'Garden Aria / a Library for the Birds of Ōtepoti' on TIK (TimeInventorsKabinet) ArtRadio, Bratislava, Slovakia

this small-scale live transmission work was performed, collected and re-transmitted by Radio Cegeste in the private gardens of an historic mansion in New Zealand's oldest city, Dunedin, over the course of one day in early spring, the 11th September 2011. Comprising site specific outdoor raw field recordings of improvisational acoustic violin and portable crank Gramophone playback of a 78rpm record of birdsong by Beatrice Harrison ('Dawn in an Old World Garden (English Songbirds Awakening) / Nightingales, Actually recorded in Beatrice Harrison's Garden, Oxted, England', Orthophonic Recording, Victor 20968), as well as live solar-powered transmission of environmental recordings collected during the day, progressively layered back into the environment via solar powered Mini-FM transmitter and radio receivers.

'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.

how to explain radio to a dead huia

“This is where we must begin; with the magical power of replication, the image affecting what it is an image of, wherein the representation shares in or takes power from the represented — testimony to the power of the mimetic faculty through whose awakening we might not so much understand that shadow science known as magic… but see anew the spell of the natural where the reproduction of life merges with the recapture of the soul”

— Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity

‎"In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting... Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are."

— Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought

on the afternoon of Friday February 11, 2011, radio cegeste transmitted a Mini FM radio programme within Orokonui Ecosanctuary, a 307 hectare regenerating forest ecosystem located just outside Dunedin in New Zealand's South Island.

this transmission - an experimental, site-specific nature documentary - involved gathering location recordings of birdsong and ambient sound in the sanctuary during the morning, these sound files being re-transmitted the same afternoon in a natural clearing, demarcated by three giant Rimu trees, deep within the forest. 17 small radios were hung in this clearing; most in trees and others placed on the surrounding ground, these then picked up the signal from a mini FM transmitter, layering the recordings back into the space.

the show was about an hour in length and without human listeners, apart from the crew (one visual documenter, as well as myself; in fact as an aside i was thinking while sorting through the photos here showing the process of making the radio station, just how satisfying it was to engage with the notion of the implication of human presence within the bounds of its invisibility in the narrative of the traditional nature documentary).

the re-transmitted birdsong emanating from this 'flock' of decentralised small radio receivers filled the clearing and augmented and interfered with its sound, ultimately attracting many endemic birds. particularly distinguished guests were two large endangered kaka (nestor meridionalis), as well as many smaller birds which in more populated times would have often travelled together in multi-species flocks, including piwakawaka (fantail/rhipidura fuliginosa), some miromiro (tomtit/petroica macrocephala), pipipi (brown creeper/mohua novaeseelandiae) and titpounamu (rifleman/acanthisitta chloris) - the latter New Zealand’s smallest bird.

exploring the relationship between birds and radios has become somewhat of an ongoing, extended multi-layered research project for radio cegeste, with this programme the continuation of a line of thinking (or flight?) taking the materiality of radio waves, a focus on the territorial delimitation of mini FM, the traditions of the natural history museum and the birdsong as a NZ cultural sonic trope into various site specific territories and exploratory notions around 'environmental radio'. this work in progress will continue with future iterations under the general programming title of radio d'oiseaux, in part-homage to composer Olivier Messiaen.

the radio d'oiseaux project asks some broad questions about the relationship of the museum to the living world it catalogues, progressing with the assumption that the modernist natural history museum, with its mounted specimens in vitrines, is in some sense the shadow other to the national park, or ecosanctuary, the latter being a more contemporary conception of 'natural heritage', or a 'living museum', albeit with a related focus around the notion of the archival preservation of species as museological. as a sound project, radio d'oiseaux is also interested in the materiality of the sonic object and the functioning of sound recording as a form of memorial museology, and the fact that the impulse toward field recording of birdsong has, in new zealand, historically found a home on the radio, and within the audible texts of national identity.

this particular iteration of the project also trucks with the notion of documentation being the only trace of performance, and asks whether (and if so : how), the deliberate non-spectatorship of an event in an overmediated world can lend clarity to that event, and, relatedly, that if we posit that there is no such thing as an event without an audience (or a tree falling in a forest, or silence, variously), what might happen if we imagine a spectatorial base that is non-human, or "natural". how can we approach non human animals, in other words, as listeners that are "equal but different", and what might this mean? what is it to understand a non human species, to approach an encounter outside any propensity to anthropomorphise, to get around 'figurative appropriation' - using animals as symbolic, reductive, sentimentalised, illustrative metaphors - and can we make steps to do this by tracing observations about the history and development of the human-nonhuman animal bond? i.e. how does reciprocality function in this relationship - in a general situation, as Erica Fudge puts it, where “we lack a language at present in which we can think about and represent animals to ourselves as animals, in ways that are not metaphorical" (Fudge, E. (2002). Animal.)

a touchstone here is the event-work for which Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys is perhaps most famous, in which he claimed he preferred to explain pictures to a dead hare than to human, western, cultural, head-based beings, saying “A Hare comprehends more than many human beings with their stubborn rationalism ...I told him that he needed only to scan the picture to understand what is really important about it” (Jones, A. The Artist’s Body, p.77)

a delayed response to this statement might be found in an interview with the German artist Wolfgang Müller, talking about his 2009 project Séance Vocibus Avium, a book/record whose reconstructed sound-poetics of human imitations of extinct birds won its author the Karl Sczuka-Preis for radio play as radio art:

"Q : Your installation features drawings and the reconstructed sounds of extinct birds. What does the name mean?

A: Séance, you know, is from French, a spiritual meeting with dead people. Vocibus avium is ‘voice’ and ‘bird’ in Latin. It sounds like abracadabra: mystic and magical. Our society believes they are not mystical and not magical – that this is something exotic other countries have. They say we are very rationalistic, very serious, but I don’t think so. There are different descriptions of these bird sounds in every language: French, German, English. You cannot hear the original sound so only the different interpretations make the truth. The drawings work a bit like this too – similarities and differences. I thought it was a nice idea to get musicians and singers, including a Grand Dame of the National Icelandic Theatre, to reconstruct sounds of birds that were never tape-recorded. I wanted a natural record."

my piece's methodology was inspired somewhat variously by recent bioacoustic studies into bird listening and mimicry, notions of EVP and the perpetuance of ghost-signals via transmission, the potential for a radio station powered directly from the sun, how birdsong is affected by human changes in the soundscape, and some general wondering around how Deleuzian ideas about the birdsong as refrain and the sonification of territory relate to small scale, bounded radio transmission.

some specific formal elements were inspired by a story reported on the Radio New Zealand website on the 8th August 2009, under the header :

Birdsong recordings to lure kokako to new homes

"

Thirty rare native kokako are to be relocated in the North Island with recorded birdsongs being played to help them settle in.

The birds are being moved to help re-establish kokako populations in Whirinaki Forest Park near Murupara and in the Waitakere Ranges.

Waikato University PhD student David Bradley will use recordings made from the birds' home territory, including the Urewera National Park and forests in King Country and Waikato, to encourage them to stay in their new surroundings.

Mr Bradley says the pre-recorded birdsongs will be played through speakers that will be hoisted by ropes into trees."

many thanks are due to Ben Smith, Orokonui guide, and Campbell Walker, photographer.

'shouting over the music' icecast to radio futura 2010

two days after arriving back in New Zealand, a live re-mix of the site-specific transmission work shouting over the music : a dawn chorus for walter and olivier, recently staged as part of visible city within Melbourne's Cathedral Arcade, was netcast over the airwaves of radio zero, as part of the Radio Futura programme (12 - 16 October), official radio station for the FuturePlaces media art festival, Porto, Portugal. The festival's byline was "five days of exhibitions and events addressing the potential and the impact of digital media on local cultures" and its radio station utilised the potential of radio to link particular and distinct localities via global networks, with a programme of various artist projects and live streams converging in radio space. My slot was from 2-3am (2-3pm NZ time), Saturday 16th October, 2010. This performance without an immediate audience took place in the distinctly localised, deco-era domestic, quietly end-of-the-world setting of Kerry Ann Lee's living room, in Mornington, Dunedin, New Zealand

a regular listener from another NZ city emailed me with the following feedback after the show (thanks CW) :

"Among the buried beauty through so much of the piece, there seems a strong theme of an almost science fiction (in a dystopian modernist vein) element around the relationship of changing birdsong... the way the manipulated ontological qualities of radio itself are bending the very birdsongs into the warped, corrupted forms they will need to find to go beyond the beautifully preserved sanctuaries of 1920s arcades and all they stand for - Also represented by the comparatively elegant weave of Messiaen, against the sounds of the birdsong melting into violin into wheel squeak into a shortwave solo(!) and back and around... with the burned twitch of the characteristic R/C mini fm collapse to hiss as a regular reminder of some kind of perverse and anxious and impatient logic or intelligence surrounding it all, again corrupted... A piece veering from a rather bewitching miasma into the terrifying at surprising intervals."

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."

Radio d'Oiseaux : EVP recordings among the extinct bird collections at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

This morning I talked about Media Povera, a group exhibition i'm curating at the Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin (July 13 - August 7), in an interview with Lynn Freeman for Radio New Zealand programme The Arts on Sunday. The conversation also included artists Kim Pieters and Nigel Bunn, speaking via distance from RNZ's Dunedin studio. This interview will air Sunday week, while we are in the midst of installing the show for its Tuesday opening.

Media Povera includes a work by Radio Cegeste. This will be an iteration of the Radio d'Oiseaux project with its focus on birdsong, museology, and NZ broadcast space. A first foray into the collection of bird silences for this work, in the form of EVP investigations into extinct New Zealand avian species at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, was conducted between 10:30am - 12:30pm on Monday 28th June.

Many thanks extended to Gillian Stone, Collection Manager of Birds at Te Papa, for access to the collections, and also to James Gilberd for technical assistance and use of equipment.

radio cegeste presents Radio d'Oiseaux at Chicks Hotel, port chalmers

Newcastle-based organisational and musical force Chris Hearn, aka Alps, briefly alighting at None Studios in Dunedin while on his New Zealand tour with Ray Raposa, aka Castanets, from Portland, Oregon, pleasantly coincided his stay with my arrival in the city. As it eventuated, no local support act had been organised for these fine gentlemen's southernmost NZ gig. Consequently, discussions in the None kitchen resulted in Radio Cegeste being invited to support Alps and Castanets in a certain esteemed experimental music venue at a nearby charming port, the very next evening (ie. "your name is on the poster"). Rather than baulking at this short notice thrust into the limelight (such as it was, on a Wednesday in Port Chalmers), I very sensibly recognised an opportunity to experiment with the public presentation of the slowly evolving Radio d’Oiseaux project, and, as you can see from these photos by Markus Gradwohl, verily jumped at the chance.

Sound sources this time were field recordings of birds played through mini FM transmitter, Radio New Zealand vinyl pressings of birdsongs played on a portable record player, 78s, music box and related sonic ephemera (such as one of those musical cards, emitting the song of a New Zealand native bird - the Saddleback - via an activation of an embedded digital chip/music box, every time it was opened).

You can't see them too well here, but there was also a live visual element, involving a slowly diminishing stack of c. 1960s Forest and Bird magazine covers, propped in front of a static video camera routed through the in-house projector, and progressively removed one by one during the performance.

My one regret concerning the evening, apart from its various minor equipment failures, was that Ray's set, vulnerable, desolate, delicate and blacky humorous at turns as it was, had included, as was evidently his habit, a cover of everyone's favourite pop song about death, Blue Oyster Cult's (Don't Fear) The Reaper, in every NZ show except this one. Damn!

more photos of the event at Markus' site, noise redux, are viewable here

owls do cry : field recordings in the grounds of seacliff asylum, dunedin

a field trip to the grounds of the old seacliff hospital on the outskirts of dunedin produced some recordings of local birdlife, and associated reflections on Janet Frame's history on site during the most troubling period of the writer's life. Her first short story collection The Lagoon and Other Stories was published while she was a patient – advance copies arrived on 4 March 1952. Nine months later, in December of the same year she was scheduled for a leucotomy at Seacliff. As Michael King puts it in An Inward Sun – the World of Janet Frame :

“Nine Months later, when Janet was once again committed in Seacliff, the book may have saved her life – or, at the very least, her intellectual and artistic life. There medical staff informed her that she had been selected for a dreaded leucotomy operation (the same operation known in the United States as a lobotomy). This intervention severed the fibres connecting the front part of the brain to the rest of the cerebral cortex. Most patients who had the operation experienced a reduction in anxiety; some were rendered vegetative. In Janet’s case, momentum towards this outcome seemed unstoppable. John Money advised against it. But Lotte Frame was persuaded to give written consent. Within days of the scheduled surgery, on 26 December 1952, newspapers around the country carried a story headed ‘Writer Wins Prize for Prose’ – Janet had won the Hubert Church Award, New Zealand’s only literary prize for fiction or non-fiction prose, for The Lagoon. And the superintendant of Seacliff, Dr Geoffrey Blake-Palmer, took her off the operation list. ‘I’ve decided that you should stay as you are. I don’t want you changed.’”

built in the 19th Century, the Seacliff hospital buildings were structurally unsound from the beginning, and after the relocation of the hospital staff and patients to Cherry Farm psychiatric facility in the 1950s, various uses for them were mooted but never realised, and they were left to slowly decay.

birds however have found their home here in abundance. in a improptu lo-fi tribute to Messiaen, and perhaps Sebastian, and certainly the people who once wandered the grounds here, some spontanious human-bellbird imitations were also recorded...

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.

--

“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