'genetic noise [source text missing]'*

"It is by moving onwards, beyond the known, that No one and you, other reader, will hear the textual voice, which still remains to be heard, and which gives to each of us, after all, No one’s name.” - first names of no one, in The Helene Cixous Reader, S Sellers (ed), p. 33, 1974


, this snow
is
falling

on you,
on where
you stand,
on where
you
stood

[deleted]





it

[barely audible] , it





, happens,
even

in the antipodes,
this snow
hits
your arriving-

place





as modulations in
the after-

image, the
partition-
ed, lit
sequence
of [absences]

on sky-





as winter came, has
come, now
from the
other. sided
from the one, and

pointed
there





to skies. cast

as [name?],
as [date?], strung

in the radio
as micro- weave &
wave,
as spoke
to no-
, to every-.

listening





-cast
as/to sea &
sky.

as/is to know
to list as

absent, see

[inspecific]





as cold is
not
a place it is
this ,[question]


-----

*[first published alongside 2 other poems in NZ/Aust literary magazine Otoliths, issue 18 (August 2010)]

"the bird sings with its fingers" : Alphaville and Orphee

Chris Darke's 2005 book on Jean Luc Godard's 1965 film Alphaville contains some great lines on the relationship of Godard's sci-fi noir masterpiece to Cocteau's own prior re-contextualisation of the Orpheus myth, and on the Orphic poetics of the filmic / radio relationship.

from the chapter entitled Orpheus unbound :

---

"In Alphaville, Orpheus, bard of Thrace, the poet and singer of classical myth, undergoes one of his most unlikely reincarnations as Lemmy Caution rescuing Natasha von Braun, his Eurydice. As they flee together he tells her, with inverted fidelity to the myth, not to look back at the underworld they've escaped from. Godard's version of the myth dwells heavily on its earlier cinematic treatment in Jean Cocteau's Orphee (1949). When he filmed Orphee, Cocteau was adapting his play of 1926 as well as updating the myth by dressing it with all the trappings of modern life. Cocteau's Orphee (Jean Marais) hangs out at the Cafe des Poetes, is conveyed to the land of the dead in a chauffeured limousine (which passes through a negative-printed landscape) and receives communications from the dead poet Cegeste (Edouard Dermite) via the car's radio. In Orphee, radio and cinema are technologies transfigured, machines that communicate mediumistically with those who know how to listen and see, those with the capacity to tune into the other-worldly wavelengths on which myth broadcasts its messages from beyond. The strange communications that Orphee picks up are a kind of morse code in blank verse - 'L'oiseau chante avec ses doigts. Une fois. Je repete. L'oiseau chante avec ses doigts. Deux fois. Je repete...' ('The bird sings with its fingers. Once. I repeat. The bird sings with its fingers. Twice. I repeat...') - and they echo throughout Alphaville, either as aphoristic fragments from the mouth of a machine in the questions that Alpha 60 poses Lemmy, or when Lemmy narrates, in voice-off, his taxi ride with Natasha after they have left the Institute of General Semantics:

Lemmy (off): As the radio was issuing its traffic programme, Natasha spoke to me in her voice of a pretty sphinx...

The words 'joli sphinx' ('pretty sphinx'), thrice repeated on the soundtrack, work with the mention of the car's radio to reprise the mysterious communications in Orphee. There are also numerous visual invocations of Cocteau's film, from the negative-printed sequences already discussed to the scenes in which the inhabitants stagger through the corridors of Alphaville as the city self-destructs, clinging to the walls like the deathly denizens of Orphee's 'Zone'. Paul Eluard, too finds a place in Godard's Orphic myth as the figure of the dead poet whose words are brought to life by his messenger-surrogate Lemmy Caution. All of which indicates that, for Godard, the myth of Orpheus serves a greater purpose than merely homage. In 1962 Godard was already calling on Cocteau's film as providing a definition of cinema as 'the only art which, to use Cocteau's phrase, "films death at work". The person one films is in the process of aging and dying, so one films a moment of death at work'. Over 30 years later in episode 2A of Historie(s) du cinema, Seul le cinema, the reference has changed slightly (Cocteau's name has gone missing) but the aim is still to give a definition of cinema in terms deriving from myth and poetry: 'Cinema authorises Orpheus to turn round without causing Euridice's death.' For Godard, cinema not only shows but also conquers death.

Myths as we know never die, they just assume new disguises. Claude Levi-Strauss observed that the interpretations of myths 'are themselves instances of the myth, prolongations or variations of its narrative logic'. So it is with Orpheus, who has been busy reinventing himself since he last plucked his lyre. In a brilliant essay that anatomises the place of this myth in Godard's work, Jacques Aumont claims that the director has often returned to Orphee, and in Alphaville, Allemagne annee 90 and Helas pour moi (1993) he finds the film's "disguised remakes". Orpheus is the 'code name' for cinema which posesses 'the power to look behind itself and, in the same look, to bring history forward and to make it disappear'.

"Filmed, the past freezes, but can die no longer. [...] such is the horizon of the Orphic metaphor: the cinema is that which endows us with another memory... Cinema remembers everything, virtually and sometimes for real, but it has changed our way of remembering ourselves, changed the contents of our memory, changed memory itself."

In Cocteau's film Orphee is guided through the Zone, wading in slow motion through the limbo between the lands of the living and the dead; 'time is the wind he must walk against'. Could it be the same wind invading Lemmy's hotel room at the end of Allemagne annee 90? If so this wind makes twins of Orpheus and Benjamin's Angel, both of them traveling in time, continually turning to look back at where they've come from, caught at the moment of crossing a boundary, one passing from the darkness of the underworld to the light, the other propelled forward from Paradise by 'progress'. As Aumont acknowledges, the Orphic metaphor for Cinema at work in Godard's films is ambiguous. In having looked back at the past, cinema casts its light forward in time as well: cinema 'projects'."

- Chris Darke, Alphaville pp. 94-6

another excellent excerpt of the text (which also has a brief discussion about the cultural semiotics of a gated community just outside Sao Paulo called, fantastically, Alphaville) is available here

wunderkammeren, strings and static...

the evening of the 3rd of July saw me embarking on further collaborative sonic explorations with Black Boned Angel guitarist, Stumps drummer, Sandoz Lab Technicians multi-instrumentalist and general improv polymath James Kirk.

taking the opportunity, while i was in Wellington, to build on some investigations begun in Dunedin at Lines of Flight last May, we began to clarify a method around the minimalist use of strings and static, finding an instrumental base in radios, erhu, violin, and melodica, and a manifest expression in small summations of broken melodies, careful fragments and drift, with a vaguely Sandozian-eastern feel.

Harnessing the effects pedal James uses with Black Boned Angel added a whole new sonic palette to my violin, with drones like arctic ice and deep space becoming the backing to a delicate foreground of whispering acoustics and feathery aetheric scratchiness...

I recorded about half an hour of audio. a fairly sketchy edit snipped off this, called 'from the pencil area' is listenable here

-----

"... we each discover our own silence, we each recreate silence as a metaphor. From noise to silence, from panic to quiescence, from catastrophe to calm: the very existence of silence both depends on noise, and permits noise to exist"

- Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio

"I have become increasingly preoccupied with atmosphere. Somehow I wanted to move what I'm doing (intention) towards this notion of atmosphere, an activity where we're not aware of technique, of instrument, of playing, of music even, but instead as feeling/sensation suspended in space, perhaps what Feldman meant by music as time, energising to the air, making the silence (unintention) audible."

- Keith Rowe, liner notes for Duos for Doris

radio cegeste with Motoko Kikkawa at NONE

the first public unveiling of the violin / radio duo with Mo Kikkawa on the 20th of June came at the end of my two month stay in Dunedin, as the closing act of a gig which umbrellaed a variety of new combinations of artists from NONE's dynamic, vibrant improvised music community.

i've posted the second part, or more correctly the 'encore', here

a video of the first part of the performance by Edie Eves is on vimeo and also to be found blogged at the free103point9 newsroom here

Radio Cegeste from Edie Eves on Vimeo.

thankyou to Markus Gradwohl and also to Edie for the wonderful documentation, and to Matt Middleton for such a fittingly aphoristic recall of the event's ghost-on-the stairs driftscapes (whose bogan aether-spectres appeared less as the ubiquitous air-guitar solo than in the form of the opening organ refrain from Andrew Lloyd Webber's 'Phantom of the Opera', incessantly wafting in from some obscure, unpluggable radiophonic wormhole) on the ever-readable Crude blog :

"Radio Cegeste - Stairwell install - Ghost channels - Bogan Ghosts scream for Stairway to Heaven - Fine-tune my Runes - Droppers und Spoons - Motoko/Vapour/Viol - Ether transmit - Aurorae, Weather, Morse - European Venous Forum - Estonian Volleyball Foundation - Quantum Rind - "

Kikkawa/McIntyre/Noyes

the fertile creative laboratories of Dunedin's NONE community continue to provide ample avenues for collaboration, and opportunities to test out the creative instrumental potential of transmission art as one blip on the experimental music spectrum. An improvisatory exercise with violinist Motoko Kikkawa and percussionist Lee Noyes on June 6 lasted for over two hours.

This was the first time i'd used the kitset Theremin as part of the radio cegeste setup.

with many thanks to Lee for the photos.

string chamber static...

collaborative improvisational activities with Japanese born, Dunedin based violinist Motoko Kikkawa, involving transmitter, hand held radios, violin, and voice are proving fertile ground, and bouncing fruitfully off my solo 'bowed airwaves' violin/radio experiments.

As with the latter, I am finding with this as yet unnamed duo that the tonal similarities between violin and radio static, and/or violin-broadcast-through-radio-static can be breathtaking. Woven in with Mo's vocal range and her violin (as opposed to what should probably be called my "anti-violin" in this context) things become more interesting still.

Mo was involved in the Tokyo Grand Guignol group (which included Yasunao Tone, Otomo Yoshihide, et al) as a teenager, and is now a dynamic part of many NONE associated bands including the duo Tsunami No Orikata (with Toki Wilson), The Readytronics (with Toki Wilson, ISO12, and Rachel Blackburn) and the wonderful Piano Queen Rainbow Star Telephone (with pretty much everyone).

For the purposes of this particular project, she plays Suzuki-trained strings and vocalises (both in Japanese and in some unearthly ur-language), and I call up the ghostly debris of signal from the aether, transmit various instrumental field recordings, and sympathetically scratch away on the 'deconstructed' violin at points.

There's an interesting interplay, almost a call and response, between her all-acoustic input and my end of things, which is mainly lo-fi electronics. Sometimes a creakily noise-infused signal of a radiophonic voice or a theremin sound will act as catalyst for a live vocal equivalent, and transmission of violin sounds will mingle with live violin. We have hit some great synchronicities and disjunctures in this manner.

Our second event/experiment/broadcast with this instrumental setup was conducted in the stairwell of NONE on the afternoon of June 4. more than the usual amount of thanks to Toki Wilson, who was drawn out of his fever-dreaming sickbed to take the following roving video footage...

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."

---

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

repetition and difference

my arrival back in Christchurch to witness the final performance of local experimental supergroup Grunge Genesis in the week noise guitarist, G'n'G member and amateur ethnomusicologist Richard Neave was preparing to leave the country for another Orientalist foray also produced a subsequent flurry [Apr 18-25] of last-minute home recording sessions, a concentrated creative space and an accompanying wealth of material [RN: koto, shamisen, shinobue, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, violin, voice / SM: violin, Mini FM transmitter, field recordings, transistor radios, music box, voice], which I am currently trying to get my head around... there are a couple of preliminary edits (named 'die tote stadt' and 'intaglio') posted in mp3 form here. perhaps it sounds something like the missing link between Ent Lang's "cold, a harvest" and Michiyo Yagi... I am excited about this collaboration.

“…the domestic insects of which I am going to speak are mostly night-singers, and must not be confounded by the Semi (cicadae).... the Japanese find as much difference between the notes of night-insects and of cicadae as we find between those of larks and sparrows; and regulate their cicadae to the vulgar place of chatterers. Semi therefore are never caged. The national liking for caged insects does not mean a liking for mere noise…”

- Lafcadio Hern, Exotics and Retrospectives, 1898

radio free NONE / the book of margins

an improvisatory radio cegeste broadcast was recorded on the afternoon of the 11th of February, in the main gallery of NONE, at 24 Stafford street, Dunedin. For just over an hour, my transmissions were channelled through the instruments, bodies and sensibilities of None denziens and multitalented improvisers Alex MacKinnon, Toki Wilson, and Edwina Stevens.

For most of this time, the Mini FM transmitter was activated in a no-input and hands-on manner, effectively treated as akin to an unwieldy, unstable Theremin, although a small amount of playback material, sourced from recordings made the day before at a group violin/cello improv jam session with free-string group Strork, whose players included Alastair Galbraith, John White, Alan Starrett, Motoko Kikkawa & Nigel Bunn as well as myself, crept into the last quarter of the session.

thanks to Alex for the recording. an excerpt of it can be found in Mp3 form here

radio cegeste at Chicks Hotel, Dunedin

the inaugural radio cegeste live micro radio performance on 12th Dec 2008 involved creating a site-specific radio programme for the iconic, historically notorious Chicks Hotel, in Port Chalmers, Dunedin. a playlist of environmental and anecdotal field recordings collected around the Port Chalmers area within 24 hours of broadcast were played back via itunes, handmade Mini FM transmitter and hand-held radio receivers.

Nigel Bunn helped me collect the field recordings. Our sonic mapping exercise took in various indoor and outdoor, cultural and natural environments. Along the way I also talked to a church organist about trains, a publican about the artist Ralph Hotere, children exiting a school bus, and the Chicks Hotel proprietor Hector Hazard about his attempts to 'unlearn the guitar'.

I shared a bill with various improvised noise / sound practitioners and DJs from Christchurch and Dunedin : Adam Willetts, Dirt Room, EYE, and A'sides for Betaville. Kim Pieters took the following performance photographs.

'from Mini FM to Hacktivists : a guide to Art and Activism' and Mini FM building workshops led by Tetsuo Kogawa at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery

The Govett Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth's recently arrived curator of Contemporary Art, formerly NYC based art critic Mercedes Vicente, put together an exhibition entitled from Mini FM to Hacktivists: a Guide to Art and Activism as her first contribution to the gallery's programmes. 

Drawing somewhat on lines of thinking around pre-internet prehistories, in the way so wonderfully set out in Annmarie Chandler & Norie Neumark (eds)'
At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet, Vicente included New Zealand practitioners as part of this dialogue.

——

From Mini-FM to Hacktivists: A Guide to Art and Activism

2005-12-10 until 2006-03-03

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

New Plymouth, New Zealand (Aotearoa)

 The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery is pleased to present From mini-FM to hacktivists: a guide to art and activism from 10 December to 3 March 2006. Curated by Mercedes Vicente this is her first exhibition as the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s new Curator, Contemporary Art. The artists featured include: Greg Bordowitz (US), Fiona Clark (NZ), Alannah Currie (NZ), John Di Stefano (NZ), Marcelo Expósito (SP), Annie Goldson (NZ), Adam Hyde (AMS/NZ), Zita Joyce (NZ), Tetsuo Kogawa (JP), LTTR (US), neuroTransmitter (US), Paper Tiger TV & Deep Dish TV (US), Oliver Ressler & David Thorne (AU/US), Martha Rosler (US), Allan Sekula (US), The Yes Men (US), 0100101110101101 (Eva and Franco Mattes) (IT)

Vicente says: “From mini-FM to hacktivists examines contemporary artistic and activist practices in the context of alternative media and provides the historical grounding for today’s internet collaborations. It illustrates a new paradigm of counter information in communications as well as in artistic practices.”

Three components make up the show including; installation works; an interactive media lab; and a programme of documentary screenings in the Gallery theatre. This exhibition presents the mini-FM project of Tetsuo Kogawa, founder of free radio in Japan in the early 80s, whose model has influenced media activists and artists such as the collective neurotransmitter and artists Adam Hyde and Zita Joyce. Representing the anti-globalisation movement is Allan Sekula’s Waiting for tear gas (white globe to black) 1999-2000, a photo reportage of the Seattle World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests. Martha Rosler revisits one of her most emblematic photomontage series Bringing the war home: house beautiful 1967-2005, which draws a parallel between the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. Marcelo Expósito’s video Radical Imagination (Carnivals of Resistance) 2004 documents the Reclaim of the streets movement which brought commercial life to a standstill in London in 1999.

Taking the form of guerrilla cybertactics the collectives The Yes Men and 0100101110101101.org clone news and spoof websites creating a great deal of confusion and succeeding in exposing the effects and ideologies behind global corporations. Fiona Clark uses photography as a political tool to fight community issues. Her series Arial views 1980, presented for the first time in a Gallery context, were used by local Te Atiawa Iwi in a court case against the destructive waste generated by an expanding Taranaki energy industry.

The media lab includes a selection of recent video productions by Paper Tiger TV and Deep Dish TV who have been providing shows for public access TV via cable and satellite in the US since the 80s. An extensive programme of documentary films will feature works by Annie Goldson, John Di Stefano, Greg Bordowitz, LTTR, Leon Narbey, among others, whose strong social and political commitment as a natural progression of their own politics introduce public awareness and change. Vicente has recently returned from New York after opening her show "If it’s too bad to be true, it could be disinformation". This exhibition has received reviews in both The New York Times and ArtForum and will travel to the Blackwood Gallery in The University of Toronto at Mississauga, Canada from 4 January to 28 February 2006.  

——

I reviewed the show for Flash Art International, although the link to this is no longer online.

Public programmes included a weekend of workshops by Japanese Mini FM pioneer, philosopher and radio artist, Tetsuo Kogawa. The ADA network archived a page with some information and photos of the workshop HERE, and I’ve also used one above (credit to Stella Brennan). 

On a personal note, I built the transmitter which would eventually be used as a core component in the radio cegeste project in these workshops, and am so very grateful to Tetsuo for both his generosity of knowledge and his facilitative role in starting me on this line of praxis.

Here is the original writeup for the workshops:

---------------------------

BEGINNERS WORKSHOP FOR ADULTS

Saturday February 4^th, 1-4pm

Tetsuo Kogawa will introduce this workshop with a lecture on the mini-FM movement, and the means and objectives of "hacktivism" in electronic technology, providing a projection on the history and uses of mini-FM.

After the lecture, he will conduct a workshop for adults (10 people maximum) on how to build a simple mini-FM transmitter. Later performing with the transmitter for 30 minutes showing the interesting characters of airwaves and demonstrating the possibilities of transmitters as an art form. Participants will experience how to broadcast themselves with their newly-built transmitters.

This workshop is free but requires pre-registration due to limited space. To register and further details please phone 06 759 6060 or emailgovettinfo@govettbrewster.com .

ADVANCED WORKSHOP

Sunday February 5^th, 3:30-6:30pm

Following the beginners workshop this advanced workshop (10 participants maximum) will deconstruct a simple transmitter and will transform the pre-existing simple transmitter into a more powerful radio and a TV transmitter. The advanced participants will learn how to make a power meter, a booster and an antenna.Tetsuo will set up a FM radio station for the community and a micro TV station for indoor video experiments in the studio where the workshop will take place and will demonstrate the multiple possibilities of these transmitters.

This workshop is free but requires pre-registration due to limited space. To register and for further details please phone 06 759 6060 or emailgovettinfo@govettbrewster.com.

-----------------------

RADIOART PARTY and PHONE INTERVIEWS

Sunday February 5^th, 6:30-9.30pm

After the workshop there will be a radio party open to all workshop participants and general audience that will take place in one of the galleries. Tetsuo will set up one or two temporary micro radio stations in this gallery (every participant will have their own station if there is enough free frequency space) and will be open to the public participation. There will be various radio programs and radio art performance shows. Visual, sound and dj artists are invited and encouraged to participate.

Towards the end of the radio party, he will conduct live phone interviews to media activists such as DeeDee Halleck (founder of Paper Tiger TV, US), Franco Berardi aka. Bifo (founder of Radio Alicia in Bologna, IT), Peter Wilson aka. Hakim Bay (US), Elisabeth Zimmermann (Director of Kunstradio, Vienna), and Tonic Train (Sara Washington, co-founder of Resonance FM, London, and Kunut Aufermann). Tonic Train will have a sound performance. Other participants to be confirmed.

These phone interviews will be broadcasted live in the Gallery by the newly set-up transmitters and possibly streamed in the internet. Adam Hyde (NZ/NL) will join to the radio party with live streaming from Amsterdam. A PA system and video projector will feature some of these live interviews in the Gallery.