Following its recent tour to the Unfolding Practice symposium at London College of Fashion (UAL), – where it was performed as part of the paper Withdrawn from use: for voice, turntable and pause – Silence on Loan was politely returned, signed for and slipped back on the shelf at Winchester School of Art Library
It has been five years since the publication of Silence on Loan, and to commemorate this wooden anniversary, the annual performance will take place as part of the Into the Fold Artists Book Fair at Winchester School of Art Library. As part of this two-day fair (15th/16th March), I will be performing Silence on Loan at 2:30 on Friday 15th March. This year, silence will be broadcast live to air, via a micro-FM transmission. Immediately received through a small array of dysfunctional radios, silence will be dispersed amongst the library stacks.
Silence and radio have history. The dead air of radio was the favoured medium of communication for the electronic voice phenomena of spirit voices. One ethereal voice declaring in an accent, which I like to imagine was somewhere between the vaudeville of Frankie Howard and Carry On of Kenneth Williams: “What a rascal, switch on the radio!” Raudive claimed that radio was so popular on the other side: ‘various groups of voice entities […] operate[d] their own [radio] stations.’
The transmission of Silence on Loan through the electrical elsewhere of radio, augments the fragility of the silence broadcast; a silence arriving from somewhere and possibly somewhen other than here.
All those who are there (here) to listen and those who’s listening the silence borrows, will receive a free paper wristband bearing the ISBN of publication. And a special edition commemorative badge will be free to all those wearing a badge from a previous year’s performance of Silence on Loan.
As part of the Into the Fold Artists Book Fair I will have a table of commemorative limited editions, in the form of wooden postcards, ISBN prints, and ‘I am not listen-ing’ pin badges. There will also be limited-edition cassettes, seance cards, multiples and original prints from Listen the Waves and other sound works on paper.
Delighted to be one of 25 artists, invited to contribute to The Postcard Show, which opened at Gallery DODO, Brighton on Friday 9th February.
In the exhibition introduction, Gallery DODO write: ‘One can confidently say that more postcards have been sent from, rather than to, the seaside resort of Brighton. However, it’s never entirely one-way traffic. The artists and works included in the exhibition share a consideration of the postcard as an art object in itself – the artwork is the postcard rather than just on it- and utilise, in varying ways, the everyday process of the postal service, its recto/verso and image/text form, or engage with the postcard’s conventions.’
To ‘widen the gene pool of contributing artists, and distance themselves from the curatorial selection process, Jon Carritt & Dan Palmer, asked each of the initial 15 artists approached to invite an additional artist of their choosing to also mail a postcard to Gallery DODO. The arrangement of postcards in the gallery is ordered by their date of arrival and displayed in such a way as to make both sides visible.
My own postcard went through several incarnations before a stamp was finally licked. Compliant with the A6 proportions of postcard etiquette, Silence second class, is a stereo set of two dumb, hand stamped and hole-punched, 300gsm cards. Both are pierced through with a small circle of tiny holes; a visualised acoustic pattern reminiscent of speaker ‘grills’ or the microphonic mouthpiece of landline telephones. This hollow array is juxtaposed with a small, rubber-stamped word: On one card the word, Silence and on the other, Listen. With a graphical and conceptual nod to Yoko Ono’s Hole to see the sky through (1971) the postcards proffer a shift of listening attention away from the audible, toward the post audible, the unheard and the imagined, the infrequent modulation and tinnitus shush of weak or empty signals.
The Postcard Show runs until 24th March 2024. Viewing by appointment. DM Gallery DODO on Instagram (@aproposdodo) to arrange a time. Gallery DODO, c/o Phoenix Art Space 10-14 Waterloo Place Brighton BN2 9NB UK
Please be aware that the gallery can only be accessed via a staircase.
A ‘live’ diptych recording of rehearsal tapes for the performed Mare Street Variation of the text piece: I am not imaging the sound of these words, you are, is now available on Bandcamp. The Mare Street Variation (for typewriter, cassette and an empty house), was intended to be performed last September, as part of the exhibition Din, at 195 Mare Street, Hackney, London . Sadly, due to illness, I was not able to take part.
However, I decided that a record of my not performing should still be available. I had rehearsed the performance at home, using two portable mono recorders to simultaneously document and duplicate the action. The unreliable nature of these obsolete recorders, meant there were quite a few rehearsals, each taped over its failed predecessor, leaving both tapes puckered with sudden magnetic bursts of sound and silence. I released these two tapes as a limited edition cassette diptych: on side ‘R’ of each cassette, a record of the rehearsals for the performance; on side ‘P’, an unintentionally blank ferrous record of a performance that never took place. Packaged in the shredded papery remains of the typed texts and including a free I am not listening conference card, these two original tapes have now been sold and delivered.
Before they were dispatched, I gave a private performance of the rehearsal tapes in the room where they took place. I created a stereo digital recording of this performed mono duet and this new Mare Street Variation is now available to be listened to and downloaded on Bandcamp.
In early September I was invited to be part of the exhibition Din at 195 Mare Street in Hackney, London. Built in 1697, 195 Mare Street is one of the oldest surviving buildings in Hackney and was once home to the Elizabeth Fry’s Society Refuge for women leaving prison. The Quaker and reformer Elizabeth Fry had played a significant part in prison reform and between 1860 and 1913, Mare Street provided refuge for thousands of young women recently released from prison.
In 1913, the house become home to the New Lansdowne Liberal and Radical Club, a working men’s club, but subsequently fell into disrepair. In 2022, the house was finally bought and will be restored and turned into a domestic home and community arts centre.
In its current state of vacancy, the house on Mare Street bares mute and beautiful witness to its prior dwellings. Abandoned layers of paint peal quietly, exposing the temporality of place. Whilst the karaoke of floorboards allows our steps to walk with the ghosts of absent footfall.
195 Mare Street. Photos: Sebastiane Hegarty
At home in the temporary refuge of this peeling landscape, Din, curated by the artist Matt Harding, (aka: The Thames Submarine) offered an exhibition of sound and its absence. For two days at the end of summer, silent sounds dwelled behind the doors and windows of Mare Street. The exhibition, which included film, painting, sculpture and installation, opened with a concert of sound performances, including Angharad Davies and Matt Harding, performing around the silent sonic gaits and characterful strides of Sue Harding’s collection of Foley shoes. Other contributing artists included Maria Chavez, Lynn Loo, Dion Kitson and OyamaO (see poster for full list).
Foley Shoes: Sue and Matt Harding
My own contribution was a performed variation of the text piece, “I am not imagining the sound of these words you are.” In keeping with Mare Street’s association with Elizabeth Fry, penal reform and refuge, this Variation for Cassettes and an Empty House, would occur in isolation. Behind a door closed-quietly-to, the performance would only be visible through the jar of the door and the hole of its missing lock. The percussive rhythm of the typewriter’s metal letters falling on proofing paper would be pronounced in the acoustics of the space and heard through the grade II listed resonance and wooden tapes of the walls walnut graining panels
“I am not imagining…” Limited Edition Audiocassette. 2023. Sebastiane Hegarty
The performance (lasting approximately six-minutes) would be simultaneously recorded and duplicated via a pair of obsolete portable cassette recorders and the performed text produced pinned to the back of the door. It would be recorded on two C15 ‘prison’ audiocassettes – clear plastic cassettes sealed without the small screws that enable the cassette to be dismantled. Once over the sound would be rewound and its sonic remains replayed and performed again. The cassettes would then be immediately released as a limited edition of two. On the other side of each cassette, is a simultaneous recording of the performance rehearsals made at my home in Winchester.
Din Exhibition Photo: Matt Harding
Sadly, the day before the exhibition opened, I became ill and was not able to attend or perform at the opening. But Matt placed my written instructions for the performance, and his own portable cassette player in the window seat of the room where the performance was to take place. This silent obituary for a performance that never took place, was not only very kind but also an appropriate variation for a text that sounded in the imagination.
I decided that the record of my not performing was a form of taking part and decided to release the unrecorded performance as a limited-edition cassette diptych; on one side the recorded rehearsals for the performance; on the other side, the blank tape of a sound [and its record] that never took place.
“I am not imagining…” Limited Edition Audiocassette. 2023. Sebastiane Hegarty
“I am not imagining …” is now available for purchase. The tapes can be purchased as either individual cassettes or as the original diptych, carefully packaged in the shredded paper remains of the typing rehearsals. Leave a message if you’re interested.
Fitting the cassette To insert the cassette, push the cassette compartment button (8) in the direction of the arrow. The cassette compartment then opens. Insert the cassette with the full spool on the right, the empty spool on the left, then close the compartment door.
In the summer of ‘78, on the double-decked 500 bus from Lime Street to Kirkby terminus, Hilary slipped me a cassette. A C60 audiocassette.
In 2022, some forty-five years later, I was contacted by Phil Wrigglesworth, Editor and Art Director of Left Cultures, who asked if I would be interested in contributing a ‘personal story’ for their next edition. Left Cultures is a unique publication, a contemporary space to champion all kinds of voices on the Left, publishing ‘other’ narratives, which are at once, culturally diverse, and left leaning.
I was delighted to be invited and excited to contribute.
This morning I awoke to the postal thud and seductive whiff of fresh ink on heavy matt paper: an advance copy of Left Cultures 2had arrived. An exquisite ‘lexicon’ of left bent cultural stories, that smells good, feels good, and ‘fizzes’ with imagery, ideas, and energy: From the sartorial slogans of Johnny Hannah’s Crass inspired ‘pay no more than £3’ workwear, to Rachael Miles/Bessa unpicking the politics of woodchip and the Scary Monsters of David Beech’s scalpel splice through the counter-culture of Bowie’s lyrical landscapes and the artist-run organisational 'model’ of Punk.
Throughout the 50 stories and 128 pages, music appears a conspicuous and common agent of change. So too, my own story: On the 500 bus Hilary slipped me a cassette. But it’s not just the lyrics or energy of music that is important, it’s also the cultural exchange and community that forms through sharing and experiencing music.
'On the 500 bus...' in: Left Cultures 2 with visual instructions by Colum Leith
The chance meeting of my encounter with Hilary, was spontaneously arranged through mass unemployment and the Youth Opportunity Programme (YOP). Hilary had been offered the career opportunity of becoming a part-time Library Assistant at my school, Brookfield Comprehensive in Kirkby, Knowsley, Nr. Liverpool. The library was small and impoverished with a predominantly disengaged clientele: as a career opportunity I am not sure Brookfield library knocked very loudly.
On her days off, Hilary (Steele) was more creatively [un]employed as a photographer for the Liverpool Punk scene around Eric’s; the nightclub where the Sex Pistols performed in ‘76. She was also friends with Liverpool’s proto-punk super group: Big in Japan(Jayne Casey, Holly Johnson, Budgie, Big Bill Drummond, Ian Broudie). In addition to the C60 cassette slipped into my hands on the 500, Hilary got me a signed copy of, From Y to Z and Never Again (Zoo, 1978), the posthumous extended play epitaph of Big in Japan. In a rare out of school meeting, Hilary took me to Probe Records where she tried to persuade Pete Burns to sell me a copy of Devo’s infamous bootleg, Workforce. Notorious for his acerbic approach to customer service, Pete of course, refused.
Record shops were critical spaces, where you had to earn the respect of the counter. Music was not easy to find or get, you had to listen out for it in the reviews and classifieds of the NME or discover it in the sleeve notes of other albums. There was of course the cultural antennas of John Peel and Phil Ross (Radio Merseyside), but it was the musical rumours of friends and the magnetic contraband of mixtapes that proffered an ear into the unknown.
The copyright infringing, ferric hour that Hilary took the time to curate and tape, spliced together the eponymous punk of Big in Japan, the Day-Glo dystopia of X-Ray Spex, the Handsworth Revolution of Steel Pulse and sparse, melancholy guitar of Link Wray & Robert Gordon’s cover of Fire. Gloriously eclectic Hilary’s mixtape wound my ear toward a music in which the personal mingled with the political.
Sometimes the Tape Stops. Fold-out Xerox cassette cover (1981)
C30 C60 C90 go Off the radio I get constant flow Hit it, pause it, record and play Turn it, rewind and rub it away
C30, C60, C90 Go by Bow Wow Wow (1980)
The audiocassette was a cheap, democratic and yet revolutionary medium. Through its ability to reproduce, rewind, mix, erase and share, we become the curators of our audible and erasable self. We could share, make and release music. At art school I set up a semi-fictional record label (Starving Panda Records) curating, duplicating and releasing, Sometimes the Tape Stops; a C90 compilation of sound and music made by friends and other students, many of whom formed bands, became musicians and sound artists for the duration of the tape and then split and retired back into painting, sculpture or ceramics. The audiocassette created a community, and a creative culture of sharing. You didn’t sell a mixtape; it was part of a gift economy, made to be shared, to be given away. We made tapes for friends, for people we loved, for people we left and those who left us. For people we met on the 500 bus
Hilary left the career opportunity of Brookfield Comp behind and I headed to Wolverhampton Poly to study Fine Art. I've searched, but sadly I can’t find Hilary’s cassette, but I did discover that a book of her photographs, The Crucial Years - Eric's Liverpool 1977-1979, was published by Hanging Around Books (Sadly sold out).
The tale of Hilary’s cassette, accompanied by the exquisite line of Colum Leith’s visual instructions is available in Left Cultures 2. You can order a copy here or purchase it in person at cool independent bookshops all over the UK.
Care of tapes Please do not put your cassettes on top of central heating radiators or any other heat source. The tape will become deformed and useless.
‘[The Tractatus] exists in two parts’, wrote Wittgenstein, ‘the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. […] I’ve managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it’. Extract from introduction to: Saying Nothing to Say: Sense, Silence and Impossible Texts in the 20th Century.
In May I was invited to present a paper at, Saying Nothing to Say: Sense, Silence and Impossible Texts in the 20th Century; aninterdisciplinary conference, supported by the Humanities Research Centre and organised by Tabina Iqbal at the University of Warwick. Bringing together speakers from literature, philosophy, art history and photography, the conference ‘trace[d] the contexts, conflicts, and legacies of Wittgenstein’s claim:
“In art it is hard to say anything as good as: saying nothing.”’ (ibid)
Since 2004, my sound practice has included a series of silent releases: unheard, unwritten works, sometimes performed, sometimes transmitted, often forgotten and occasionally lost. One of the most recent of these, Silence on Loan is an artists’ book, published in the form of a single-sided 10” vinyl record – although, cut with a silent groove, it is [not] a record of nothing.
The paper I presented at the conference, Silence on loan: Listening to silence and the unheard, draws on these silent works to explore silence as a potential and communal space: an act orsituation of inaction which invites both listener and non-listener into unheard congress.
In a choreographed montage of words, voice, images, sound and silence, the paper was intended to include a performance of Silence on Loan. However, as part of the Artists’ Books Collection at Winchester School of Art Library, the book is catalogued as ‘reference only’. Therefore, although available to be handled and ‘used’ by library users, it cannot be removed from the library building. Thus confined, and magnetically protected from theft or ever being borrowed, Silence rests, jacketless on the library shelf, quietly gathering dust and harm, ‘waiting without waiting for’.
In conversation with the Head of Collections and curator of the Artists’ Book Collection at WSA, it was agreed that a retrospective contract, hastily signed and methodically duplicated, would permit myself: ‘free access to the artists’ book Silenceon Loan on reasonable notice (1 month) being given […] and subject to standard loans procedures, for the purposes of performing it at exhibitions and /or events.’
Contract, dated, and signed, Silence was folded up in a shroud of acid free tissue and placed inside a grey archival box. With the passport of its paperwork enclosed, the book was issued, and silence was not only officially on loan, but also on tour. To commemorate, what is hoped to be the first in a series of ‘national’ performances, I created the official merchandise of a Silence on Tour badge, available free to all those attending.
SayingNothing To Saywas held in the Wolfson Research Exchange on the third floor of the library at the University of Warwick. As I entered the library, silence was heard to breach security, alarmingly announcing its presence as I passed through the magnetic surveillance of the library turnstile. A ceremony, embarrassingly repeated on exit.
With keynotes by Dr Maria Balaska (University of Hertfordshire) and Dr Thomas Gould, (University of East Anglia), the conference programme included panels on ‘The Missaid: at the limits of language’, ‘The silenced and politics of voice’ and ‘The unsaid’. Speakers included; Juulia Jaulimo (University of Helsinki/Justus Liebig University Geissen), who discussed ‘Kathy Acker, Samuel Beckett and the Poetics of Sous Rature’; Imogen Free (Kings College London) who explored the ‘thick almost guttural sound of the voice’ and resounding vocal relations in Rosamund Lehmann’s The Echoing Grove(1953); Owain Burrell (University of Warwick) who discussed ‘working-class’ silence in the parlour of Tony Harrison’s poems, whilst Jarkko Tanninen (University of Nottingham) focused on ‘Silence after Violence’ in the ‘photographic absence of Joel Sternfeld’s, On This Site.’ Details of the full program are available here.
Returning Silence on Loan to the shelf at WSA, required further papery exchange. A form, confirming that there had been ‘no change’ to the condition of the book was signed and duplicated. Silence was then carefully unfolded from its acid free shroud and slipped discreetly back between the hardbacks at 741.64 HEG.
Congratulations to Tabina Iqbal for organising such a fascinating conference and thank you to Tabina and Matthew Nicholas for making me so very welcome.
Tapping the air is a practice-based research project performed through a series of covert residencies and transmissions at locations associated with wireless and listening history. The air was first tap, tap tapped in 2017 with the temporary occupation of Marconi’s Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station (Cornwall); site of the first ‘over the horizon’ wireless transmission in 1901. The most recent transmission took place in 2021, during a brief window of opportunity between COVID lockdowns, when I retraced the journey of that signal back to Knowles Farm on the Isle of Wight and the empty concrete base of the missing radio mast which had sent the di-dit-dit of Marconi’s test signal over the horizon to Cornwall. Each ‘residence’ concludes with an unannounced (and mostly unheard) micro-FM transmission, broadcasting from the location of residence. Tuned-in through portable radios the performed transmissions are re-composed from field-recordings gathered in local landscapes haunted by the discarded remains of listening and communication technologies.
Having spoken about the project at galleries and conferences in the UK and Ireland, in 2019 I was invited to present a paper at the Radio Preservation Task Force Conference2020 at The Library of Congress, Washington. Sadly, due to the Covid pandemic, the conference was postponed. But on the 26th of April, 2023, I took flight over the Atlantic to Washington DC to perform my paper, Tapping the Air, at #RPTF2023. Directed by Neil Verma and one of the largest events to be held at the Library of Congress, this ground-breaking conference brought together over ‘300 archivists, radio and television historians, artists, information scientists, journalists, curators, sound studies scholars, broadcasters and others.’
On my first day, I listened to songs of extinction (Alexandra Hui), the queer archives of Lesbian radio radicals (Stacey Copeland), the celestial short-wave mixing board of the ‘ignorosphere’ (Amanda Dawn Christie) and the Plutonium Blues tapes of toxic landscapes (Jay Needham). I was fortunate to meet Davia Nelson of the radio producers and artists The Kitchen Sisters(Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) and attend their Keynote interview – one of the absolute highlights of the conference. (Serendipitously when I returned home, exhausted and ill late on Saturday evening, I fell asleep to the radio lullaby of an edition of BBC Radio 4’s Something Understood, by The Kitchen Sisters.
As part of a panel on Recapturing ‘Liveness’, chaired by Nathan Moor and including Stephanie Brown and Professor Anne MacLennan, I performed the paper, Tapping the Air: Ghosts, landscapes and technology. Having traced Marconi’s signal back to the Isle of Wight, this variation of the paper submitted for the conference in 2019, includes images, words and sounds from the haunted landscape surrounding Marconi’s former Niton Station at Knowles Farm (IOW). In particular, the empty concrete base of the now absent radio mast:
In the national monument of this mouthed hollow, the metal spiked teeth, which once held the radio mast aloft are still present. Tapped with a pebble from the geological fault of the Lizard Peninsula, the teeth chit, chatter and chime, pealing the sibilant consonant of Marconi’s test signal, back into the landscape. Tapping the air. (2023)
Whilst at the conference I took advantage of the opportunity to wander off and listen in on people’s conversation. Through this I discovered that the Library of Congress, has a vast complex of subterranean passages, connecting the buildings of the library and leading me from James Madison to Thomas Jefferson. These tiled walkways are lined with hidden shops and the occasional still lives of museum storage. I arose from this underground mosey, up into Jefferson at the exact hour, the viewing public are allowed to join a queue for a brief 5-minute transient through the celestial vaulted silence of the research reading room. I queued, I rounded silence, listened, recorded and left.
Baird Auditorium, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History
The conference concluded on Sunday 30th April, with a Listening Party at the Baird Auditorium in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. My sound work Over the Horizon, composed from the fragmented remains of the three occupations of Tapping the Air, was included in this listening event. Sadly, I had to leave on the Saturday and was not there to hear the catering susurrations chatter of Marconi’s metal teeth, tapped and sounded on the Isle of Wight, brought over the horizon of the Atlantic Ocean and received in the acoustic shell-like of the Baird Auditorium.
Thank you #RPTF2023 for a fascinating five days and for a truly life affirming conference.
There is a summary of the conference here And a short 2 minute clip of conference sounds and images here
It’s night, and there is a gale blowing pitch dark. I am standing at the gate of a small wooden bridge which leads to the door of the Slaughden Martello Tower, close to Aldeburgh on the Suffolk Coast. Above the door, a light has been left on, keeping watch, and providing the tower with a filament of visibility in the darkness. Through a window the glimpsed illumination of a table lamp promises a sallow incandescent warmth, a warmth that waits and invites us in.
I cross the bridge, ladened with the baggage of self-catering and the mute irony of a boxed-up blimp (a zeppelin shaped windshield designed to protect microphones from the noise of air). As I walk across, I adopt the autonomic gait of the funambulist, shifting the weight of body and baggage in immediate response to the turbulent airy whoosh that wraps around the tower. Fumbling with a key, I struggle to open the heavy wooden door, double bolted with atmospheric pressure. As the door finally groans ajar, a hinge of air whistles, soughs, and susurrates. I close the weather behind me and lift a latch into the thick-walled silence of the empty tower.
Built between 1808 and 1812, Slaughden Martello Tower is the most northerly of a chain of defensive towers built along the South and East coasts of England, in response to the threat of invasion by the French emperor Napoléon. The Tower is the last surviving remnant of the village of Slaughden; an important maritime port, which long since succumbed, not to the French, but to the tidal invasion of the North Sea.
Modelled on a defensive Tower in Martella, Corsica, the translation to ‘Martello‘ was thought to have emerged as a consequence of the presumptive English Carry-On, that all Italian words end in ‘o’. With this slippage meaning shifts: in Italian, Martello derives from the hammer which strikes a bell and sounds a warning. Serendipitously if the ‘a’ of Slaugh shifts behind the ‘u’, we are left with Sluagh. In Gaelic folklore, the Sluagh are ‘Hosts of the unforgiven dead’ who take the form of gusts of wind: carrying ‘off the soul of a dying person in a [fluttering] flurry of wings and screeches.
To the best of my knowledge, [the tower’s] effectiveness was never put to the test. The garrisons were soon withdrawn and ever since these masonry shells have served as homes for the owls that make their soundless flights at dusk from the battlements. The Rings of Saturn. 2002. W. G, Seabald.
In the ‘million-bricked’ up silence of the Martello’s shell-like, all sound becomes conspicuous. On the first of three nights stay, the dark is woken by the peal of whispered vowels and spontaneous consonants of a north-westerly, singing through the vaulted reeds of the tower’s architecture. Sighing out loud, a deep breath drawn through a fireplace disturbs in a deathly rattle, particles of soot caught in the metal throat of its current. Under the floorboards, 200 years old, the creaking songs of footfall haunt and hollow the stillness. Suddenly and from somewhere without origin, a dull thud hammers once loudly. It can only be moments before the tower follows Slaughden into the waves.
Unstable or hesitant […] sounds and words, eroded yet persisting through time – a transmission that sometimes becomes a convulsion, deforming what is there still. Singed. 2021. Daniela Cascella
In the morning I open the storm door of the easterly window to find tomorrow rising yoke yellow over the squally horizon of the North Sea.
Radio, live transmission
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
The architecture of the Slaughden Martello is a unique variation of the normal design. Instead of a single tower, four towers coalesce into a quatrefoil; a four-leafed brick clover. Acquired by the Landmark Trust in 1971, the restoration of Martello converted the four towers into four rooms around a large, vaulted centre. Each tower and room correspond with the cardinal points of a compass; an easterly window peeks out over the North Sea, a northerly window looks toward the shingle-shore of Aldeburgh, through the kitchen, the front door looks back westerly across the bridge toward the river Alde, whilst a southerly aspect keeps an eye and ear upon the distant silent Mist of retired radio towers on Orford Ness.
Eerie wooden structures more than eighty yards high which could sometimes be heard creaking in the night. The Rings of Saturn. 2002. W. G. Seabald.
Martello Transmission (edit). 19th February 2023. (06:50 mp3)
Arriving at Martello under cover of darkness, I smuggled in a cheap FM-transmitter, a bundle of radios and a folder of field-recordings collected on Orford Ness, some ten years hence. Here within this folder are the accosted derelict voices of ballistic pagodas and the encrypted Morse of air upon door hinge. In a clandestine FM transmission, broadcast from the tower’s vaulted centre, these confiscated voices mingle with others caught lurking in the stone tapes and wooden cassettes of Martello. Through the array of dysfunctional radio sets, weak modulating signals are transmitted live back into the ‘interfrequency’ of the tower, seeping through its walls, out to sea and over the horizon.
The broadcast opens with looped static of a tidal recording (a tide of silence) made over a decade ago, by immersing a silent grooved record into the incoming tide at Cley next the Sea. This is accompanied by the flued voice of the fireplace and pulled-chord chime of the tower’s entrance bell. The chime is rung by dance/movement artist Julia Hall, who enters the Martello and performs the compass of its architecture, opening and closing the four doors in a ritualistic circuit of west, south, east, north, west. This reel of latch and footfall performs in concert with the radios’ short waves of interference and the shingle shanties of rolled pebbles on floorboards.
In the tower FM reception is poor, but the Martello signal breaks through clear. Tuned in and out its song flickers briefly, before disappearing off air in the atmospheric mush of radio silence.
Oh – we sowed our signals and we reaped the air. We eavesdropped on Plasetsk by loop. Algiers by backscatter; we tracked the flights of planes, the arcs of missiles, the paths of ships, the movements of train.
But we also picked up what wasn’t uttered. Ness. 2019. Robert McFarlane & Stanley Donwood.
Pebble Shanties: A song from under the floorboards 2023. (01:27 mp3)
January 2023 will mark the fourth anniversary of the publication of Silence on Loan and its subsequent inclusion in the Artists’ Book Collection at Winchester School of Art Library. Published in the form of a 10” vinyl record, Silence on Loan sits shyly on the library shelf at 741.64 HEG: Four years of dust and silence have now come to rest in the silent groove cut into its surface.
Every year there is a free performance of Silence on Loan at WSA Library, which this year will take place on Monday the 16th of January; coincidently the birthday of my mother, who died twelve years ago. In 2022 the Silence was performed without an audience there to hear. This year the performance is open again to the public and to the arbitrary ear of all library users. As with previous iterations, all those there to hear and those who’s listening the silence borrows, will be offered a commemorative hand-made pin badge, produced exclusively for the ‘event’. As an ‘event’ the performance of Silence on Loan is unremarkably low noise and low-key: an uneventful twenty minutes in which Silence is taken from the shelf, placed on a portable turntable, and rotated at 33 revolutions per minute. The arm of the turntable is swung gently over the edge of the vinyl ellipse, and the needle dropped damply into the silent spiral of the groove. Nine or so minutes later the needle is lifted out of the locked rut of the run-off loop and Silence taken from the platter and returned to its place on the library shelf. This small inconspicuous ritual marks the end of Silence for another year, and is occasionally greeted with a closing, discreet ripple of bookish applause.
Silence on Loan annual performance with free badge
15:00 Monday 16.01.2023 Winchester School of Art Library Park Avenue Winchester SO23 8DL
To make Silence available to listeners around the world, the performance will also be broadcast live via Instagram: @sebastiane_hegarty
With a knowing nod to Alvin Lucier’s, I am sitting in a room (1969) the invitation was to participate in, The: the third word and part, of Christof’s annual dozen. Like Lucier’s magnetic room, The, composes its form from an instructed action:
Room you are not in. Room where you usually make (sounds, images, objects, etc.), but that is currently running on idle. Idling in unintentional sounds. Room is lit but faded in and out after the fact (I will do the fade in fadeout). Camera captures room or detail (up to you), only one position throughout. Presence might be felt but is not present. You were there and you will be there again, but you are not there now.
The room where I make is spare, small and recently painted. It’s also the place where I keep and shelve the things I made and make with. On a desk in the corner there is an iMac with one Sonic Egg studio monitors on either side. An old straw hat perches ergonomically on the left-hand egg.
The room has one window. When the iMac is on stand-by or off, the window is reflected in its screen; the dusty emptiness of the room behind made visible through the glass darkly. On sunny winter days, the light from the window casts shadows on the wall opposite, shadows that breath slowly in and out of perceptibility. I use these shadows as an opportunity to stop and stare and let myself dawdle in their idleness.
I made two films in response to the instruction. In the first and selected film, the stare of my iPhone is fixed on the wall where shadows appear. I pressed record, left the room and closed the door to. Twelve minutes or so later I returned to press stop. The twelve minutes recorded are uneventful. Shadows are slight and fleeting. The distant spin of a washing machine whines through its cycle. A draft from the open window, pushes and pulls the room ajar, creating spontaneous creaks, which occasionally synchronise with the fluctuations in light and less light.
In a more composed second attempt at idleness, I fixed the stare of the iPhone upon the iMac screen. I muted the microphone, and started a metronome before leaving the room, to return twelve minutes later and press stop. Visible through the blizzard of dust which covers the screen, the reflection of the metronome keeps time silently. An occasional particle of dust, drifting through the air is caught in the sunlight of the silenced room. This silence is replaced with the audible draft of the previous twelve minutes. The silent metronome announces and measures loss, whilst time creaks and idles in the dust.
In the late winter of 2021, sitting in front of the dim mirror of the iMac screen, I started to experience a bright and recurring flash in my left eye. Unlike the stained-glass spiral scotoma of a normal migraine, this light was briefly white and peripheral. Some days later drops of liquid dilated the aperture of my pupil and the attentive lens of the optometrist found a small tear in the retina of my left eye. As if to celebrate my visual field was immediately flooded with millions of black dots. That evening in a small, dark and automatically locked room, small bursts of a laser welded a line around the edge of my retina, the light so bright that my left eye seemed to lose the notion of sight.
Through winter 2021 and spring 2022, there were four more tears and four more laser surgeries to weld my retina back into place. This has left my vision full of floaters, the remains of cells, casting their shadows on my retina. Like the wall and iMac screen, my visual field is full of dust and the idleness of shadows.
Emergency Eye Clinic: Southampton General Hospital
Baird Auditorium, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History
DFTPTMMYAIN, part 3 – The. 2022. Christof Migone. 
sebastiane hegarty 
