Renegade Birds

Being in Wellington, working with the Adam Art Gallery, a day at the Mighty Mighty bar, with local students, talking, sharing, unfolding thoughts on sound, art practice, and the interweaving of the private and the public – what sounds might generate horizons of intimacy… – we went outside, the afternoon a beautiful brightness, to listen and respond, a kind of playback system made of soft ears, and to play whistles: the whistles function as loaded signifiers, sonic signals that break the silence, trigger understanding, and set loose, as possible birds taking flight, or resting on city furniture and playing with feathers. Walking down the street, in the city, each blew a whistle in response to a given visual clue – something in the city, a pigeon, an arrow, a color, a shoe, operating as the trigger, the beginning… (“You can blow my whistle anytime baby” someone yells) What rises up and then falls back down are the tiny frictions of opening and closing, of coming out and moving in, of touching the skin and running away, of a sonics pushed and pulled by the mingling and breaking up of the local. The immediate, the proximate, the pressures and releases of being in and amongst others – with the stumbling and bubbling of the group bouncing along Cuba Street, as a vague marching band, I felt the whistles as a form of laughter, a kind of sensitive channel responding and producing a sinewy alignment with its surroundings, a mobile funnel through which different articulations passed: a text written over all the signs and symbols of the street, as tiny proddings and punctures that rivet the ear with points of translation, misunderstanding, and a form of unexpected community. The city became not a backdrop to the movements of the social, or a stage for a heightened performance, but a partner in the formation of a certain soundtrack.