extend beyond the present moment into the deep past and the deep future."
Within such works and their small-scale reach, I was always trying to get to grips with the ways in which the durational nature of disasters within everyday lives sits in conflict with their role as spectacle within public media. The most obvious of these is the slow violence of climate change. But other disasters subtly announce themselves in ways that were also true of the 1600s plague and the 1918 flu epidemic. Even now, the Covid-19 pandemic that first emerged in 2020 is writing itself on bodies; both those that invisibly suffer from long covid, and those that walk the streets of inner city Melbourne, those in thrall to conspiratorial right wing mythologies, still protesting imaginary restrictions. As Joyce and Ballard go on to conclude of their investigations into creative works that have articulated a response to the earthquakes:
Working with the earthquakes and their media has taught us much about the amount of time it takes for stories to emerge. This tracing of artists’ relationships with the material geology of a city points to new geological and aesthetic understandings. Media and experiences are still evolving, as houses and public spaces are still being rebuilt. Many of the evocative images of the Lisbon earthquake were published 100 years after the event. Media and image cycles are now much faster, and as we have shown, many creative responses to Christchurch were immediate and dynamic. Rather than considering media as a reflective material, we have suggested that seismic media is the result of co-creation between the elemental energies of the earthquake, the creative energies of the artists and the community and social energies of the city.
Again, I return to Cubitt's thoughts on the archive, that it "is not an aesthetic category but an ethical one, in that we owe some obligation to the past and the future to maintain objects in the present. This obligation is either virtuous (it is right and fitting to recall the dead and pass on their memory) or deontological (we remember and transmit ancestral actions as we would wish ourselves and our works to be remembered and transmitted)." (Cubitt 2017)
The second of my works in the show was '–. .-.. .- –. ..- . / -.– . .- .-. (plague year)' (2021) a fifteen part micro-cast radio serial narrowcasting a daily poetic reworking of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), made during the pandemic lockdowns in Melbourne, as a commission for the State of Disaster public art project.
