There’s a 1921 poem by Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, where he talks in a primary way about the first time radio waves erupted into consciousness through early human apprehensions of radio. It’s filtered through the utopianism of Russian Futurism, but he was a gentle lover of nature, and he rightly equated the sounds of early radio to birdsong, calling them “this stream of lighting birds”. That idea that the unearthly crackles and cheeps at the border of sense that radio makes audible could be related to birdsong is something I’ve been working with.

Lately I’ve been working a lot with the sounds of bird migration tracking systems. I recorded some big MOTUS bird tracking antennae in upstate New York when I was there on a residency last year, and I also have a small bird tracking device that’s a radio transmitter and receiver setup that’s normally used on domestic parrots or falcons so their owners know where they are in flight, which I’ve been using as a sound device. I first saw these devices in use by conservationists in the field when I was doing an artist residency on the isolated New Zealand bird sanctuary Kapiti Island in 2012, and was following some Kiwi Scientists around who were pointing them at the rugged hills from the beach, and bush bashing their way to the kiwis, following the signals.

Aesthetically I like to make sounds that exist on the edge of listening or that sound like they’re happening at 3am when everyone is asleep, maybe because I’ve often been up at that time or used those hours to broadcast to others’ dream states, or listen or think and write. I’m fascinated by the complex worlds within static. The silence at the beginning of the universe you hear in empty radio bands. This comes through listening to natural phenomena like auroras and lighting strikes, and radio phenomena, but also the grain of media history. These sounds at the edge of listening that become audible through the translation of not only mechanical devices but natural forms like birds.

When I started the MESS residency there was a new strange astral body discovered in space, a form of dead star that belongs to a new class of objects called long-period radio transients (LPTs), that pulse on timescales of minutes and hours, distinguishing them from pulsars. I’ve been thinking about those slowly pulsing dead stars quite a lot while in the studio at night, and that’s affected the sounds I’ve been making on devices I’ve been using. 

As an artist I’m interested in an ecological approach. My aim is always to use projects to understand where I am and orient myself toward becoming more aware of other forms of sentience and sensory activity within my environment, including those hidden aspects of the world that exist beyond my very limited human range of sensory comprehension. This includes paying attention to the border between both the heard and the unheard, or the perceivable and the imperceivable, and also the border between technology and what we might still sometimes call nature. This started when I was a child in the bush in Tasmania and became aware of the silences and absences around me within seemingly lush natural places, which I came to understand as silences that still had presence.  So, the sensory space of listening as a sensitive translation between and across more-than-human worlds. I also want to listen historically, to those audible spaces within the long history of the interaction between humans and other creatures we share or once shared the world with – often these encounters are latent within seemingly static histories contained in archives and museums. But you can always listen anew.

I link this to a wider, expanded definition of media that sees media forms as not being the sole domain of humans or this very narrow definition of technology that we’ve come to adopt. I have been working on a project in the past few years about bird migration and electromagnetism that considers birds as radio operators, within their use of global electromagnetic currents as a navigational mechanism, which is very old and completely embedded as a form of knowledge. We used to mystify it as “the sixth sense,” but we now know that it’s electromagnetism. It predates the so-called discovery of radio or radar by millions of years.

An ecological approach also involves a commitment to the studio and hands-on experimental process, that places the embodied ear of the artist as only one part of a circuit within a wider system. So listening to what’s actually there, and not preceding through the imposition of pre-formed or fixed ideas or images, but learning from the time spent and the interactions that happen – in this case with objects, machines, and systems. I learned a lot of this through being involved with grass roots experimental music communities in New Zealand, which place a high value on tinkering and experiment, collaboration, anti-spectacle, noise at the border of signal, and a sliding scale of non-musicality that at its extreme turns into an active anti-virtuosic stance. So, I’m a materialist when it comes to technology as well – I am obliged to use it and interact with it, not treat it as a form of image-making. In this space, the objects are always my teachers, and I follow them, and listen to what they have to say. If they’re 100 years old, all the better, as they can communicate about timescales longer than my own lifetime and things I have never experienced, and eras when things were able to be imagined differently. In practice this has informed my interest in mechanical music, and early sound reproduction from the pre-electrical era. It’s vastly different to listen to a phonographic way cylinder live through a projecting horn, and one recorded and played back through a wav. file on a stereo speaker system. The way that mechanical music can evoke forms of memory is useful for ecological listening. It’s advantageous for playing back notation of extinct birds that were never directly recorded, that went extinct when this technology was still in its infancy. It suggests what a recording of that creature would have sounded like, but it also imposes the more important question of why would actually want a recording of something that’s no longer alive. What does that preserve? Why do we collect sound libraries, and what does that say about us and our approach to both culture and memory within capitalist culture?

It’s a rare thing to be able to interact with some of the machines that MESS is the custodian of, like the 1933-34 Theremin prototype – to actually be able to use this is an incredible opportunity to tangibly interact with and to touch how histories of sound making technology function, and bring these lost possibilities back into the present.

As a radio artist I’m primarily interested in how some of the machines at MESS are creative explorations of the possibilities of radio waves when radio was only starting to become a major medium and its experimental possibilities were still being explored. In his early 1990s manifesto of radio art Tetsuo Kogawa talks about Heidegger’s notion that you can see the most extreme possibilities at the beginning and end of a technology.

So it’s easy to apply that insight to the theremin – which is the first and most famous radiophonic instrument, and which in some ways looks like one of the cabinet radios built for domestic use in the 1930s, or the ondes musicales which is a remake of the original Ondes Martenot from 1928.

These machines are also great teachers. They also speak a lot of the ongoing intersections between electronic music and the state, including the development of military technologies, state surveillance and espionage. The theremin that’s in MESS’s collection was made by Lev Termin by hand in his New York studio, just before his return to the Soviet Union. He disappeared for years, but we now know that in 1938 he was sent to a work Gulag and then ended up imprisoned in a laboratory developing surveillance listening devices for the Stalinist state for a decade. Which is a fairly sad development of the situation in the 1920s in the USSR where avant garde arts were supported by the Revolutionary state. Lev was invited to the Kremlin to demonstrate the theremin to Lenin, who loved it and reportedly had a go, playing a composition called “skylark.” These histories are latent in the machines themselves.  

So interacting with the 1933-34 prototype Theremin is my MESS highlight. Within the MESS collection its positioned as a precursor to everything else. It’s also the first time radio art really became physical. I’ve used Moog theremins but they’re quite different, much more limited. My little radio station, radio cegeste, is named after a dead poet in a 1950 film by Jean Cocteau but it also translates to “radio ce geste,” or something like “radio this gesture.” I’ve been making unwieldy, imprecise noise theremins with the interactions between heterodyning radios and transmitters for a decade or more in my live performance setup as radio cegeste. That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about while in the MESS studio.

The challenges of my time at MESS are just the usual ones. Creative stuff doesn’t pay, especially experimental work, so despite MESS’s extremely generous support of artists, I haven’t spent as much time in the collections as I would have liked to. In Melbourne I have to have a day job so I work as an academic. I trained in literature, and had great teachers that seemed to spend most of their time writing books and chatting to their honours students about T S Eliot and Malcom Lowry over cups of tea in their offices, but that’s a lost world now. As this sector gets further away from employing people properly, this becomes less sustainable, and less attractive. Before that, I spent years on the dole in Dunedin, in these impossibly grand, decaying houses that had ballrooms but no real functional kitchen, tinkering around, doing little collaborations, and performing gigs, often in those very same houses, to about 8-15 people. Often we couldn’t afford to turn the heater on in the winter. So there’s been a long navigation around how to focus on a coherent and sustained line of creative thinking and working, despite either having no money or no time. Ideally I would find a happy median, where creative research took precedence and the day job could be left at the door. I certainly wouldn’t be marking 400 first year media studies essays over two week timeframes on a regular basis. That saps the will to create, and perhaps to live; it leaves no time for anything else.

I was actually given the advice, quite young by an older artist, that the best thing an artist can do is to persevere, to keep making work. I stick to that.