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

environmental radio : radio d' Oiseaux

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

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

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

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

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

- R. Murray Schafer

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

'jeanne d'arc / acousmatics of a beach, repeating'*

small unpicked signal

sounding among a whiteness of gulls.

almost inaudible as (a smile?)

as wind noise, a relation to skin

that shifts to recall

its wall as a doorway

this body’s openness closed

around its own (function)

fiction of warmth

the small, mammalian sun

which declares an unbroken circle

of blood to the line of cold

sharpening the grasses

with frost

& climbing into

it’s (percussive) onslaught as though

trailing through snow:noise a picture

in the decay, a voice, the white trail

of song dropped from a mouth

once kissed or otherwise

oddly residual, the fish-hook barb

of a sweet, sharp taste

lodged in the dry

authority of the eye

(warming a circle, chilling a line)

sucking like a series of sweets

the forward moving field of air

in small glowing mouthfuls

propped more or less vertically against

wind, sound stipples and shards crashing against the body’s lines

trying to get to the thing

buried at the end of the bone

white nautilus of the

cochlear spiral

where once, in another season

at the end of the track, the blinding opening

of a bay, gaped like an unspeakable optimism

an (unlipped) hope,

gapped (in potential) suddenly

the soundtrack cuts out…. a launch of pauses at drift in a discman’s

dead charge animating the individual waves in the sea’s monotone…

memory loops against the words that seal the eye’s telescopic glaze

into distance…. but you have no telescope,

only this soft technology… (and there is no power point anywhere on

the beach)... only these words or parts of words washing up among the

types of grains these rocks are.... you move around its text until unable to

differentiate an image’s edge, this puzzle of a face mixed up with other

scenes and scraps… these beached salt-crusted ‘70s sunglasses, (have

they been out there ever since. (shipwreck?))... you move around its text

its midden of found shards, flints, shells, not trying to find an old order,

or yet able to found another... and in waves some subtitled decade ends

as another begins and begins…

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*[first published alongside the poem 'stations (loop for paused morning)' in the 35th issue of Auckland based literary magazine Brief, September 2007, pp. 42-49. a pdf of the entire issue can be found here]