.--. .-.. .- --. ..- . / -.-- . .- .-. (plague year), for Radiophrenia Glasgow 2022

A new work by radio cegeste, '.--. .-.. .- --. ..- . / -.-- . .- .-. (plague year)' has been made as a half-hour program for radio art project station Radiophrenia Glasgow. It is scheduled for broadcast on 20 February 2022, 2:00 pm - 2:30 pm, GMT. 

'.--. .-.. .- --. ..- . / -.-- . .- .-. (plague year)' (2022) is a thirty minute edit of a fifteen part live transmission artwork that ran as a radio serial from 11-25 September 2021, as part of ROAD MAP: State of Disaster, a temporary public art project conducted within the bounds of a single geographic postcode, 3031, in Melbourne, Australia, while the inhabitants of the city were under curfew, in the midst of the longest pandemic lockdown in the world. 

Microcast over local airwaves on the frequency 104.5FM, the serial was a daily poetic reworking of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), written as 'a fictional reworking of true events,' a mock-first-hand account of the last epidemic of bubonic plague in London in 1665. 

Drawing on the relentless "doomscroll" of local pandemic statistics as a prompter for a daily algorithmic re-reading of the 1722 text, each morning in Melbourne, the number of positive local Covid-19 cases and the number of days the city had been in lockdown were triangulated. This mechanism was then used in selecting and producing a daily double-reading of a Defoe passage, as voice and morse code. Each episode was transmitted between the hours of 6-9PM, as an intervention into the local airwaves, on a hand-built micro-FM transmitter. 

A homage to the aesthetics of clandestine wartime radio broadcast, '.--. .-.. .- --. ..- . / -.-- . .- .-. (plague year)' also counts among its influences the proto fake-news panic of Orson Welles’ October 30 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds, and the underworld transmissions of Edouard Dermithe's character of Jacques Cégeste in Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée.

In its original iteration, this work was exhibited as 'a shelter for the moment, but outlasting it' (2021), an episodic experimental radiophonic and text work that could be heard nightly by listeners tuning in to the frequency 104.5FM from 6-9pm. These transmissions were mostly conducted from a bunker made of books built in the middle of my living room, an unwieldy mise-en-abîme that nested, Russian-doll-like, within the locked-down house, in a locked down suburb in a locked-down city, and provided a structural/architectural analogue to the small-radius "foxhole" transmission of the work within the official broadcast architecture conveying daily pandemic information and updates. 

'a shelter for the moment, but outlasting it' was commissioned alongside Campbell Walker's accumulative projection and endurance walking project Going through the Motions (on foot) (2021), for the lockdown art project ROADMAP: State of Disaster, curated within the postcode 3031, by Tameka Cater and Rute Chaves. 

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Radiophrenia is a unique experiment in radio that bases its temporary interventions out of CCA Glasgow. Gregory Whitehead has described the 2022 iteration of the project as "yet another magnificent voyage through the boundless aethers."

Radiophrenia's 2022 broadcast schedule begins at midnight, 8th of February and will continue, 24/7 until midnight, 20th of February, 2022. In the Glasgow area, listeners can tune in to Radiophrenia's frequency on 87.9fm. Online listeners should head here.

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This work was also included in an online exhibition called What is Not a Map by the Earlid project during the 2022 European spring, which also extended the temporary and localised narrowcast signal of the original work. Thanks to Joan Schuman for the inclusion and the writeup: 

"Gesturing like a sputtering, live signal to this sonic artistry is the temporal threshold of radio cegeste 104.5 FM and its polyphonous collaborations including ROAD MAP: State of Disaster, which traversed many twines since its inception in 2020 within Melbourne’s postcode 3031.

Microcast across the FM frequency of a neighborhood, this nomadic project expands in numerous directions, particularly curtailed in the parabolic spaces of one of the longest lockdowns in the world."