date: 26.6.2009
time: 2.00pm
location: Victoria University, Wellington / the Ontological Hysteric Theater, Manhattan
simulcast: icecast to free103point9's Noise! festival
notes: The 26th of June was a rainy Friday in New Zealand's capital city, and the aether was filled with reports of Michael Jackson's death (at 11am that day, NZ time), as I prepared a 2pm radio cegeste transmission to the other side of the globe from a lecture theatre at Victoria University of Wellington's school of architecture and design.
My half hour set opened the second night of New York state transmission arts organisation free103point9's Noise! 2009
festival, held at the Ontological Hysteric Theater in Manhattan. This
festival had a local/global distributed element, as each of its four
nights began with an artist casting in their performance from another
location somewhere around the globe. The
dislocated present-ness of being live at such a distance, when combined
with the bounded locality of Mini FM, fragmented the live immediacy of
the radio cegeste project in fascinating ways, and the two sided
anonymity of the performance, in so many ways like a traditional radio
broadcast, framed the sonic content. This
was a palimpsest of noise and archival material, including laptop-mixed
location recordings of New Zealand natural and cultural spaces,
theremin, music box, the activation of aleatory airwaves, and live and
recorded/transmitted violin, as well as some guest appearances by some
of my favourite etheric ghosts: '80s one hit wonder The Buggles ("in my
mind and in my car / we can't rewind we've gone too far" as Cocteau
might have been thinking when writing code-transmission for Death's
black Rolls Royce) and fleeting Cegestions of the electromagnetic poetry
channel of Jack Spicer
the first half of this performance can be heard here