Constance ARI

Foyer Gallery

Sally Ann McIntyre

A listening air./They are that that talks of going

Sally Ann McIntyre works with radio transmission as a form of fieldwork, and a set of expanded possibilities for artistic intervention into the inaudible and invisible aspects of sites. Approaching Tasmania's old growth forest, not through the contemplative, naturalist myth of wilderness in a 'pure' state, but as a historical and cultural text with its own sense of active witnessing, she proposes to enlist some of the tallest specimens on the Forestry Tasmania register. These will be approached as collaborators, becoming both the source, and the conductors, of sound, in a process combining semi-utopian early 20th century scientific experiments in turning trees into broadcast radio aerials, with more recent bioacoustic techniques for tree sonification. The project aims to gather and make available the knowledge of a "library of superlative trees" in order to build a possible archive of environmental witnessing, through a form of pseudoscientific poetics, approaching this sonification of the voices of the state's oldest trees as akin to the faux-ethnographic collecting of a untranslated language, which potentially contains traces of a centuries-old Tasmanian memory.  

Bio:

Sally Ann Mcintyre lives and works in Dunedin, New Zealand. Harnessing the material of the airwaves to the practices of phonography and more archival forms of sound-collecting, she programmes a micro radio project station (radio cegeste 104.5FM) as a sporadic, mobile, small-radius platform for unstable site-responsive radio art events. radio cegeste was originally built in a workshop with the Japanese radio artist Tetsuo Kogawa in 2006, to his simplest transmitter mini-FM schematic. Following Tetsuo's thinking that "airwaves are wasteful and not ecological. Big radio is no more necessary," Sally has, since then, operated radio cegeste as a decentralised, distributed, localised, minor, artist-run and nomadic form of the medium, opening its small circle of transmission as a fleeting clearing within many contexts and environments. Projects consider sound, ecology, memory and transmission through research-based, curatorial, and artistic investigations. not unrelatedly, sally is the New Zealand programmer for the 24 station radia network, which promotes the airwaves as a peer-to-peer exhibition venue for radio art; for each radia season she commissions a new radio art work from a New Zealand (or Australian) artist and hosts the weekly radia program on the Dunedin independent broadcaster radio one 91FM.