Twin signals at Silver Stream (fragments of a landscape for specimens #50766 & #50767)
Twin signals at Silver Stream (fragments of a landscape for specimens #50766 & #50767) is a radiophonic artwork that stages a site-specific memorial for two extinct owls, a male and female pair of the species Sceloglaux albifaces, a bird known to Māori by many names including whēkau, ruru whenua and hakoke, and which the settler-colonials, who knew it for a far shorter time, called the laughing owl, white faced owl, or laughing jackass. Declared extinct in 1914, S. albifaces was known for its haunting and unnerving call, although its vocalisations were never directly recorded. Now catalogued as items #50766 & #50767 in the ornithological collections of the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien (Natural History Museum, Vienna), the two owls are approached as historical “recordings,” within the museum collections. They are then returned, as two seperate radio frequencies, to Silver Stream, near the city of Otepoti/Dunedin, the place where they were collected by Austrian-born taxidermist, collector and bio-prospector Andreas Reischek, in 1884. In Twin signals at Silver Stream (fragments of a landscape for specimens #50766 & #50767), these owl-frequencies intermingle with the sounds of the site, with live and transmitted accordion, in reference to a late nineteenth century report of owl-human listening and interspecies communication through music, and with the vocalisations of living endemic birds whose own long memories might hold some knowledge of the owl’s lost voice, a listening that also becomes an inaudible part of the work’s radio ecologies. Credits: Sally Ann McIntyre – extinct bird museum recordings, on-site micro-radio transmissions, colonial squeezebox accordion. Edie Stevens – accordion (whekau mourning song). ----- As well as the audio component, this work is complimented and completed with the text to be found at our website; a more in depth discussion of the piece and the process. Please visit https://www.pyramidclub.org.nz/twin-signals-silver-stream-fragments-landscape-specimens-50766-50767-sally-ann-mcintyre ----- Bio: Sally Ann Mcintyre (1974, NZ/AU) is a Melbourne/Naarm based radio and sound artist, researcher and writer, who has been working artistically with small-scale radio transmission since 2006. Twin signals at Silver Stream (fragments of a landscape for specimens #50766 & #50767) extends a series of sound and radio art works she has been performing and exhibiting since 2012, which strategically utilise early recording and transmitting media such as wax cylinders, music boxes, and small-radius radio, to reveal the relationship of historical sound archives to cultural extinction narratives, and to consider extinction as a form of non-representational trauma, erasure, silence and silencing within the settler-colonial landscape.