'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.

Obscura Day, Dunedin

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

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



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



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

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











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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

imaginary media / the legacy of professor robert jack

In the “Second Introduction to an Archaeology of Imaginary Media,” Eric Kluitenberg writes that one of the tasks of the discipline of media archaeology is to scour the historical archive – “stories, drawings, prints, films, songs, advertisements or quasi-philosophical imaginaries” – for the utopian dreams of potential or possible media forms that might “compensate for the inherent flaws and deficiencies of interpersonal communication."

Siegfried Zielinski, one of the first scholars to use the term "media archaeology," breaks down the category of imaginary media into three groups of phenomena in his essay in the same text, "Modelling Media for Ignatius Loyola":

untimely media: media realized in technical and media practice either long before or after their invention

conceptual media: media sketched, modeled or drafted but not actually built

impossible media: media which cannot actually be built but nevertheless express ideas which impact the factual world of media

Slavoj Zizek’s book on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Organs Without Bodies, argues not only that the emergence of the New is Deleuze’s central concern, but that for Deleuze, the New only emerges through repetition. In other words, the creation of something truly new always involves a kind of repetition. What is being repeated, though, “is not the way the past ‘effectively was’ but the virtuality inherent to the past and betrayed by its past actualization”. In other words, imaginary media present us with a series of possibilities for actions in the present precisely because they never fully appeared in the past.

By way of positioning the political project of media archaeology, Zielinski writes:

"[T]he main purpose of this archaeological work is to counter current tendencies towards standardization and universalization in the interest of a uniform global market with the rich variety of variants offered by bygone eras. If archaeology is the principal method for this special form of historical research, then variantology is the tactic (in the Foucauldian sense) by which individual genealogies are to be unravelled from its wealth of varieties."

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visiting the University of Otago's physics department with Nigel Bunn the other day (he was picking up a trolleyful of oscillators which, no longer used in the classroom, were going to be thrown away), we were shown around the labyrinthine environs of the teaching facilities by Paul Yates. the chance find of Robert Jack's transmitter sitting in a cupboard - the actual machine used in the first NZ broadcast, c.1921 (an exceptional imaginary moment in the history of our communications media), was predicated, after a wonderful, rambling tour of all sorts of nooks and crannies of obsolete technologies and teaching aids, by the statement, "oh, you might be interested in this"

... well, yes. I was.

an excerpt from Robert Jack's original broadcast can be heard here

the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography entry on Prof Jack can be found here

a timeline for New Zealand communications history can be read here

Orson Welles' War of the Worlds 70th anniversary broadcast

with the help of of Plains FM programme director Petal Largie, I re-broadcast Orson Welles' classic elaborate Halloween prank and seminal intervention into radio space on the evening of its 70th anniversary, at 10:30pm on the night of Thursday October 30, 2008.

the original radio play is archived in its entirety on the website of its umbrella broadcast series, Mercury Theatre on the Air, here

this is the email i sent out about the broadcast:

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tonight, for those in the Canterbury region... a special Halloween broadcast... 10:30 - 11:30, Plains FM 96:9

Orson Welles’ radiophonic adaptation of H G Wells novel "The War of the Worlds" was originally broadcast as an elaborate Halloween prank on the 30th of October 1938, on the radio drama programme the Mercury Theatre on the Air.

Scripted as a series of increasingly worrisome news reports introjected into a simulcast of a live concert, the reports depicted an evidently real-time alien invasion of New Jersey, replicating the semi-documentary style of Wells' classic science fiction text for the medium of radio.

The legends state that listeners, used to transparent journalism, and led into the the drama of the incident by its flawless scripting, thought what they were hearing was actually happening, with mass hysteria the inevitable result.

Other commentators have pointed to the fact that the notion of a national panic, in which hundreds of thousands of people left their homes, and built makeshift gasmasks and sandbagged shelters protected with armories, may itself have arisen due to media exaggeration of the figures in order to dramatize the panic.

Welles' later career includes some of the major achievements in 20th Century American filmmaking. But War of the Worlds remains as a touchstone moment when art and life broke into each other to reconfigure our ways of thinking about media. As a study in simulation and crowd dynamics, the broadcast has been closely listened to by artists, sociologists, and the military ever since.

All over the world in the next two nights, creative radio makers are engaging with the spirit of this seventy year old radio play, with artistic interventions which shift the original collapse of the fictional and the real into contemporary formations.

Plains FM 96:9 wll simply be airing the original broadcast in its entirety, your chance to hear, over the airwaves, a proto-media artwork whose seismic shocks around the intelligent manipulation of its medium are still traveling to our ears.

Mini-FM transmitter building at the Physics Room, rotate your state for Radio Kiosk

a Mini FM transmitter building workshop, hosted by The Physics Room Contemporary Art Space in Christchurch on the 5th of June 2006, with New Zealand media artist Adam Hyde at the helm, was organised to coincide with the making of a Mini FM radio station, Radio Kiosk, curated for a public art site in Central Christchurch by the collaborative media and sound art duo ((ethermap (Zita Joyce and Adam Willetts). 

Radio Kiosk, to which I contributed historic recordings of rotate your state, a long-lived experimental sound programme I hosted in its final years from 1998-2002 on student radio station RDU98:3FM, was a graceful conceptual reframing of various historic and contemporary broadcast radio experimental music programmes. 

It effectively became an appropriately formally partial, transient and fleeting archive of localised unknown NZ experimental radio practices, and a pointer toward strategies for the further elaboration of such histories. My rather anecdotal essay on Rotate for Radio Kiosk is republished below (as is a terrible washed-out pic of L, R: myself and fellow DJ K8 in the RDU studio, doing the show sometime in the mid-1990s):

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Rotate Your State 

Broadcast through the 1990s on rdu, 98.3fm, Christchurch Rotate Your State, as it was originally called, (before being shortened to the more casual, sentimental ‘rotate’ somewhere along the way, a gesture partly respectful of the baton-passing networks of underground radio tradition, partly a back-pat for the dearly loved haven of live-to-air sonic pondering it became), was a show that ran on Christchurch radio station rdu, spanning the 1990s with a bit of overflow into the 2000s, from 9-11 on Thursdays, and then, for the last two years, at the same time on Sundays. 

Two hours a week for over ten years is a lot of audio, and a temporal stretch one cannot hope to compress in a compilation like Radio Kiosk, but perhaps the tip of rotate’s sonic iceberg might at least be hinted at by the shows I have included here, which represent four of the show’s hosts, and include rotate’s idiosyncratic ads, pieces of radio art in themselves, which in their cyclic aural signposting perhaps best defined the show’s distinct, if interrelated, eras. Thus, instigator and patron saint .leyton’s taciturn layered vocals, post-industrial ambient reverb soundscape, and “heartbeat-with-carcrash” coda becomes K8’s recontextualised, giggle-inflected personal answering machine message to a friend, recorded while she was in the studio doing the show (“Hi, I’m at rotate and you’re not home, it’s a really good sesh’ if you’ve been listening…!”), which in turn becomes the rather more anonymous, strongly Stockhausen-indebted mash of vocals & static-between-stations which defined rotate’s final three years under my curatorship (then under the DJ name of a:version), all in their own way ‘showing not telling’ what the show was all about: ultimately, the pure creative and intellectual joy of mucking around with sound, of melting into flux all ideas of solid musical genre boundaries, as well as (often) the boundaries between the sonic storage artefact and the performative live event. 

 Because rotate was radio made by people who spent at least part of their everyday lives as artists (musicians, actors, curators, writers), it was also essentially both an excuse for us to listen to things we liked, and to find other, unusual things, to collect unlikely sonic objects and force them into even more unlikely and disorienting juxtapositions. So tapes found in op-shops, our favourite films re-envisaged as radio plays, and ancient records borrowed from the public library’s mouldering back-room stacks sat alongside favourites from record collections constantly being replenished and modified with treasured compilations ordered (often ‘blind’) during the frontier days of internet mail order lists. We navigated by our own logics but provided enough thematic clues for the curious. One example among many: in 1998, Oval’s Marcus Popp was in town (an appearance largely instigated by Radio Kiosk co-curator, ((ethermap’s Zita Joyce, in her then-role as rdu programme director), and to celebrate we dedicated a whole show to this glitch-pioneer’s music, finding that between two of us we had enough to fill a whole (rather minimal!) two hours. When one of our duo, K8, who was the support dj before Popp’s performance the next evening, informed him of this show he said with bemusement it was the first time he’d heard of such a pronounced event of ‘endurance radio’. 

rotate as a forum taught us much about radio as aural cultural research, of the value of the long history of radio and sound art and of sound’s intersection with other artforms, of the creative potential of unearthing the world as sonic material, as found scraps and jewels and fields of force and broken shards, of juxtaposing the sublime and the ridiculous, the bombastic and the minimal, the compelling and the superfluous. Such ‘serious play’ sustained our belief in broadcasting as an active, rather than a passive passtime. It infected us with its sense of dry humour, and charmed us with its cryptic artistry and studiously meticulous non-definition, becoming a kind of wallpaper music for those listeners who were, for whatever reason, also in a convivial state of mind to become obsessed with the detail of such curvaceous, chaotic sonic arabesques. 

While live to airs and interviews were more common in later years, we never let the show lapse into any kind of professionalism, believing strongly in the notion of student radio being akin to a kind of “on-air artist run space”. In this, we gave broadcast time, often live, to sound-makers, both locals and visitors, who shared our experimental aesthetic, and were unlikely to be heard elsewhere on the airwaves. More small scale DIY tricks in the studio could be as basic or quirky as panning rdu’s archaic soundboard’s speaker dial from left to right and back again at intervals, so that the sound would also travel as such on the receiving end, or indulging in the occasional live vocal experiment. We didn’t take rotate ‘seriously’, believing it utterly ephemeral, but it was simultaneously full to the brim with ‘serious music’, and we invested everything into it, as it became both mirror to and part of the everyday fabric of our lives. 

We perhaps knew, even at the time, that we could not easily have gained elsewhere what a few years at its helm taught us about how to listen with agency, and that the notion of djing as an intent and concentrated form of independent creative curiosity that we developed through rotate would stay with us in our various ways far into the future. We seldom broke its momentum with talk, wanting listeners to get completely lost, or else to ring up and talk to us, hoping to reconfigure the linear hegemonies of broadcast toward more of an experiential circuit, or more of a one-on-one communicative relationship. We always wondered who was out there listening, and hoped, that if there were indeed more participants in our experiment than merely us, that they were having as much fun as we were. 

 sally mcintyre, june 2006