TWIN SIGNALS AT SILVER STREAM (fragments of a landscape for specimens #50.766 & #50.767)

 

TWIN SIGNALS AT SILVER STREAM (FRAGMENTS OF A LANDSCAPE FOR SPECIMENS #50.766 & #50.767)

Drawing on the medium of radio’s ability to connect across time and distance, Twin signals at Silver Stream (fragments of a landscape for specimens #50.766 & #50.767) (2016-18) listens in to the global flows of colonial extractive economies via two minor silences present as traces in the landscape of contemporary Aotearoa/New Zealand. A new performance work and installation themed around erasure, the audible trace, extinction, colonial-era collecting, and silence, the piece utilises micro-radio transmission as a conduit for speculative forms of sonic repatriation.

Sceloglaux albifacies is an extinct New Zealand bird commonly known as the Whekau or Laughing Owl, once found nesting in rocky crevices in the remote landscapes of the South Island. In October 2016, one male (specimen #50.766) and one female (specimen #50.767) of this species were encountered in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien (National Museum of Natural History, Vienna), as part of the collections of Andreas Reischek, an Austrian taxidermist and self-taught naturalist who spent over a decade roaming New Zealand in the late nineteenth century, appropriating an immense collection of ethnographic and natural history artefacts, including a near-complete set of New Zealand birds, the largest of its kind to ever travel to Europe. A local footnote within the totalising and globalising drives of Reischek’s taxonomic catalogue, the pair of owls were collected by the naturalist at Silver Stream, Otago, a small river near Mosgiel, in 1884, thirty years before the species was declared officially extinct.

a Deaf Cinema for Thylacinus cynocephalus.

“It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.”

- Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

“…I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire… I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing
(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth--
we call it life. We know no other.
The underworld's a blank
and all the rest just fantasy.” 
- Euripides, as translated by Anne Carson, in Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

For a cultural heritage site of some significance, the former Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart is surprisingly overlooked. Over the course of a few days in October 2017, on the site of its derelict ruin (which is locked, and currently inaccessible to the public) near the Botanical Gardens in the Queens Domain, almost no-one comes by as I place highly sensitive contact microphones alongside various open-air microphones, to record whatever might be audible there. Together, both pick up the movement of metal and wooden fences and padlocked gates, the vibrations of structures in wind, the guttural croaking of endemic Tasmanian forest ravens (Corvus tasmanicus) and the eerie melodiously rhythmic warblings of black currawongs (Strepera fuliginosa) twisting in the air like mobiles or sonic DNA structures, the melancholy monotony of water falling from objects, the deep juddering of cars on the street going by from the same direction as the occasional, softer yet more startling human footstep, my own movements as observer. These sounds together begin to create a sightless image of the predominant life of the site, in absence of direct attention from people, which is also a gathering picture of the desolation of its abandon: an expanse of field containing a few crumbling, indeterminate concrete structures, a swampy area attended by Tasmanian native waterfowl sitting incongruously inside a ringed-off area of faded hi-vis tape.

  

'dead silence: ecological silencing and environmentally engaged sound art' : paper by Dugal McKinnon, at New Zealand School of Music, Wellington

Dr. Dugal McKinnon of the New Zealand School of Music gave this talk at the Adam Concert Room in Wellington today, about silence in ecologically minded sound work, in which he discussed two works I made during my Kapiti Island residency, Collected Silences for Lord Rothschild, and Huia Transcriptions.

More of Dugal's writing can be read on his blog here.

'selected radio memorials'

a suite of transmission works collected from the last few years' somewhat consistent low-level preoccupation with narrowcast radio and local seismic activity are to be included in Simulcast, a group exhibition of radio works running at the Audio Foundation's Auckland space from the 7th - 30th of March, also including work by Auckland artists Ivan Masic and Jay Hollows, and a 'radio wormhole' linking Auckland to central Christchurch, a sonic transfer of the everydayness of each locale opened up for the month's duration by Zita Joyce.