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

I wrote a review of a group show called Breathing Space, shown at the Physics Room, for Christchurch's Presto magazine...

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breathing space

Bekah Carran, Regan Gentry, Shaun Gladwell, Maddie Leach, Nathan Thompson, P. Westbourne

The Physics Room, 6 th - 30 th April

Wandering into a Christchurch winter sans car, my thoughts quickly turn to my umbrella, a svelte and slender creature from the early 20 th century with (if you’ll forgive the fetishist’s attention to minutiae) a long silver pinnacle spike and tooled black crocodile leather handle. Unfurling this wonderfully graceful and culturally loaded object, which is really less a thing than a ‘vehicle’ (in the sense of a transformative spatial possibility) always seems a quiet clarion call to a less utilitarian existence. The appeal of umbrellas has to do with the zone of selfhood they open up, which, due to their embedded sense of near-flaneuristic dalliance, encourages introspective slowness. Functioning as the small roof of an illusory portable room, which nevertheless the body inhabits as though it were a space, an umbrella in rainy weather is an exceptionally comforting ‘breathing space’, whereby, sheltered both from the sight of others and from the wide grey vistas of sublimity that the sky holds, the ‘outside’ is, for a moment, scaled to more intimate, more human dimensions. Under an umbrella there is room and time to stroll about, and to think, and to look at things. It frames the outer world just as it constructs a certain type of contained individuality, a typically elusive sense of personhood, through its delimited solitariness. As such, it arises out of the same post-Enlightenment spectatorship base as the traditional experience of visiting an art gallery, and becomes an exceedingly good, if appropriately digressive, vantage point from which to begin to look at the group show breathing space.

breathing space is concerned with ‘leisure and its relationship to the contemporary art gallery’, and from the outset, P Westbourne’sRain Song declares the show’s focus to be less about ‘easily consumable leisure events’, or products and activities designed as ‘entertainments’ by the monolithic cultural entities of hyper-capitalism, than about how art can function as a zone in which to isolate and frame those ever-diminishing small, private, playful experiences of ‘free time’, and understand them as personally valuable. Recorded in Bergen, “one of the rainiest cities in the world”, Rain Song is an audio work comprised of field recordings of rain hammering against the outer fabric of an umbrella. Situated in the Physics Room’s foyer area, the work literally meets you at the door, and as such functions in the wider context ofbreathing space as threshold, a sonic sorbet that cleans the sensual palette of everyday assumptions about the ways in which artworks, spectators, and bodies inhabit space. The work is deceptively simple, and in playing back an extended moment of the everyday, which would normally flow by us as unrecorded sonic blind-spot, the sensual properties of that moment are vividly transferred. To stand underneath the cone speaker, substituted here for the umbrella’s improvisational ‘drum skin’, is to be aware of how much of our embodied experience is linked to audibility, as the ‘spectatorship’ of such a work becomes as much to do with the skin prickling on your arms as small hairs stand on end, and with the relaxing of your stomach muscles in response to the inherently comforting reverberations of rain, as it does the experience of seeing. The situating of a sound work in a group show comprised mainly of visual work, is in itself a pointer to a more fluid apprehension of art’s placing, as sound is inherently uncontainable by walls, and as such will influence the viewer’s experience of other works.

Walking, then, into breathing space, other free time activities which emphasise solitary space and patience rather than collective consumption and instant gratification are encountered, including the jigsaw puzzle (a more indoor ‘rainy day’ activity), referenced in Regan Gentry’s Re-jigged, although here, instead of fitting together seamlessly, the bright touristic optimism of a New Zealand “teatowel” style map is atomised to a kind of join the dots exercise which will never be finished. The experience of looking out the window becomes a dreaming reverie of transformative and mutative potential in Bekah Carran’s view from my window, in which, much like the forests invading the boy protagonist’s bedroom in seminal children’s story Where the Wild Things Are, the vegetation of the ‘outside’ permeates ‘inside’. Carran’s strikingly crafted urban weeds creep through the floorboards to investigate ideas about the hardiness of city sensibilities, the crossover of the fine arts and street art, and the permeation of the gallery space’s sterile enclosures with ‘viral’ narratives. Shaun Gladwell’s Tangara is a videoed performance of pure play, which pictures the artist in a public tram, hanging upside down on a railing. The image is inverted to suggest anti-gravity, expressing a wish to invert the assumptions we, as spectators, bring to everyday physical phenomena. Tangara also exposes the science fiction films and novels it references as fantasies of escape which, even when enacted with no resources, still transform space in the richness of the human imagination. Maddie Leach’s The Lilac Ship is similarly lo-fi in its visual depiction of a large ocean liner setting off on a voyage, connoting the social and private spaces enabled by ship travel, and the slowness and sublimity of seaward staring eyes. Projected onto the wall, its frame becomes a portal through the gallery space and out into the drift of imaginings both romantic and banal. Gentry’sTakeaways suggests that the activity par excellence of contemplative solitude is, of course, the museum or art gallery visit. A factory line of plaster-of-paris heads, cast from the artist’s own, wait quietly in line for their turn on a pedestal which, instead of elevating them into a museological permanence, will slowly turn them, via a sheet of sandpaper connected to a mechanism, into a pile of white dust. Deconstructing the classical bust, and also the modernist myth of the artist as ‘genius’, Gentry’s time-based installation also, quite wonderfully, seems to pastiche later histories of violent anti-establishment and self destructive gestures by (male) artists, with its inherent gentle politeness. Nathan Thompson’s Busytown is based on the artist’s apprehensions of the dislocating experience of moving to the big city, and as such, initially seems to form a counterexample to the intimate scale of the other works in breathing space. But on closer inspection, it is evident that the models made to represent the city are small in scale, clunkily made, with banks of flashing L.E.Ds glimmering sequinlike from their cardboard facades. The work evokes city wandering, spectatorship and dislocation, and the non-abject melancholy of the flaneur. Sound and image combine to produce phantasmagoric intimations of b-grade and early film, and long gaps in both sound and image play with the audience’s expectations of ‘entertainment’, ushering in the by-now familiar concepts of patience, solitude, open-endedness, the onus on personal response, and the inversion of expected experience, which are true of the show as a whole.

Sally Ann McIntyre

projekt# video art show at the physics room

a catalogue essay for the video art compilation Projekt# appeared in the Physics Room Annual 2004

it is online here

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Projekt#.
Essay by Sally Ann McIntyre

Dick Higgins, Fluxus artist and writer, wrote in 1966 that ‘much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media’. No real coincidence, then, that while having origins in the filmic and radiophonic technological developments of the early twentieth century, video art’s emergence from the nascent technologies of television also happened around this time. Now 40 years old, video is, arguably, the predominant postmodern meta-medium in its capacity to mix and dissolve the boundaries between media, to combine with and expand media, and to provide commentary on contemporary media saturated social realities. An invaluable insight into recent Australian video art, Projekt#, curated by Brendan Lee, is a travelling video archive documenting the work of artists using video in art contexts, much of which was originally destined for showing in the gallery space. Projekt# serves a dual function; to gather and document the localised history of video in Australia, and to serve as distribution system for new artists working within the genre.

Video art’s roots in the domestic space of television afford it an intimacy unknown to film, and personal video recorders have collapsed the distinction, preserved in film, between lived reality and the space of the media. Reality television is the most explicit statement of this. Artists in the Projekt# series draw upon such ideas in a variety of ways, including exploring the potential of home video and the internet to document hidden aspects of domestic realities. Kathy Bossinakis’ cry, for example, shows a markedly abject, adolescent-sociopathic list of (obviously fake) tortures enacted by a central female character on a cat, like Carolee Schneemann without the utopianism, as seen through the warped lens of the Chapman brothers. Elsewhere, in Matthew Griffin’s All eyes on Amin a dead girl on a pristine white ground spews blood from her mouth to a soundtrack of speed metal. More stark and simple gestures are foregrounded in Lyndal Jones’crying man 1, which in its depiction of a man crying against a bluescreen background is a succinct statement of video’s potential to zoom in both neutrally and incisively on the human subject. Jones’ piece was also shown as it was installed in a gallery setting, an attempt to portray the way in which the audio echoes in the space, and the way in which sound is, necessarily, an important component of video work.

The loop as a structural device is seen most succinctly in Emil Goh’s 1 minute at 9, and Daniel von Sturmer and Meri Bazevski’sDriveway Sequence, both of which use editing techniques to restructure linear concepts of time into lulling repetitive mantras. Leslie Eastman’s two works, Eraserhead and Several Provisional Contingencies not necessarily precluding the eventuality of Reconciliatory Union utilise similar concepts toward a reinvigoration of the medium of drawing, with each sketchy gesture enacted by the artist resisting the pull toward finality and definitiveness through the potential of video editing to rewind and erase events. The influence of popular culture - especially, perhaps, the music video - is everywhere, whether this be literally, in Philip Brophy’s clip for Honeysmack, which, referencing the cross-dressing Freddie Mercury, traces a musician’s search for his audience around the Melbourne suburbs, or in work such as the Kingpins’ Versus, which uses archival footage from the Leigh Bowery estate to re-enact Aerosmith and Run DMC’s walk this way, in a collaboration that time-leaps to the Eighties.

Britney Spears appears not once but twice, in Kate Murphy’sBritney Love, a faux-documentary biopic that explores the sexualising of prepubescent girl pop culture, and Sue Dodd’sFears for Spears, a performance-based piece that draws heavily both on music video and karaoke. Dodd sets her analysis of celebrity culture and media surveillance to a squelchy electro acid soundtrack, bringing to mind the Grunt Machine video catalogue, seen at the Physics Room in 1999, in which New Zealand artists explored connections between video art and the music video.

Sally Ann McIntyre

Audible

I curated the audio art exhibition Audible for the Physics Room Contemporary Art Space. Artists were Rachel Shearer, Richard Francis, John McCallum, Phil Dadson, r a d i o q u a l i a, and Wendyhouse. A sound show without spatial or imagistic works, the 'listening booths' were especially comissioned for the exhibition, and designed by Valentin Tinc. Audible's works were also broadcast as a series of programmes for Radio New Zealand's Revolutions Per Minute programme, hosted by Matthew Leonard.

the physics room site has a record of the show here

notes for a coastline

quite soon after meeting documentary filmmaker Zoe Roland on her move from Auckland to Christchurch, she commissioned me to write the script for a short experimental film she was working on, based around the 'bach' (holiday house) culture of the South Island seaside settlement of Gore Bay.

This film eventually became Notes for a Coastline, which drew on documentary, oral history, B&W 16mm shot on vintage Bolex cameras, found archival super-8 and experimental radiophony, layering a palimpsest of film and digital video footage, and audio interviews with community members with an essayistic monologue.

It had its inaugural screenings in the 2004 Homegrown programme of the NZ International Film Festivals (Wellington and Auckland), and a screening at the 5th biennial New Zealand Expanding Documentary Conference (2004). It went on to be included in the official selection of the Navarra International Documentary Film Festival (Spain) in 2005, as well as having a hometown showing that year at The Physics Room Contemporary Art Space

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"Notes for a Coastline” is an essayist documentary about cultural memory in regard to place; in this instance, Gore Bay, a beach settlement in the South Island of New Zealand. The narrative is a poetic exploration into the art of storytelling, which presents and muses upon the subject from a number of angles. It is “about” storytelling, a semi-scientific portrayal as well as a personal portrayal of the search of stories."

Director: Zoe Roland
Screenplay: Sally Ann McIntyre
Music: Ryan Smith
Sound: Zoe Roland, Sally Ann McIntyre, Nigel Bunn

Director of Photography: Nigel Bunn
Producer: Zoe Roland

the Forbidden Room

discussions with devised / media theatre group The Clinic (who were, at the time, much esteemed theatre critics on the Arts radio show Mag:net, which I was hosting on RDU98:3FM) about a project involving their workshopping my writing eventually led to the three act piece The Forbidden Room.

This piece was performed at Enjoy Gallery, Wellington, as part of the Wellington Fringe Festival (where it picked up the prize in Multimedia) and in Christchurch for a short run at the Physics Room Contemporary Art Space.

The first act involved interaction between screen based and live characters with a plot based loosely around incidents in the domestic life of Louis Althusser, the second act's puppet-like physical momentum was largely driven by a typewriter score, and the third act included references to the writing of Marguerite Duras as well as a live radio show, complete with performative foley effects.

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"The Forbidden Room is a collaboration with a writer, focused on the relationship between writing and acting, the text and the body. Taking the myth of Bluebeard as a narrative structure, we examine three different male-female and writer-written relationships. Performed in art galleries, the show also took a critical look at the 'forbidden room' of the world of contemporary art."

Director - Anastasis Dailianis
Scriptwriter - Sally McIntyre
Film design - Julieanne Eason
Performers - Lucette Hindin, Anastasia Dailianis
Additional direction – Haydn Kerr

Otomo Yoshihide in Christchurch

i interviewed Japanese experimental musician Otomo Yoshihide for radio station RDU98:3FM, during the Christchurch leg of his tour of New Zealand, just before the performance he gave in the foyer space of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery.

the interview, eventually transcribed for the Physics Room Contemporary Art Space's journal, Log Illustrated, is archived here, and also made its way here.