sally ann mcintyre is a sound/radio/transmission artist, writer and researcher. Beginning her creative output as a poet and influenced by long involvement in peer-to-peer experimental radio art networks and DIY experimental music and media arts cultures, she is guided by a critical allegiance to the technological trailing edge and the material media archive’s potential for re-imagining lost or latent possibilities in the present. Her work combines investigations into technical and conceptual aspects of sonic history, including radio’s ability to conjure the presences on the edge of listening. 

sally’s work since 2006 (as technician, operator and collaborator) with the mobile micro-radius project station radio cegeste 104.5FM, has led to the development of an experimental method of sonic fieldwork that, in incorporating expanded-field radio art and the active use of modernist audio recording and playback devices, allows intersections between sonic archives, environmental sites and mediated cultural histories. radio cegeste’s projects draw on media archaeological and transmission art methods in combination with field recording practice to focus on environmental change and crisis, and provide a critique of the extractive histories of collecting. Several recent projects focus on the unrecorded voices of birds driven to extinction within settler-Colonial encounter, revisiting the Natural History museum’s strata of ‘dead silences’ to invite these ghostly soundmarks back into particular physical sites and/or shared more-than-human cultural experience, with an emphasis on environmental witnessing, affective listening, cross-species mimicry, liminal silences, and the poetics of failure within mediated representation. Other works consider the expanded field of transmission media in relation to media ecologies, such as the embodied relations between birds and radio as operators of electromagnetic “sky media.” In these works, the troubling histories of the concept of “Nature” are approached variously as inscription within technological forms, archival databases and cultural narratives, while being simultaneously re-interpreted as a relational, more-than-human material, vibratory, embodied strata of forces that normally remains inaudible and invisible outside both the human sensorium and cultural representation.

Recent works include Study for a data deficient species (grey ghost transmission) (2016), commissioned for the exhibition Das Grosse Rauchen: the Metamorphosis of Radio, curated by Anna Friz for the Radio Revolten radio art festival in Halle, Germany; Collected huia notations (like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded) (2015), nominated for the 2019 Share Prize for contemporary artists working at the intersection of technology and science in Turin, Italy; and Post-extinction huia soundings, Te Whanganui-a-Tara 1912-1924, (2023) a sonic fieldwork project commissioned by The Pyramid Club in Poneke/Wellington, that traced extinction geographies and the concept of sonic environmental witnessing across several sites where the extinct huia (Heteralocha acutirostris) was seen in the wider Wellington region after the species’ official extinction date of 1907, playing back phonographic wax cylinders recorded with 19th century written notation of huia calls.

sally was a 2024 Wave Farm artist in residence, presenting the project Ion and bird: a test transmission for the Atlantic Flyway as a dual performance on-site to a live audience at Wave Farm’s transmission art Park in Acra, NY, and over the airwaves of WGXC 90.7 FM. This project drew on an expanded palette of electroacoustic and radiophonic instrumentation including bird-tracking telemetry systems used with migratory shorebirds on the Atlantic Flyway, and VLF (Very Local Frequency) radio using local Hudson valley trees as aerials.