Sterbende Welt redux: field notebook for a failed nature documentary (for Andreas Reischek), commission for Kunstradio (Austria)

Title: Sterbende Welt redux: field notebook for a failed nature documentary (for Andreas Reischek).

Artist: Sally Ann McIntyre

Duration: 50:00

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In Vienna I look at a being that can no longer look back. In the bird’s eye, plucked out and long discarded, is the past I cannot access. There is a world there, a way of sensing and moving in the dense green thickets of canopy of the 1880s, which are not a landscape, that do not conform to that Eurocentric convention of contemplative distance. There, the food trees the bird knew as landmarks, the ones it regularly visited within the small, constrained territories, walking through the forest in lines of kin, clambering through the thickly matted density of treetops, branch to seamless branch to branch, without any need for flight, without ever touching the ground. Those long-felled trees appear still, a series of bright points, a constellation sinking down in the memory of nothing now living. This too was song: a sonic tree-map of low muttered closeness, and all air, all earth, all distance subsumed in this closeness, the green density of the whispering canopy.  

The agency of seeing has been removed. In the public-facing specimens the glass eye, inserted in its place, seeing becomes depthless; a decorative wall, a placard. In this bird, rewritten as a study skin, no replacement eye has been offered, and the sockets are open to the tufted fronds of arsenic-infused cotton, above a beak tied with a small loop of hemp string. These substances are also infused with colonial histories, cotton and flax. They fill the body rendered placeless, without agency, present as a blind and glassy field, a placeholder for the farms that have replaced the forests with a blind and husklike dryness where the tall grasses wave in ripples and folds, grazed by the molars of sheep in quiet wind. The memory of forests is buried here, erased beneath the quiet amnesia of this useful landscape. The forests burned, to make way for pasture, are a layer of charcoal. An unspoken and illegible violence written as layers of ash in that geological strata is also present here, in the quiet body, the arsenical-soap stilled study skin, which is also a recording. It holds these sounds to itself as a witnessing, an archival sound-object, a phonography without playback. 

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Sterbende Welt redux: field notebook for a failed nature documentary (for Andreas Reischek) is a feature-length experimental radio documentary that engages conceptually and critically with the ornithological collections of Austrian taxidermist and self-taught naturalist Andreas Reischek (1845 –1902), housed in the Natural History Museum in Vienna. Reischek spent twelve years in Aotearoa New Zealand in the late nineteenth century, initially working for Julius von Haast at Canterbury Museum and then travelling the two main, and several offshore, islands to appropriate an immense collection of ethnographic and natural history artefacts, including a near-complete collection of New Zealand birds, the largest of its kind to ever travel to Europe. Many of the bird species Reischek collected, in sometimes vast numbers, went extinct during the same period. Confronting these aspects of Reischek’s collection, as a New Zealand sound artist and researcher, is also an engagment with the entwined histories of colonialism and ornithology, and a recognition of their inseperability. In this piece, the Natural History museum is approached as a space where the material remnants of extinction can be encountered, and the languages of colonial science can be listened to, in their inability to transmit knowledge of the relational ‘natural’ worlds of now-extinct creatures of which little behavioural information was recorded, apart from the violence of their deaths – this event itself then smoothed over in the birds’ re-writing as representative types within a taxonomic catalogue. Despite this, within the process enacted when making this work, the specimens are also approached as former members of complex multi-species ecosystems, even if this status is minimised by their current positioning as individualised specimens, potential portals to environments that Reischek himself encountered and recorded in his travelogues, and are now lost to time and history, erased by colonial-era land transformation from forest to farmland. The piece utilises sound and transmission methods to listen again to these inaudible histories and their many ecocides, ostensibly as forms of silenced and inaccessible knowledge, which are presented to the listener as acoustic silence through the media of field recording and transmission art. As such, they use sound recording and radio in a highly material, non-representational way. 

The work is composed in two sections, or movements. In the first section, we are located in the field in Aotearoa New Zealand. Two recordings of specimens of the extinct owl Sceloglaux albifacies (now re-classified as Ninox albifacies), the Whēkau or Laughing Owl, are taken in Vienna in October 2016 on standard industry field recording equipment and then physically transported back to the place in Aotearoa New Zealand, as written on their labels, where they were killed and collected by Reischek in 1884. A mini-FM transmission is then conducted at Silver Stream, in the Otago landscape, beside the banks of the river, re-releasing the owls’ silences, in a durational performance without human listeners. This radio memorial is itself re-recorded; it is then supplemented with a reading of two passages of Reischek’s text Sterbende Welt (1924), translated into English as Yesterdays in Maoriland (1930), at the same site. This performance speculates that perhaps even the smallest ecocides leave forms of violence as traces still present, if invisibly and inaudibly, in environments. For Judith Butler, at the scene of loss “it is myself that I find there at the site of the object, my absence.” This transmission work is posited as not merely an archival memento mori, but also a speculative commemoration which is an undoing or reversal, through the minor politics of micro-radio, where the listener follows the artist in not mirroring but reversing Reischek’s journey from Australasia to Europe, as well as the associated one-way geographic flow of colonial extractive economics. Here, potentially, nonhuman lives wiped out by such processes can become subject to experimental forms of memorialisation and sonic repatriation, and the dead silence of the static archive, in which nature is understood as a series of objects to be deciphered and catalogued, can be re-cast as a listening, in which we acknowledge the silence at the site of our own observation. (This performance has been previously exhibited elsewhere, in a different form, as Twin signals at Silver Stream (fragments of a landscape for specimens #50.766 and #50.767) (2016–18))

In the second movement, we are located in the Natural History Museum in Vienna. Specimens of three species of extinct New Zealand birds that Reischek collected in the late 19th century are heard as they are recorded in-situ in the museum. These are the huia (three female specimens: Reischek’s total collection of huia at the museum is four hundred and twenty four birds), the South-island kokako (five birds, including two pairs and a single male), and the South-island piopio (eight birds). The fourth recording, of twenty adult and juvenile individuals of the hihi or stitchbird, is the coda. The hihi went extinct on the mainland of Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1880s, with one remnant population surviving on Little Barrier Island, where Reischek took these specimens; at least 78 and up to 130 of the 181 extant 19th-century hihi specimens are Reischek’s. Taken together, these stark one-take recordings are akin to a field log, and replicate the bare accounts within Resichek’s own notebooks, which catalogue the names of species he collected in austere, crossed-out lists. In terms of field recording practice, this project was procedural in a simple way. I treated it as one would a set of nature recordings, as part of a field research exercise, introducing the species and recording a durational “excerpt.” I also think of these recordings as re-collections, in both senses, their accumulation a kind of counter-archival practice. Ostensibly recordings of nothing (dead birds can’t make a sound), they also document what is audible in the Viennese site in 2016: firstly, they become a documentation of the sounds of the everyday life of the museum, where these birds are still housed in frozen animation as study skins over a century after their deaths. The absence of sound of a living bird becomes the presence of the sounds of museum staff chatting, the office photocopier, chairs scraping, myself talking and rustling around in boxes as I pick up the birds and try to decipher the copperplate script on century-old labels, overwhelmed by the experience and sometimes getting the details wrong, the sound of my museum-issue pencil scribbling notes. Secondly, the recordings are documentary evidence of the investigative forensics of discovering these birds in the present era, ostensibly solely through the inscrutable classificatory information on their labels, but also with vivid and overwhelming awareness of their presence, not as taxonomical representatives of their species safely housed behind glass, but as once-living beings that are also cultural taonga to Aotearoa (indeed, many taonga within Reischek’s collection of stolen ethnographic artefacts have recently been repatriated, after almost a century of negotiations, by Maori communities). Dugal McKinnon wrote about this friction between the silence of extinction and the presence of the everyday in my work as "dead silence," (when Cageian silence assumes an ecological, ethical dimension). 

There is an added material-conceptual dimension to Sterbende Welt redux: field notebook for a failed nature documentary (for Andreas Reischek) in terms of its positioning the site-specificity of radio art. In the first movement, the two owl silences are transmitted on small-radius Mini-FM back to the site of their collection on two frequencies corresponding to those of the National radio stations of Austria and New Zealand, layering the museum recordings with the sounds of the river, which is then itself recorded; this work also engages further with the site-specificity of the airwaves in its broadcast on Kunstradio over the Austrian public broadcaster Österreichischer Rundfunk, setting the presences of five New Zealand birds into flight through the medium of transmission to engage in a ghostly manner with Andreas Reischek’s legacy – including his son’s (1892-1965) important role in the early years of Austrian radio, beginning in 1924, which coincided with his editing and publishing (and substantial embellishing or re-writing in the Adventure-story genre) of his father’s journals, first as Sterbende Welt (1924) and in English translation as Yesterdays in Maoriland (1930). It is from the latter that the text read out in the first section is exerpted.

Through Sterbende Welt redux, and other projects since 2010 that have similarly combined research into the museum and the field, I have come to understand the museum itself as a giant recording device - within it living things formerly functioning as nodes in giant interconnected webs of community and communication, including forms of sonic signalling from which humans might have initially learned their own capacity for communicative language, become reified with the taxonomical classification given them, so imprinted with recordings of imperial arrogance that they can no longer be said to retain their original function. They become specimens and enter into another ontological order of objects – through the transformations of such reification they become partly their own memorials and partly a zombified material strata, a form of noise or silence. Unlike the interpretive museum exhibits in Aotearoa that have tried to re-create the sounds of these extinct birds, I appreciate the fact that the public galleries at NHM Vienna have no sound at all, not one interactive exhibit; instead the retaining of a complete time capsule of Victorian scientific process means it is a site to research such histories of without the added layer of contemporary filters of interpretation. Out the back, in the study skin cabinets, it’s both a wonder of scientific classification, and a horrific mausoleum, and completely unapologetic about that. It's interesting to imagine what the historic "New Zealand nature" that Reischek heard can "sound like" here. I invite the listeners of this documentary to fail with me in doing so. 

Sally Ann McIntyre, nipaluna/Hobart, lutruwita/Tasmania, January 2024.

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Sterbende Welt redux: field notebook for a failed nature documentary (for Andreas Reischek) is a feature documentary and work of radio art commissioned for Kunstradio and first broadcast on the 14th January 2024.

Recording, editing, production: Sally Ann McIntyre
Thanks to: Elisabeth Zimmerman, Anita Gamauf, Markus Gradwohl

Permalink to the work on the Kunstradio site is here 

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.

radio 33, broadcasting from Domain House, Hobart, as part of the Hobiennale, 3-12 November, 2017.

When operated in politically strategic ways, the contemporary aesthetic use of modernist technologies, like radio, can function as an effective localised antidote to a global technological homogeneity, one that ultimately flattens the field to a narrow bandwidth of expressive possibilities, within a homogenised focus on commercial interests.

Joining other experimental and artist-run stations I know which are using the constraints of bounded technological space to critically address this set of conditions, is a small North Hobart micro-cast radio project called Radio 33, which specifically re-imagines radio, through the operation of month-long artist projects put into physical broadcast space as small scale, low power FM transmissions, as a potentially emancipatory medium, where communities can be built and the like-minded can connect with each other.

Radio 33's particular take on the minor and amateur literature of the airwaves is historicised within its careful listening to gendered histories of radio space, hearing them - and celebrating them - as a medium holding an ongoing structural continuum of self-identified female/non-binary voices audible since the medium's earliest days.

With core reference to the U.S. radio amateur/ham designation YL, instituted in 1920 by the American Radio League to designate a female operator, and amateur operator Clara Reger's subsequent YL33 code, coined especially for women communicating with other women, a salutation "considered sacred by female hams", Radio 33 recognises these historic women as kin and forebears, as well as the ongoing work it has taken, in the past and the present, for such voices to claim audible space, as - and for - themselves.

Tricky Walsh, the artist behind Radio 33, has been experimenting with the artistic use of radio in their work since 2011, and started this project at the beginning of 2017 as a radio station programmed as a gallery space for month-long artist projects: "I see it as less of a "program" than a virtual space anyone could 'walk' into and experience a sound work. just think of it as a gallery space made out of radio waves".

I was lucky enough to be invited by Tricky to be one of four 'ephemeral residents' in this on-air gallery space for the duration of the inaugural Hobiennale Arts Festival, from 3-12 November, in the beautiful upstairs attic rooms of Domain House in Hobart. Radio 33 broadcast a compilation of my extant past and present sound and radio art works into this listening space, and after this first excursion into the possibilities, I very much look forward to developing new work for - and with - Radio 33 in the near future. 

thanks to Tricky, also, for the photographs and the text.

'three variations on a study for a data deficient species (grey ghost transmission)' on air at Radiophrenia 87.9FM, Glasgow

I have a radio art piece included in the impressively extensive schedule of radiophonic experiment coming up in the programming of radiophrenia 2017, a temporary project station for radio art, broadcasting 24 hours a day from 6 - 19 November, out of Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts. This solid fortnight of radio, sound, and transmission art (from friends, peers and many new names), together promises to "promote radio as an art form, encouraging challenging and radical new approaches to the medium."

'gull lines, at a slope of conduction (for waiorua shoreline, violin and shortwave)' in TIK festival of ecological media arts, Brussels

gull lines, at a slope of conduction (for waiorua shoreline, violin and shortwave) was recorded during early May on Kapiti, as a contribution to the Time Inventors Kabinet (TIK) festival of ecological media arts (11 - 13 May 2012) in Brussels. It emerges from my current research into the area of Kapiti Island, supported by Creative New Zealand and the New Zealand Department of Conservation.

Both as a contribution to this festival and within the wider parameters of my current project, the piece extends the sounds of a remote place to listeners in the heart of an urban sphere across the other side of the world, taking as part-provocation R. Murray Schafer and Bruce Davis's concept for a 'wilderness radio' : “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”. (R Murray Schafer, 'Radical Radio' in 'Sound by Artists', ed. D. Lander & M. Lexier, 1990)

(It should of course be pointed out that Kapiti is in fact inhabited, albeit sparsely, as many such places are).

'Transmission Arts : Artists & Airwaves', edited by Galen Joseph-Hunter of free103point9, published by PAJ

Radio Cegeste's series of programmes that listens to the links between radio and birdsong, Radio d'Oiseaux, has been included as one of 150 historic and contemporary artist projects in the book Transmission Arts : Artists & Airwaves edited by Galen Joseph-Hunter with Penny Duff and Maria Papadomanolaki, of New York state Transmission Arts organisation free103point9.

'transfiguration for winter light and folded time' narrowcast at Rice & Beans

"....my body [for example] lives in as many spaces as the society, the group or the collectivity have formed; the Euclidian house, the street and its network, the open and closed garden, the church or the enclosed spaces of the sacred, the school and its spatial varieties containing fixed points, and the complex ensemble of flow-charts, those of language, of the factory, of the family of the political party and so forth."

"...all times converge in this temporary knot: the drift of entropy or the irreversible thermal flow, wear and ageing, the exhaustion of initial redundancy, time which turns back on feedback rings or the quasi-stability of eddies...."
-Michel Serres

a radio programme transmitted at midday on monday 30th May, transfiguration for winter light and folded time was staged for one hour as a audio contribution to the exhibition Money We Can't Use Here, by Japanese-Dunedin artist Motoko Kikkawa.

Motoko's show, currently enjoying its first week of slow material accumulation at recently established Dunedin artist-run space Rice and Beans, comprises an artist book, delicate sculptural works (an exquisite Elizabethan collar made of short-grain rice that references paper cutting), digital prints, and various performative interventions. Sparse and waywardly tuned, the show foregrounds the space's quietness and light in this final (pre)wintry week of May, with live works involving various performers inhabiting the space, often populating it briefly with sonic interventions. These performative inhabitations and nomadisms have included guestings by Matthew Ward and Richard Scowen, as well as the occasional appearance by Kikkawa herself on violin.

The formal structure for transfiguration for winter light and folded time involved temporal mirroring, via a simple psychogeographic folding and compacting of an hour of the day into the one following it. The programme's temporal backbone was the re-transmission of a blankly durational recording of my movements while walking across the city of Dunedin from my house to the second hand bookstore where I work, this soft surveillance continuing during the walk from this location across town to the gallery space, the recording progressing from 11am until 12 noon, at which time the performance at the gallery began, sonic reception at this point transforming (as seamlessly as possible) into transmission.

I kept recording while setting up for the show, unfolding an out of date municipal map of Dunedin and surrounding districts and placing this on the beautiful bare wood of the gallery floorboards. I knelt on this map, after removing my shoes, and slowly surrounded myself with an infrastructure of radio receivers. This radiophonic cityscape was tuned progressively into the field recording I had just made, which became audible alongside the usual mini FM residue of etheric bleed and chaneling-into-audibility of the airwaves of the space itself, a soundscape occasionally layered at points with recordings of solo violin done in the previous month.

The sound was transmitted to the space using a solar panel connected to my Mini FM transmitter, the latter in this way directly powered by the strong white winter New Zealand light streaming through the gallery windows. At a certain point near the concluding stages of the hour, an analogue vocal mapping of street and place names, read aloud as-written on the grounded map, supplemented the transmission, further scoring a body-sized poetics of place live to the gallery space.

As a compositional framework, this live site-specific transmission, or radio show, was bolstered by the additive improvisational accompaniment of Motoko Kikkawa on violin and amplified chip packet, as well as Matthew Ward and Richard Scowen on various instruments.

'Species of Spaces 0:02 : soundtracks for the city/Melbourne tram conglomerate' on Frequency Oz, hosted by NAISA radio for the Deep Wireless Festival

my piece Species of Spaces 0:02 – soundtracks for the city / Melbourne tram conglomerate has been selected for inclusion in Frequency Oz, a thematic exhibition of sonic media art and radio art by Australian artists, part of a programme presented and produced by Yanna Black, curated by Colin Black, and hosted by NAISA (New Adventures in Sound Art) radio for the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio & Transmission Art.

Deep Wireless is a Toronto-based month-long festival, running in 2011 from April 30 - May 31. It includes performances, installations, radio broadcasts of commissioned works, and the Radio Without Boundaries Conference. Frequency Oz's stated wider aims as a project are to act as "a nexus for supporting new and innovative sonic media art, and building on the legacy of Australian radio art". They also maintain an online research resource for Australian radio art history.

The work by radio cegeste included in Frequency Oz's 2011 programme is an experimental documentary edited from field recordings and recordings of performances gathered during my time as one of 11 artists participating in the keynote project of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, a residency and "large scale collaborative live artwork" called Visible City which ran from 22 September - 10 October, 2010.

The initial work of the Visible City programme, in which "a live collaborative radio work for a transient audience" was created on Melbourne's number 57 tram by radio cegeste as a curatorial project involving the collation and transmission of audio and field recordings from the home cities of the 10 other Visible City participants, occured at the Visible City launch on Wednesday 22 Sept 2010, followed by other transmissions during the residency. More can be seen at the Melbourne Fringe website.

some Visible City video documentation of one of these performances :

Visible City - Species Of Spaces from Martyn Coutts on Vimeo.

The entire programme for the fourth week of Frequency Oz, as well as my writeup for the piece, appeared as follows :

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Week Four, 23 - 31 May 2011 (duration 59:30)

New Australian works submitted to Frequency Oz responding to the theme of “transmission, dislocation, space and place” and how this theme relates to them as Australians :

1. Daniel Blinkhorn - Built Environment
   

2. Automating - DePreston - Dedicated to Ambulance Victoria
   

3. Radio Cegeste (a.k.a. Sally Ann McIntyre) - Species of Spaces 0:02 – soundtracks for the city / Melbourne tram conglomerate
   

4. Garth Paine - Present in the Landscape
   

5. Sam Gillies - Dichotomy:Assembly
   

6. Pamela Lee Brenner and Johannes Muljana - Overhead, By the Way
   

7. Jordan Lacey - I'm Really Conscious Of Myself Talking Here

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Species of Spaces 0:02 – soundtracks for the city / Melbourne tram conglomerate

Radio Cegeste (a.k.a. Sally Ann McIntyre)

In Melbourne during October 2010 on a collaborative residency for live art called Visible City, the keynote project of that year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival, I spent much of my time roaming around on public trams, foraging in record stores and libraries, and recording the sound of the city I was living in, a sustained private psychogeography which served as an investigation of an Audible City, which, via its various outcomes in small public art projects, was my response to the residency’s daily challenges.

Despite growing up three hours east of Melbourne, the concentrated attentive focus on the city which the residency allowed meant this was the first time I had got to grips with the place through its sonic details for some time. The sonic textures of the inner city’s life, poised as it was between a historically unprecedented draw in the local football league’s final match and the re-play outcome the week after, something that had left the city on some level of standstill, like a held breath within the weave of its tribalisms and rivalries, seemed richly interpolated with mythologies, accents, the tension between older ways of life and newer, globalised mall culture.

My public art works during the Visible City residency included creating Mini FM stations for localised situations and spaces in response to my wandering research, such as narrowcasting a series of field recordings collected on inner city public transport back into the tram system via distributed radios, installing a dawn chorus of radiophonic native Australian birdsong in an inner city arcade in the week of the 70th anniversary of Walter Benjamin’s death, and the project ‘soundtracks for the city’, a live radio show and film soundtrack which involved sitting on a chair in a public space (in this case the corner of Elizabeth and Little Collins Streets in the Melbourne CBD, and within the former Greville Botanical Gardens, now Grattan Gardens) with a portable record player and a stack of library records thrown away from the channel 10 TV archives (with such titles as “Stranger in the City : Alienation”), over-dramatically responding to an imagined narrative crafted from the movements of passers by for a two hour period, with appropriate feedback from the city’s population of viewer/listeners (this work was not a one-to-many, but many-to-one transmission).

This piece for Deep Wireless Toronto is a re-situating of some of the audible elements of this series of works, within a new transmission work for Mini FM recorded in Dunedin, New Zealand in April 2011. As a memory space, Melbourne appears here as fleeting and fractured, its narratives disconnected, fragmented and subtle at turns. In such a bewilderingly rich environment of signs, one gets the impression that the smallest spheres of holding are the only ones really trustworthy: either the cloistered private spaces of the headphone-listening space, where people build private rooms in public space via the delineation of their own sound-worlds, or that of intimate spaces of private conversation, whether it be between two strangers on a tram of different nationalities and generations, or an old regular being welcomed into an Italian café that has been in the same site for four generations. Here, on the level of city life, grand narratives of romantic nationalism seem as pompous, outdated and misrepresentative as public sculpture which tries to speak “for” a population so diverse and decentred. People sing their own songs on the trams of Melbourne, in exchange for a dollar or two.

The medium of radio, with its potential to site sound in small bounded transmission spaces (in the case of Mini-FM) and in the immaterial materiality of the ether, is an apt exploratory tool when thinking about sound recording, memory and place. This experimental documentary eschews a centralized narrator in favour of letting the city ‘speak for itself’, reflecting and re-posing the shifting, ephemeral fabric of the city’s sounds, where we listen in daily to many such fragmented narratives and imperfect attention-spaces, quiet whispers and clamours to be heard. The specificities of the spaces in which this work’s original recordings move, layered together in a field of interference, imperfect recall and re-transmitted siting within the present, become analogue for my own dislocation from Australia as an emigrant whose cultural identity is informed by spending half my life living in, and identifying with the cultures of, New Zealand. For me, asking the question(s) ‘what is it to be Australian’ from such an observational, yet immersed perspective seems the gateway to a potent set of trajectories.

radio cegeste at records records, dunedin

The bugler sent a call of high romance— “Lights out! Lights out!” to the deserted square. On the thin brazen notes he threw a prayer

- Robert Graves, 'The Last Post'

Records Records is an iconic second hand record store in Dunedin, New Zealand. An institution in the city, it was started in the 1970s by Roi Colbert, in a little space located in Stuart St, just off the central Octagon, where in the crucial decades of the 80s and 90s it filtered the ebbs and flows of the financial realities vs. the listening and collecting habits of various illustrious locals, while acting as an information and networking hub for Dunedin's sound culture. Recently, Roi sold up and the shop shifted to new premises over on Princes Street. Current owner Pat Faigan has continued the legacy and hosted many live gigs in the store, but, in an era when running independent record stores is a difficult proposition at best, Pat will be retiring from the record selling business at the end of October.

apart from a long history buying records from the shop, I spent a lot of time in the neighbourhood last summer, working right next to the current RR store at second hand bookstore Raven Books.

so, on Friday 22nd October, radio cegeste opportunistically crashed the end of someone else's gig upon finding out it was the 2nd to last one the store would host, and with half a day's notice, transmitted a site-specific soundscape at 8:30pm as a performative radio programme for RR, using the things I had at hand - namely, mini FM transmitter, 13 small radios, some of my 'bowed airwaves' violin tracks and field recordings transmitted via the above, alongside manipulation of room-sensitive radiophonic noise interference.

I also used a portable battery powered record player with material sourced from the shop that very afternoon (incl. an incredible spoken word 1-off private pressing of a british family recording an audio christmas greeting 'letter' to Grandma - the latter presumably located in NZ, which Pat sold me for a dollar), and some 78s found by a friend at the Dunedin dump (incl. a broken, skipping, cracked HMV 78rpm recording of the band of H.M. Coldstream Guards' rendition of ceremonial military standards Evening Hymn and The Last Post).

There were also some musical birdsong cards from the Otago Museum i'd bought that day, coupled with Radio NZ birdsong recordings on 45rpm which i'd picked up from the Blue Oyster Gallery after their inclusion in the Media Povera show. The lack of working overhead lights in the shop added to the huddled and intimate nature of the resulting peripheral, floor-based, no-mains-power performance for receivers and transmitter alike.

my post-Melbourne nomadisms have included, as is usual at some point in such Dunedin interludes, a temporary docking-point at None studios, and renewed engagement with the deep-listening silences and ghost-terrain of Dunedin has been balanced with a grateful nod toward the ongoing industrious activities and artistic vitality of the city's ever-shifting living communities.

Tonight's gig saw long term None residents Motoko (violin, voice) and Justin (percussion, voice) playing together as a duo they call The Surgical Department for this Records Records (second to) last post, as well. Also on the bill were local groups Communist Rainbow Relationship and QTPI.

as if this wasn't enough I cancelled my plan to see Robert Scott play at Chicks Hotel in favour of continuing the evening's energetic bust of engagement in event-based audio exploration by going back to None immediately after the gig to record a duo set with percussionist Lee Noyes.

This was more minimal, based on radiophonic feedback, and involved manipulating 'radios talking to each other' in theremin-like accompaniment to Lee's spacious and subtle acoustic manipulations of a drum, a wire, and various strings. Lee has since tidied this up and is treating it as a potential release, pending acceptance.

RIP, Records Records. thanks to Arron Clark who shot and edited the following video montage of the RR in-store proceedings...

Radio d’Oiseaux : attempts at the non-linearity of a nest 1 & 2 at the Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin

'attempts at the non linearity of a nest' comprised two works. both were exhibited as part of the group show Media Povera, at the Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin, 13 July - 7 August, 2010.

'attempts at the non linearity of a nest #1' was a live sound piece recorded in the office of the Blue Oyster gallery, direct from radio transmitter to the gallery’s telephone answering machine, to be heard only by callers to the gallery when no-one was present to pick up the phone, and erased without being recorded anywhere else, at the conclusion of the show. this work comprised me re-vocalising the only extant recording of a Huia (Heteralocha acutirostris), the original sound recording of which is itself not a recording of the actual bird, which became extinct before sound recording technologies were widely available, but a human imitation of the bird (or, if you like, a playback by an organic/mnemonic recording device) by a Maori guide who remembered the song from his childhood. I also recorded myself singing and playing on the violin The Huia Song (a Maori Lament), a NZ popular song written by O. M. Shakespeare in 1932. Playing these recordings back in a live performative manner through the Radio Cegeste transmitter, direct to the blank 'audience' of the gallery telephone, the recordings were fragmented and augmented by the naturally occurring electromagnetic and radiophonic noise to be found in the space, to produce a soundscape that seemed lost in time, evocatively filtered by traces of other signals, erasure, and interference.

'Nesting' this work in the gallery's telephone re-imagined the 'phone - normally a pragmatic, humdrum part of the gallery operations, an invisible sonic conduit of its office - as a small gallery space, the work's housing of itself in a part of the Blue Oyster's 'corpus' not normally open to artworks had a slightly parasitic quality which drew out the 'cuckoo' thematic of the work. It also opened up the real-time poetics of the telephonic space. In a time when 'land lines' are becoming less common as they are replaced by wireless communication devices, we arguably have just as much opportunity to reflect on the materiality and usage of older telecommunications technologies as we do newer ones (a situation which is mirrored by the situation of radio : I was not tempted here, for example, to make this work as an application for iPhone, in the same way as I prefer to use a home-soldered analogue Mini FM transmitter rather than make a digital podcast radio show), as a framework with potential to re-invest itself with imaginative or artistic possibility, retro-fitting the intimation of wonder that Marcel Proust (who himself used to listen to opera and theatre live from Paris over the 'phone) described as waning so quickly in the early 20th Century, when he wrote about the telephone in 1907 as "a supernatural instrument before whose miracle we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream." In the development of this work, where two older communications technologies set up a listener-speaker relationship, I was also reminded of an interview with Peter Jefferies in which the musician talks about artistic inspiration as a 'tuning in' to possibility : "The last line on the last song on the "Last Great Challenge in a Dull World" goes, "I'm a tape recorder talking to a telephone line, listening." He continues : "I don't know where the songs come from. They come from somewhere. I don't feel that I write them per se. I feel like a radio set who just happens to be tuned in some kind of of way that I pick this stuff up." I didn't know where the songs came from either, suffice to say that the after-hours caller to the Blue Oyster for the duration of the exhibition Media Povera might be lucky enough to hear, instead of the usual message detailing the gallery's hours and the show's title and duration, a supernatural answering machine message transmitted from an extinct bird.



The Huia Song
A Maori Lament

The pohutukawa trees,
Wave on the morning breeze,
The bellbird is carolling,
The wild duck is on the wing,
But you, but you have gone!

Ah! see how the silver fern,
And once laughing waters yearn,
And there 'neath the skies soft blue,
Tui notes they faulter too,
Pining, pining for you!

Sacred Huia, none can trace,
Your far distant dwelling place,
Kauri trees night watches keep,
We can only grieve and weep,
Seeking, seeking in vain!

Te Pohutakawa e
E mihia nei e te matangi
Koe komako e hotu nei
Koe parera, e tangi ra
Mo huia ka ngaro nei

Nga wao o Tane tenei
Nga uri o Tangaroa
O taina me te iwi
Kei te koingo ki a koe e
Huia ka ngaro nei koe

E te manu tapu nui
E te kura rangatira
Kei hea koe e kimihia nei
E tangihia nei e matou E Huia hoki mai ra.



'attempts at the non linearity of a nest #2' had, in contrast, a physical presence in the gallery space, but contained its own set of gaps and erasures, mainly based around ideas of the found object, memory, recording technologies, representations of nature, and the post-Victorian technologised paranormal. The work comprised a found bird’s nest - which I chanced upon one day lying in the middle of a path in the Christchurch Botanical Gardens and had kept ever since - containing an unwound spool of magnetic audio tape, a response to specimens of nests I had recently seen in the endemic ornithology collections of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, in particular a nest which seemed to be lined with a shiny brown material which, as the curator of birds pointed out to me, looked remarkably like audio tape. Fascinated, I recorded the sound of this empty nest in a subsequent visit in the back-room storage areas of the ornithological collection of the Museum using the Paranormal Research method of Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP), then transferred it to blank audio tape, and placed the audio tape in the Botanical Gardens nest. The Mise en Abyme aspect of this work seemed to hint at an infinite regress of emptinesses, a 'cuckoo' of blank potential around which the 'host' nest and its silence wound a careful cradle of tiny, perfectly arranged sticks and moss, lined with soft feathers.

future plans are to place this (currently unplayed) audio tape, still in its nest, outdoors in a tree, for a set period of time, and subsequently make a work ('attempts at the non-linearity of a nest #3') with the results, whatever the condition of the unspooled, and as such sensitive and brittle, tape (exposed to the elements, decayed, or missing). i figure this proposed aleatory experiment in exposed natural-material sound, whose material has additional status as a EVP recording, might potentially result in a complex imprinting of myriad traces, becoming a potential reversal of the moment of technological/spiritual encounter by Swedish painter, archaeologist and former opera singer Friedrich Jurgensen on June 12, 1959, when visiting his country house one summer.

Jurgensen brought along his tape recorder, to record the singing of wild birds (especially the chaffinch, of which he was evidently quite fond). Later when listening back to the tape he "heard a wild noise, vibrating like a storm, where you could only remotely hear the chirping of the birds. My first thought was that maybe some of the tubes had been damaged. In spite of this I switched on the machine again and let the tape roll. Again I heard this peculiar noise and the distant chirping. Then I heard a trumpet solo, a kind of signal for attention. Stunned I continued to listen when suddenly a man's voice began to speak in Norwegian. Even though the voice was quite low I could clearly hear and understand the words. The man spoke about 'nightly bird voices' and I percieved a row of piping, splashing and rattling sounds. Suddenly the choir of birds and the vibrating noise stopped. In the next moment the chirping of a chaffinch was heard and you could hear the tits singing at a distance - the machine worked perfectly!"

Jurgensen continued after this incident to investigate the phenomenon, which he came to believe was "from the other side", i.e. the voices he was recording were the voices of the dead. Over the years, he made thousands of recordings of these voices, ranging from his family and friends to, more strikingly, people such as Vincent Van Gogh and Himmler's masseur. Jurgensen believed he heard the voice of his dead mother on one such tape, an experience he described as life-changing : "I was outside with a tape recorder, recording bird songs. When I listen through the tape, a voice was heard to say "Friedel, can you hear me. It's mammy..." It was my dead mother's voice. 'Friedel' was her special nickname for me."

The recordings in Jurgensen's archive are claimed to be the world's first recordings of Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP), the paranormal appearance of strange voices on magnetic tape. In this he was very close to earlier inventors and users of technologies of transmission : both Guglielmo Marconi and Thomas Edison believed in the possibility of using new recording devices to contact the dead, and Sir William Crooks, President of the Royal Society and inventor of the cathode ray tube, and Sir Oliver Lodge, one of the leading contributors to radio technology, believed the other world to be a wavelength into which we pass when we die.

The questions I often ask when thinking of Jurgenson's experiments are many : was the recording of his mother really just an imperfectly erased recording from former times? Does that still mean it was a transmission from the other side of the reproductive-technological time divide, anyway? And : how did he know that the birds he was listening to were not voices of the dead, as well? While I think about this further, the recorded silence of an empty nest will at some point take its chances in my garden, perhaps in the coming spring, where I am hoping some live birds might be encouraged to interact with it, too.

Until then the last word on the subject of nests goes to Gaston Bachelard. In chapter 4 of his book 'The Poetics of Space', he writes, "A beginning of a philosophical phenomenology of nests would consist in our being able to elucidate the interest with which we look through an album containing reproductions of nests, or, even more positively, in our capacity to recapture the naive wonder we used to feel when we found a nest. This wonder is lasting, and today when we discover a nest it takes us back to our childhood or, rather, to a childhood; to the childhoods we should have had. For not many of us have been endowed by life with the full measure of its cosmic implications."

'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.

radio cegeste presentation at critical-digital-matter, the 5th Aotearoa Digital Arts symposium

RADIO CEGESTE short presentation for the 5th ADA Symposium, 28 June 2009

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apologies to Zita for also doing exactly what she suggested to presenters not to do, and bringing my own laptop....

...hi, I’m Sally Ann McIntyre. In the time permitting I’m going to present a brief overview of - and some associated thoughts around - a performance I did here in this very room on Friday – which coincided nicely in time with this symposium – and hopefully might be of interest to this community, considering I’m jumping on lines of thought that have come out during the symposium concerning post-Tetsuo Kogawa radio practices and questions of NZ and remoteness.

The event in question was an net radio icecast to a festival called Noise! 2009, at the Ontological Theatre in downtown New York, which I was invited to while in discussions about setting up a New Zealand presence in the radia network of distributed radio art stations and producers. This festival was organised by the New York state transmission arts organisation free103point9. The programming for each of this festival’s four nights began with one performer casting in from somewhere around the globe. So, in practice this saw various transmitted presentations from localities as far flung as New Zealand and Greece turned into data and streamed, in order to emerge again, combining with on-site performances by local practitioners in the space. The respective dispersed performers were transmitting to a performance venue for experimental music and sound art to listeners they couldn’t see, which most had never been to, and remained invisible themselves. All this dis-location does interesting things to the notion of 'live' performance, taking it back to a situation very much like traditional radio broadcast, in which you have no idea who is at the other end of your transmissions. So here, as there, I’ve chosen not to use any images, in the service of emphasising that sense of focus on listening. As Allen S. Weiss puts it in Phantasmic Radio:

“Radio is, a foriori, the acousmetric medium, where the sound always appears without a corresponding image.”

radio cegeste is an artist project which is also a functional one-woman radio station. It emerges out of a multi-faceted history of working as a broadcaster, a DJ, a writer, and a curator of sound, art, and sound/art projects, and is part of my ongoing search to both engage productively with these forms and contexts, and to make some some kind of personal sense of the variety of my outputs and interests, to, as Samuel Beckett says, "find a form to accommodate the mess". I’ve been doing radio cegeste formally since December of last year, 2008, and it has been largely 'live' or event based in that time, with site-specific performances conducted via the broadcast source a very low powered Mini FM transmitter and some commercially purchasable small hand held receivers, which demark a very localised transmission area, probably about 150 metres at the most optimistic. I am programming this station on a fairly sporadic basis to include a variety of shows, and here I am following the thoughts of the Japanese radio artist and theorist Tetsuo Kogawa when he says:

“For as long as radio has been considered as a means of communication, as a means for the circulation of information from one place to another, mini-FM has been different. How can you define radio that reaches a small audience in a very limited area? It could be possible to define it as a kind of performance art. Perhaps radio art might be a more appropriate term for mini-FM. But it is not quite adequate because mini-FM is still radio.”

the transmitter I use – this is it here - is something I made in a group workshop with Tetsuo in 2006, when he was invited to New Plymouth to be part of the exhibition From Mini FM to Hacktivists – a Guide to Art and Activism, curated by Mercedes Vicente for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Doing a workshop and emerging with a radio transmitter was itself a form of participation in and engagement with Tetsuo’s practice, and in that sense every time I use the transmitter, which has an object-status and is a kind of multiple, I am engaging in a material appropriation of his very specific technological reaction to a certain set of media conditions in Tokyo in the 1980s, when the Mini FM movement became a way of addressing the monolithic nature of the hierarchies of public media in that city. The set of conditions found in that time and place are about as far away as you can get from the current situation I find myself in, based loosely, if nomadically, in the sparsely populated south island of New Zealand. But using Kogawa’s ideas and materials, and taking that act of making further into usage by turning my back, however temporarily, on established broadcast media to engage with a more localised, performative, 'hand-made' or even 'craft-based' form of radio-making with the transmitter, I certainly consider the history of its use, and the politics of that usage to be embedded within its materials.

I was talking to someone connected to this symposium last night, who mentioned, when I described my project, that radio was over as a medium, and this is of course true in one sense, but his statement also brings up the idea, which i'd like to speak to, that the point of disappearance of the commercial use of a medium is a place where the artistic re-investigation of it can be most illuminating, and which can be a window of critical focus that can serve to cast light on the use of media in general – as Kogawa once again points out at the beginning of his essay Toward Polymorphus Radio :

“Throughout its history, despite efforts by the Futurists in the 1920s, radio has been considered largely a means of communication rather than an art form. Therefore, it is ironic that just as traditional forms of radio are in decline, its possibilities as an art form are reaching extreme potentials. If, as Heidegger suggests, extreme possibilities are reached at the end of something, what then ends with radio?”

I thought in terms of addressing the theme of this symposium – critical digital matter – and in the context of ADA in general, one interesting thing to very briefly talk through would be that sense of end point, and the use of obsolete or near obsolete media and its relation to materiality.

in its manifest form radio cegeste certainly isn’t a digital media project – ostensibly it’s about as far away as you can get, with a technological base in the simplest of hand made lo fi DIY electronics, and a manifest performative or situational base in narrowcast radiophonics. The project is digital in the most simple and offhand of ways, which might seem almost facetious to mention; reflective of the fact that in New Zealand in 2009 I live with the everyday accessibility of basic domestic digital technologies, and the associated fact that the project wouldn’t exist in its current form without the portable office, edit suite, storage and playback device which is my laptop computer. Even without the prospect of icecasting, I use domestic digital media such as an ipod and mp3s in playback, and gather my field recordings on a digital chip recorder, and the aleatory nature of each performance is informed by the amount of physical electromagnetic traffic which the transmitter reads, competes with, and which bleeds as noise into its improvisational soundscapes.

in another and very real way radio cegeste also wouldn’t really exist in the form it does without an awareness of its placing in digital contexts, and is a comment on them to some degree. The question - which I do get asked - 'why not just do a podcast?' can probably be answered with the thought that one of the key features of many contemporary technologies is their drive toward increasing standardisation and commodification.

If the mainstream usage of radio as a communicative broadcast medium belongs to the history of Modernity, then its ghostly recurrence in critically minded radio art projects like radio cegeste is also a re-analysis of that history, and in this context probably ties somewhat into what Nicholas Bourriard calls the Altermodern. He explained this in 2005 in the following way :

“‘Altermodern’ is a word that intends to define the specific modernity according to the specific context we live in – globalization, and its economic, political and cultural conditions. The use of the prefix “alter” means that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end, and alludes to the local struggles against standardization. The core of this new modernity is, according to me, the experience of wandering — in time, space and mediums.”

then he goes on to say “We have to get out of this dialectical loop between the global and the local, to get rid of the binary opposition between globalization and traditions

[...]

Artists are looking for a new modernity that would be based on translation: What matters today is to translate the cultural values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network. This “reloading process” of modernism according to twenty-first-century issues could be called altermodernism, a movement connected to the creolisation of cultures and the fight for autonomy, but also the possibility of producing singularities in a more and more standardized world."

Jonathan Crary talks very eloquently about this situation also in his book, Suspensions of Perception : Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture :

"...at the end of the twentieth century, the loosely connected machinic network for electronic work, communication and consumption has not only demolished what little had remained of the distinction between leisure and labour but has come, in large arenas of western social life, to determine how temporality is inhabited. Information and telematic systems simulate the possibility of meanderings and drift, but in fact they constitute modes of sedentarisation, of separation in which the reception of stimuli and the standardisation of response produce an unprecedented mixture of diffuse attentiveness and quasi-automatism, which can be maintained for remarkably long periods of time

[...]

what once might have been called reverie now most often takes place aligned with preset rhythms, images, speeds and circuits that reinforce their relevance and dereliction of whatever is not compatible with their formats... the question of how and whether creative modes of trance, inattention, daydream, and fixation can flourish within the interstices of these circuits

[...]

it is particularly important now to determine what creative possibilities can be generated amid new technological forms of boredom."

I hear radio cegeste as radio reconceived as a mobile medium, a medium which is artist driven, and body-sized. Its technological and spatial constraints are strategic; their technical simplicity, and fragility makes radio technology transparent to its listeners, and their scale – deliberately restraining things down to the portable and localised – is a downscaling of the technologies of radio to the size of intimate space. partly these limits are practical – I tend to be quite nomadic, so the essential question is – what can I take with me? - this then becomes a structural organising principle for the work, a kind of formal constraint, which in stripping things away to allow space, engages with the aesthetics and history of minimalism and a certain form of poetics, as well as political ideas around the accessibility of media and DIY. Doing radio cegeste constantly reminds me that no matter how mobile we get, human life remains tied to specific spaces, times and places – and that shifts in media do not actually destroy the placed materiality of human existence.

I’m inspired in this by other people working in experimental ways with radios around the world, such as Ricardo Reis of radio zero in Portugal, who wrote in a recent email to the radia mailing list:

“It seems to me that right now the new emergence of local/community/art radios (is it a renaissance or just my wishful thinking?) is another way of fighting and holding ground against a more and more every-where look alike culture. Notice that I'm not saying that is something done with such aim in conscience.

This kind of niche promotes the existence of works that are in themselves individual and so more closely related to the environment the artist is moving in. Generally this means also a more in touch contact with specific cultural references, and so, extending, some sort of lighthouse/anchor on a more desolated cultural landscape...”

this attention to the "environment the artist is moving in" is something that comes through in many ways in the content of radio cegeste performances - unfortunately I haven't yet done anything in a lighthouse, but I have played back field recordings of empty gallery spaces collected over a few hours in Christchurch, which were then transmitted as a 5 minute event-score project for a local artist run space, and I’ve collected field recordings of 80 year old men speaking about the architectural history of Port Chalmers, which were arranged as part of a transmission not far from the place where they were gathered. Other forms of attention to locality are connected to the inclusion of the audience and the engagement with particular music subcultures. I have handed out receivers to audience members, and I have played the transmitter as an instrument in situations involving improvised music, in collaboration with (other) experimental musicians. I’m also planning a radio station for native birds, which looks at the cultural history of the birdsong in NZ broadcast, and thinks through connections around of the idea of the birdsong as territorial imperative and the notion of mini-FM as bounded radio.

So, the project’s awareness of its technological, physical and historical placing informs its use of media, and its aim is transparency around the social, the economic and certainly sometimes the ecological ramifications of that use – for example here I have a solar panel which can power the transmitter quite adequately on a sunny day, replacing the 9 volt battery I normally use. In these aspects, and in its priviliging of the moment of live presence over recording, the project engages with the concept of "slow media", a borrowing from the Italian Slow Food movement which, like the latter, addresses the need for the preservation of local traditions and attention to detail within the expedient commercialism of a fast paced globalised context, and is described as follows in an article by Helen De Michiel:

"The concept of "slow media" characterises a practice that all members of the media arts field hold in common: we share the ability to do a lot with little. Our work, which is framed by a fast-moving, fickle, and overstimulated communications industry, is done slowly and deliberately"

I introduced radio cegeste as an 'artist project', and now I feel like I should qualify that slightly. You could say that as much as the station is about post-Cage authorlessness, the whole concept of having one’s own personal radio station, one that is mobile, that can be staged anywhere you go - on a bus, in a shopping mall, on a deserted beach - is also very much about the strategic recovery of artistic subjectivity, its personalisation within media structures as a way of tempering the sometimes sterile and passive aspects of today's saturated media contexts.

radio cegeste in this way is a perfect artist project for someone who has worked mainly within cultural frameworks as a commentator, a DJ, an organiser, and a listener, with, as an old english teacher once put it, "building hoops rather than jumping through them", and it extends all these things into the more personalised, or centralised space of production, while remaining pleasingly blank in it's authorial gesturing. In this way the project helps me to continue to ask – if not to answer - the question of whether (artistic) subjectivity is an antiquated notion at the beginning of the 21st century, or just something that requires new conceptions. I'm certainly engaging with 'the death of the author' in quite a deliberate way, and via formations which include everything from Roland Barthes own idea of the text as a space where 'a variety of quotations blend and clash', to questions around musicianship in the situations in which the transmitter becomes a noise music instrument, and which necessitate a certain amount of intentionality, although because I’m engaging with improvised music the ideal is always to give away intentionality.

to return to the event which began this talk, the internet radio cast to the Noise!09 festival, i was thinking afterwards about the ways in which the exciting prospect of a radio link to the other side of the world, a radiophonic hole to China, or a 'radio wormhole' as Zita Joyce might put it, extends a historic situation we are very familiar with, in terms of the presence of communication technologies being a way to address isolation with connectivity, something deeply embedded in Antipodean culture. This recurs - a few years ago you may remember there was an advertisement on NZ television which depicted the bucolic scene of a small boy alone on a pristine, isolated beach, dragging a flax flower, until he noticed a rope in the waves. Pulling on this rope, which trifurcated, the boy was shown dragging recognisable Metropoli – Paris, and New York among them - impossibly large and distant Leviathans looming toward his coastline, in an near-comical semiotic clash. The ending shot shows the boy standing triumphant on a rocky pinnacle, with his audience of cities, to the voiceover “the isolation age is over” – this was an advertisement for the New Zealand telecom network’s broadband service.

There is a wonderful passage from a 2002 interview with two ADA related artsts, radioqualia's Honor Harger and Adam Hyde, in conversation with Zita Joyce for Log Magazine issue 10, which speaks fairly humorously to this sensibility :

Adam - Also coming from New Zealand we had no intentionality of an audience. Because coming from New Zealand, you have no audience and the mythos surrounding creating music in NZ is that actually the best music is created by people who don’t give a fuck who’s going to listen to it. So from that the fact of having an audience is necessarily secondary to making good art.

Honor - So the whole idea of there needing to be people listening to the broadcasts has never been an issue for us. For a lot of people that really raises the question of why broadcast then. For us, the question is why not?

Another, perhaps more poignant take on such mythologies is found in the liner notes to a five part radio series commissioned by Kunstradio, and curated by radioqualia, called ISOL:

"Isolation and migration work in symbiosis. Geographical remoteness meant inhabitation was contingent on long journeys. Argonauts navigated firstly from the South Pacific, and laterly from Europe to arrive in New Zealand. In the 1920s radio began to further erode isolation, by connecting New Zealanders firstly with each other, then with their neighbours, and and finally with the world.

But the intervention of air travel, broadcasting and digital technologies does not completely nullify the impact of sheer physical distance. In an itinerant world criss-crossed by fibre-optics, copper wire and invisible latices of radio waves, isolation still causes a cultural lag. The huge watery spaces between New Zealand and the rest of the world still seem to slow down the speed of the information revolution. Isolation causes a kind of info-drag. But the distance from the super-highway, though often frustrating, can have it's advantages. Culturals fads and trends have less impact in a country where they arrive 3, 6 or even 12 months late. Indigenous phenomena can sometimes be left to incubate and evolve entirely localised peculiarities in the absence of the distraction of international influences. Consequently, experimental New Zealand music and sound art from the 1980s till the present day has developed its own evolutionary quirks entirely specific to the country. In comparitive isolation, experimental sound manifests specific auditory adaptions, distinctive sonic qualities, unique phonic mutations, and new interpretations of the pervasive themes of isolation, distance and remoteness."

This 'rare bird' mythology of a lack of audience being productively strategic holds, in its way, within the very small peer based communities of New Zealand experimental music culture. It can also be said to function with another obsolete medium without a visible audience – poetry – which the name radio cegeste is a reference to – specifically, the name of a character from Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphee, who is a dead poet who speaks through the car radio. My work in such underground and marginal artforms means I am fairly used to working in small communities, which doesn't necessarily mean working without feedback or with only the faintest signal flickering across the sea, it just means a lack of acknowledgement from the wider culture, which is both why the intimate spaces of performance are quite rewarding, and why in terms of casting out to that mainstream culture for listeners, asking the legitimising question “is anyone out there?” seems the wrong approach. Indeed it is a more fertile strategy, visible now more than ever perhaps, within the work of organisations such as ADA and the Audio Foundation, as well as a variety of related grass roots artist initiatives, to value and cultivate the small but concentrated communities we do have at hand, and to see the potential freedom in working within artforms in which the pressures to be commercially viable simply do not apply. The prospect of building these immediate localities, while at the same time utilising more lateral community-building opportunities presented by technologies such as icecasting, and networks such as radia, seems both excitingly new, and familiar as a footnote to the long history of artists distributing their work via similarly non-hierarchical networks of exchange, and perhaps here we consign the small lost child, the "pale intruder on an unknown beach", as Peter Jefferies once put it, to history. Or perhaps not. There was a recording of my voice speaking a poem by Jack Spicer buried somewhere in my cast to the New York festival the other day, so I’d just like to leave you with that, as part of a short re-broadcast of some of the performance from Friday.

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Jack Spicer - Thing Language

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises

Tougher than anything.

No one listens to poetry. The ocean

Does not mean to be listened to. A drop

Or crash of water. It means

Nothing.

It

Is bread and butter

Pepper and salt. The death

That young men hope for. Aimlessly

It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No

One listens to poetry.