TWIN SIGNALS AT SILVER STREAM (fragments of a landscape for specimens #50.766 & #50.767)

 

TWIN SIGNALS AT SILVER STREAM (FRAGMENTS OF A LANDSCAPE FOR SPECIMENS #50.766 & #50.767)

Drawing on the medium of radio’s ability to connect across time and distance, Twin signals at Silver Stream (fragments of a landscape for specimens #50.766 & #50.767) (2016-18) listens in to the global flows of colonial extractive economies via two minor silences present as traces in the landscape of contemporary Aotearoa/New Zealand. A new performance work and installation themed around erasure, the audible trace, extinction, colonial-era collecting, and silence, the piece utilises micro-radio transmission as a conduit for speculative forms of sonic repatriation.

Sceloglaux albifacies is an extinct New Zealand bird commonly known as the Whekau or Laughing Owl, once found nesting in rocky crevices in the remote landscapes of the South Island. In October 2016, one male (specimen #50.766) and one female (specimen #50.767) of this species were encountered in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien (National Museum of Natural History, Vienna), as part of the collections of Andreas Reischek, an Austrian taxidermist and self-taught naturalist who spent over a decade roaming New Zealand in the late nineteenth century, appropriating an immense collection of ethnographic and natural history artefacts, including a near-complete set of New Zealand birds, the largest of its kind to ever travel to Europe. A local footnote within the totalising and globalising drives of Reischek’s taxonomic catalogue, the pair of owls were collected by the naturalist at Silver Stream, Otago, a small river near Mosgiel, in 1884, thirty years before the species was declared officially extinct.

'the transit of venus, study for shortwave #1' included in Air / Ear: Radio & Nature, Argentina

"Air / Ear" was a transmitted installation of the work of 37 radio and sound artists into a cultural hall of a small town, San Justo, Santa Fe, in rural Argentina. The project was curated by Ruben Marino Tolosa.

the work I contributed, 'the transit of venus (study for shortwave 1)', was recorded in a blustery field on a miserable day on kapiti island, and it was played into the space on the 13th July 2012.

'SiB (sounds-in-between) Radio Gowanus' - narrowcast radio project at Cabinet Magazine gallery, Brooklyn

When radio cegeste was invited by free103point9-associated, US-based curator Maria Papadomanolaki to participate in her narrowcast installation project SiB (sounds-in-between) Radio Gowanus, a radio station operating from 16-19 March as a component of the exhibition Postcards from Gowanus (at Cabinet Magazine's gallery space, Brooklyn), mail-art was on my mind. As was considering the near-obsolete medium of the postcard, from the perspective of the history of distance-based communications and its associated media and artforms, as being less an object than a postal circuit, with conceptual links to other communicative mediums (eg. narrowcast radio, the internet), with a focus on its similar potential for one-to-one relationships between transmitter and receiver within networks of exchange. As John Held writes, in his historical analysis of mail-art in Annemarie Chandler and Norie Neumark's At A Distance : Precursors To Art and Activism on the Internet : "...the Mail Art community... was fixated not on the postal exchange, but rather on the aesthetics and distribution of communication".

As a sometime collector of haunted sounds and haunted images, my starting point in looking at postcards as communicative devices was to ignore any monumental, touristic or nationalistic aspects, the glossy, mass-produced surfaces, and turn to the flipsides, the 'b-sides', if you will, of this media, the scrawled notes and memos of which are not spaces of public, shared, already-agreed-upon meaning. (Re)reading the lost, potentially long dead messages of a collection of randomly selected postcards from the first half of last century as a form of broadcast, I searched through their voices as a way of activating the wider medium's poetics of the personal. This process was greatly helped, practically speaking, by my amateur-collector's interest in vernacular postcard photography and the micro production-scale of the Real Photo Postcard (RPPC), a form of community driven, folk-photographic exchange of small runs of images, which New York based writer Luc Sante refers to as a "ghost telegraph".

As Sante puts it in his recently published Folk Photography : The American Real Photo Postcard 1905-1930 : "The real-photo card was typically a product of the small town, particularly the small town isolated on the plains, whose newspaper did not have the capacity to reproduce half-tones, and whose lonely citizens felt an urgent need to communicate with absent friends, distant in those days even if they lived only three stops down the railroad line."

A second aspect to the project's development was also to consider the notion of a 'sonic postcard' in an entirely more literal and formal sense, by looking at the 78RPM phonographic postcard, a truly odd and fascinating footnote in the history of audio-visual media, briefly in existence in the early 20th Century. Some images can be found above, and here is their place within a timeline of sonic media on the Museum of Technology site. These sometimes twee, often awkward, highly ephemeral hybrid objects are spatially and temporally bounded transmitting devices, with their messages constrained to 'postcard size' spaces; they are also notable for the way their production and dissemination through postal networks exposes a shift in the cultural function of sound recording and playback media, in the early stages of their popular usage, from agency- or user-driven toward something more passive and receptive, with the audio component of these home-recorded, directly communicative 'real phono postcards' (as they were, early on, carrying messages from speaker to speaker, like an audio telegraph, or an answerphone message, before becoming a more symbolic transfer, via the transmission of a novelty pop jingle); tracing a similar process as can be seen contemporarily, perhaps, in the difference between sending a personalised email and an online social networking mass gesture, in the form's evolving from one-to-one communicative device toward its later standardisation and commodification of communication.

The brief lifespan of this hybrid medium is traced in an online history of Tucks 'talking postcards', which can be found here. It's interesting in particular to note the shift from Max Thomas's conception of their usage...

"On October 7th 1904 Max Thomas, manufacturer of phonographic machinery and requisites at Berlin, claimed a patent for Phonogram Cards, for which he also applied in the United Kingdom in August 1905: "It has been proposed to enable persons, each provided with a gramophone, to converse one with the other by sending through the post a postcard or lettercard composed of paper or celluloid which has been previously impressed by the recording device of the sender's instrument..."

... toward the highly successful, and slightly suspect, popularising of the short-lived medium by the Tuck company :

"Judging by the numbers of cards still turning up at flea markets, the only company that succeeded in manfacturing Gramophone Record Postcards commercially in large amounts seems to have been Raphael Tuck. The Raphael Tuck Company published their first Christmas greeting card in 1871, and the first picture postcard in 1894. The Tuck Company entered the American postcard market in 1900 and maintained an office in New York. American artists designed the postcards and they were printed in Germany and England and returned to the U.S. for sale. In 1929 Tuck went into the business of producing Gramophone Record Postcards. As all kinds of postcard designs (landscape view, greeting cards, art reproductions) turn up, and the pictures are largely obscured by the dark-brown opaque recording material, it is thus probably safe to assume that Tuck used obsolete old postcard stock as raw material for their product. The cards do look much older than 1929, and the designs hardly ever have any logical relation to the (electrically) recorded sound pasted upon them. Any recording could be pasted on any postcard – and, discographically speaking, noting details of the postcard designs would be irrelevant. The musical selections are exclusively public domain, no money was spent on music rights and royalties.[...] In the absence of recording ledgers or other factual evidence, it is difficult to identify the performers and to date the performances. The repertoire mostly consists of undateable standard repertoire pieces - folksongs, Christmas carols, marches, spoken greetings etc. No doubt this helped Tuck to avoid paying royalties"

The relation of the phonographic postcards to certain concerns in contemporary media art practices is an intriguing one. In a way, Tuck's clunky, imperfect, oddly charming, failed-acousmatic layering of a sonic communicative medium onto a visual one is formally, if accidently, in alignment with the strategies of 'SIB Radio Gowanus' itself, if this email description from curator Maria, of the non-synchronous layering process of spectatorship around the radiophonic / visual elements of the show, emphasising the slippage and gaps between media, and distance between participants, is anything to go by :

"They way it will be set up is as follows: Signal goes into the transmitter and then visitors will be given radio headsets to tune in as the wander around the gallery. Many of the exhibits have a very prominent visual aspect so I am pretty sure that this very intimate second layer of sounds will create interesting correlations. Apart from the imagined soundscapes sent by the translocal participants, the program will also feature field-recordings and sonic artworks produced using the local sonotopia."

As yet another broadcast project involving participation via casting over networked distance, this time not with the associated immediacy of live streaming, but instead through posting recorded audio through the internet file sharing service 'sendspace', to a gallery-based localised transmission on the other side of the world, i took the project, inevitably, as an opportunity to self-reflexively explore the poignant relation New Zealanders have to communicative distance, and the associated history of media within NZ culture. A focus on nostalgia and folk-related forms perhaps digs deeper into the networked surface, underlining that the 'translocal' nature of such contributions mostly works best when it doesn't elide the exploration of a specificity of location (or the history of that specificity) in its drive toward the 'transnational'.

I'm looking forward to the feedback, from a distance.

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this is what the organisers had to say, generally, about the show (from the blog, readable here) :

“Postcards from Gowanus” is a creative research program exploring a multitude of approaches to mapping the immediate vicinity surrounding Cabinet Magazine’s gallery space in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Drawing upon the psychogeographic tradition of critically and creatively engaging with public urban space, “Postcards from Gowanus” will examine the ways that mediation fundamentally alters our relationships to the environments in which we conduct our daily lives.

"Sib (Sounds-in-between) Radio Gowanus" is a narrowcast audio exhibit that will run in conjunction with the exhibition "Postcards from Gowanus". The program will host a series of sonic artworks ranging from field recordings, drones, micro-sound to ambient and electro-acoustic compositions by US and International artists, including works by the participants of the "Postcards from Gowanus" exhibition.

"Sib Radio Gowanus" essentially bridges the space between the inaudible, invisible (and yet real) ethereal and the physically present exhibits inside the gallery.

"Sib Radio Gowanus" is curated by Maria Papadomanolaki and is sponsored by free103point9. Participant Artists (so far): Tim Arndt, Giancarlo Bracchi, Peter Cusack, Penny Duff, Gabrielle Herbst, Amir Husac, Lina Lapelyte, Daniel Lopatin, manekinekod, Sally Ann McIntyre, murmer, Michelle Nagai, Naono, Dimitris Papadatos, Maria Papadomanolaki, Heidi Prevost & David Smith, Jase Rex, John Roach, Sawako, Janek Schaeffer, Jeremy D. Slater, Hans Tammen, Mark Peter Wright, Bryan Zimmerman.

"rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined...." : residual vistas : alexandra bridge, lake te anau, queenstown

residual vistas, imaginary landscapes: three undated hand coloured framed photographs found in opshop on St Andrews St, Dunedin, June 2009

"My working hypothesis was that any reasonably long memory - like every collection - is more structured than it seems at first. I think that a collection of photographs, taken apparently at random, or postcards, chosen on the spur of the moment, reaching a certain size, will start to draw a route, a map of the imaginary country inside us. By systematically looking through all these images, I am sure to discover behind the apparent disorder a secret map, like one of those treasure maps in stories about pirates."

- Chris Marker

environmental radio : radio d' Oiseaux

radio d'Oiseaux is a solar powered radio station for New Zealand native birds. Currently a fieldwork project, it will eventually manifest as series of radio cegeste site specific performances.

as an "environmental radio" and conceptual media project, radio d'Oiseaux looks at the links between transmission, locality and territory.

as a sound-site, the birdsong is a place of trauma and nostalgia in NZ, a situation helped along by its long association with public broadcasting. the public outcry a few years back at the intended removal of field recordings of native avian species, long a temporal marker for news reports on Radio New Zealand National, provided weighty evidence of its cultural place. The presence of bridsong as ‘soundmark’ can be percieved as displaying a memorialising or museological function. To replay already-extant sound has its own embedded politic - the loop itself is a ‘territorialised’ refrain in Deleuze’s terminology – here, Radio New Zealand's treatment of the sounds of birds is a paradigm reiterated in cultural terms by the replay of songs sent to radio stations by record companies. Instead, to deteritorialise this medium’s approach to art, we might learn from talking to the animals.

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“the plan was to put microphones in remote locations uninhabited by humans and to broadcast whatever might be happening out there; the sounds of wind and rain, the cries of birds and animals – all the uneventful events of the natural soundscape transmitted without editing into the hearts of the cities. It seemed to us that since man has been pumping his affairs into the natural soundscape, a little natural wisdom might be a useful antidote”.

“An excess of environmental noise produces sloppy listeners. We no longer listen to the radio, we overhear it. It stays on, shielding us from the coarseness of modern life. Radio has become the birdsong of the twentieth century, decorating the environment with “pretty””

- R. Murray Schafer

radiophonics and noise in the Cannan Downs ambient zone

radio cegeste played to a clearing of trees and a smattering of listeners at sundown on New Years day in the Ambient zone at the Cannan Downs music festival, experimenting with layering mobile, small scale lo-fi radiophonics with the sounds of distant large PA systems belting out electronic beats, the occasional sounds of wandering danceparty hedonists, and the area's intricate natural soundscape. this event involved the distribution of radio recievers to audience members, tactile performativity of the electromagnetic spectrum, the playback of urban and natural field recordings through 8 channel speakers and via Mini FM transmitter simultaneously, as well as added input from the guitar of Dunedin based noise improviser Toki Wilson, whose instrument functioned as sporadic aerial for the transmitter's fragile signal during the last half of the set.

navigation

'These are pure optical or sound situations in which the character does not know how to respond, abandoned spaces in which he ceases to experience and act so that he enters into flight, goes on a trip, vaguely indifferent to what happens to him, undecided as to what must be done.

I do not use pseudonyms, for there is already too much about a name which is fictional. Let’s begin with the premise that there can be no accurate signification, that to be named is to be injured. It takes a lot of movement to discover the limits of one’s own inability to speak. I am travelling by bus inside the partialities and mysteries of my name, through unfamiliar landscapes which suggest its boundlessness. The bus’s comfort is not a totality, a circle, I can’t rock myself fully convinced of my safety into its lulling momentum of dim lullabies, and sit poised on the edge of my seat inside this lack of physical trust, as i do inside the emptiness framed in each window’s great sky and noiseless insularity, and inside the feeling that, if I stayed like this: ears plugged with headphones, eyes with sunglasses, I could go for days without speaking to anyone. It is an ambiguous kind of peace, this muteness, this lack of engagement, this lack of pressure to articulate a position, to perform a self, to name the moment and divide it from its promise.

But he has gained an ability to see what he has lost in action or reaction; he SEES so that the viewer's problem becomes 'what is there to see in the image?' (and not 'what are we going to see in the next image?')

Description is a form of passive response, different from the decisions made when taking a photograph. The scenery out the windows is constantly changing: tough tufted landscapes hunkering low to the ground to shelter their slow moving, khaki coloured birds, the soft darkness of fern forests providing a backdrop for sudden shafts of light, single Nikau palms scattered uncannily, as if dropped from a great height, monumental along the roadside and smaller, doll-like, far out in surrounding paddocks. There are glimmers of musical refrains, film scenes that rise to this surface. I push them back down as I head toward a dimmer, flatter image. I have written, in order to remember : less than two per cent of the vegetation of the caterbury plains is as it was, before settlement… a jagged line of thought, curved in the softness of my notebook like a hook. I am attempting to learn how to see again, in these landscapes, to gaze inside their crust of images from the expanded place that I myself am, to know how to inhabit these places as though inside a series of moving rooms, to feel the promise of events, the effects of which are yet to be determined. An arbitrariness which when immersed is so total it includes all question of opposites. Let us continue the notion of ourselves into the idea of a spatial reading, a geography. This seeing is circular in the sense of an unwinding, and I rest momentarily inside its loop.

The situation no longer extends into action through the intermediary of affections. It is cut off from its extensions, it is now important only for itself, having absorbed all its affective intensities, all its active extensions.

This is no longer a sensory-motor situation, but a purely optical and sound situation, where the seer [*voyant*] has replaced the agent [*actant*]: a 'description'.' [1]

All I have momentarily shucked off, the clutched, poised claw of observation constantly re-grips, positions me in, brings me back to. The images are hybrids of anticipation and dread, memory and premonition, Ponsonby Road’s crowds erasing themselves into Lichfield Street’s emptiness, version after version, streets: the wet sheen of rain and the sharp, almost brutally metallic asphelt scent that seems to contain a thousand nights of abandonment. Then the arch of the English Trees above in a sky punctuated by the back-lit golden brown swirling arcs of crisp, papery falling leaves seen through the spokes of my bicycle wheel as it rests on the bank beside me like a companion animal.

As if I could ever leave these designations, these etchings pressed, these half-formed comforts. I speed through, giving away and finding again the focal point which I want and don’t want, which I find to be always moving with me. You cannot hide from your white cat, William Burroughs says, because your white cat hides with you…

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[1] Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 272

i will make time to write a response to a show

[a catalogue text written for an exhibition at SHOW, an artist-run project space in central Wellington run from 2004-2006 by Jenny Gillam and Eugene Hansen. SHOW was described as having "a focus on exhibiting projects by artists who have established experimental, conceptual and research-based practices". The instructions for the act of writing this particular text were that it must be completed while invigilating the gallery.]

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the durational boundedness suggested to me by the instructions on the wall is an intriguing one: ok, I set the following conditions: I will make time to write a site-specific, time-dependent response to a show in a space I do not know in Wellington, I will sit in the space for three hours, which is two and a half hours longer than the average duration of an exhibition’s spectatorship, and this response to an unknown room will take all of that time. The responsiveness will furthermore not be a blank slate as recent marginalia travels with me to inform my impressions of the space, the screen: this lack of editing-out and attention to textual genetics both a disinclination to state a single point of authorship and more selfishly a momentary docking point for my nomadism after strategic banalities entering Wellington by bus from New Plymouth:

paddock paddock paddock paddock field staked a generality: grey painted structures dominate a slowing: trees straighten in groups toward the contracting blue inserts in palimpsests of mist:

various manifest potentials suggest themselves, at the point where the arrangement of words and ideas and objects clicks and stutters in an unresolved immediacy. I am initially reminded, as I sit down behind the desk, of Adrian Piper’s stint as conceptual receptionist. Then I am not thinking but writing and find the initial nod toward description stakes its claim: I find myself inside an authorless blur poised where interdisciplinary and collaborative practices join the highly social space where the gallery rests. Process heightened by the voices of the exhibiting artists haunting the room, tossing around initial ideas for its title. This, one of two soundscapes layering their spatial spill against an open window’s distant street noises. The spill of light and sound into the space reminds that an open window can be a work. Another kind of window in a video loop, infinitely extending the puzzling of a Rubiks cube’s bounded set of strategies, points toward play which destabilizes a deferred correctness.

as description catches fire: there is no static point to the sunlight: real is green and full of charge: constellations: the clustered points of birds as the land flats drain through the greens and browns of my eye’s continuance of windows: of its failure to hold a moment as a growth ring: Palmerston North: cygnets in the Winter Garden.

here, museology is given an oblique spin, the white cube is set among other primary colours, in a toy like an interactive Mondrian, among the testing of a set of combinations which mimes creativity’s frustrations and possibilities. The thin clicking of the lines falling into momentary place is stretched to an uneasy, droning soundscape as I move around the space and notice the layering of detail, the dense inter-referentiality which a collaborative working methodology promotes. There is a visual echo of the toy grid in the equally vernacular grids of the blue and green carpet, set with its slightly off-centre red carpet square cut to floorplan: the filled space preserved as a picture of its previous emptiness, but red is, conversely, presence. The hot point of a larger space, reminding of the rooms which have been sectioned off to create its vantage point for art: a strategic viewing platform. A penciled floorplan on a wall adjacent contributes its sketchy maths to this thought. And a silver ruler’s numbers can’t be argued with, as they set up a relation to a shelf of foil-bound texts indented with typeset

a sky where stateless atomisations fail to rain: where water powder drifts. where colours force toward soft greys in regress: bird flocks’ chaotics: a grouping by invisible hollows: a loose ink-dipped wing like a way of saying never resting not yet: a hollow where breathing forms: having never folded into the form of a paper space, an arm’s crook, a tongue’s impress:

the formal stacking of a dog bed’s coloured cushions echoes a set of steps which lead to a viewing platform and down. There is no view, and nowhere to get to but here. The text in place of the mountainous vista is an email, another layer of documentation which, ostensibly functional, in its way re-states a methodology: “these new shifts are permanent, cheers”. A stack of atlases supports the table where I write, their compacted linear geographies the tectonic strata of a world concertinaed into text and sign. I recall, like a further contextual layering, the veinlike highways of Vivien Atkinson’s work in the Christmas show at Enjoy, seen yesterday

a day in stacks: the relation held by domes and folds: small teams of terms: monochrome spatial shelves: repetition incomplete, these loops collide in imperfect rings:

to spend this time sitting Show’s space is to find a partial view, above all it is to inhabit space as though inhabiting a question, and to filter that time through the only words that can be made to mean within the time allotted, I find my place as shifting, and what can be said as a concentrated note taking, and now these shifts are permanent, and my time is done, cheers.

Sally Ann McIntyre

1-4pm, Dec 15 2005

notes for a coastline

quite soon after meeting documentary filmmaker Zoe Roland on her move from Auckland to Christchurch, she commissioned me to write the script for a short experimental film she was working on, based around the 'bach' (holiday house) culture of the South Island seaside settlement of Gore Bay.

This film eventually became Notes for a Coastline, which drew on documentary, oral history, B&W 16mm shot on vintage Bolex cameras, found archival super-8 and experimental radiophony, layering a palimpsest of film and digital video footage, and audio interviews with community members with an essayistic monologue.

It had its inaugural screenings in the 2004 Homegrown programme of the NZ International Film Festivals (Wellington and Auckland), and a screening at the 5th biennial New Zealand Expanding Documentary Conference (2004). It went on to be included in the official selection of the Navarra International Documentary Film Festival (Spain) in 2005, as well as having a hometown showing that year at The Physics Room Contemporary Art Space

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"Notes for a Coastline” is an essayist documentary about cultural memory in regard to place; in this instance, Gore Bay, a beach settlement in the South Island of New Zealand. The narrative is a poetic exploration into the art of storytelling, which presents and muses upon the subject from a number of angles. It is “about” storytelling, a semi-scientific portrayal as well as a personal portrayal of the search of stories."

Director: Zoe Roland
Screenplay: Sally Ann McIntyre
Music: Ryan Smith
Sound: Zoe Roland, Sally Ann McIntyre, Nigel Bunn

Director of Photography: Nigel Bunn
Producer: Zoe Roland