sally ann mcintyre is a transmission artist, curator and writer working out of dunedin, new zealand. she hosts the mini FM station radio cegeste 104.5FM as a solar or battery-powered, exploratory, nomadic platform for site-specific radio art projects, focusing on the airwaves as a revelatory medium for aspects of sited materiality, through an ongoing series of projects and programmes. recent radio cegeste projects have been thematised around concerns such as museology, the sonification of extinct species, memory and memorials, the haunted materiality of absent presence, old buildings and other historic sites, bird migration and electromagnetism, the complex idea of 'dead air', the recorded and transmitted history of birdsong (sometimes also as a sonification of a New Zealand nationalism), and the possibility of an ecology of the radio that doesn't represent unstable systems as functioning in eternal homeostasis.

working with small-radius, site-responsive transmission, location audio recording becomes a key element in the development of a 'plein air' radiophonics which works in-situ with the material (sonic and electromagnetic, architectural and social) elements of a site. radio programmes have been staged in locales which lend themselves toward re-iteratation of and reflection on the bounded nature of mini FM transmission itself, such as biosecure ecosanctuaries, islands, public transport, shopping malls, private gardens, stairwells, gallery spaces, and unstable earthquake-zoned buildings. commonly, explorations of the productive tension between a systematic cataloguing of archival elements, via mapping exercises and the collection and playback of sound libraries, and their deliberate destabilisation through the performative fragility of live transmission. an interest in the history of environmental sound in radio, including the use of 78rpm field recordings and valve shortwave, works in tandem with a focus on phonography as live and temporally situated, a tendency to take field recording back to the field, airwaves dissipating into the air, rather than reify them in the studio.