Radio Buncefield at Punto de Fuga

The installation ‘Radio Buncefield’ was commissioned by the ‘experimental publishing platform’ Punto de Fuga for exhibition at the bookshop La Monte en L’Air, Paris in November 2015, accompanying a series of public events during the citywide festival Paris Photo. Photographs of images were converted to audio files consisting of a digitised voice ‘speaking’ the data, and broadcast nightly from a self-built micro radio station in the venue. Mimicking cold-war intelligence broadcasts, the work remixed of the work of a range of recognised photographers and was accompanied by writing reflecting on how the process of translation and broadcasting opened up new critical interpretations of the image, in keeping with the theme.

The ‘artists’ photobook’ is a rapidly expanding and current field which foregrounds play with notions of the production, reproduction and distribution of the image. As Punto de Fuga described the events: ‘The 5-day programme questioned the relevance of photo-books by confronting a wide range of book experiments and visions on photography with an open community of publishers, photographers, graphic designers and curators from all over Europe.’ My work was commissioned to ‘close the loop’ and critique the fetishization of the physical form, in keeping with the critical slant of the programme, by returning the physical to the immaterial in the form of radio signals broadcast from overseas. As some of the books concerned the representation of war and the archive, the use of a ‘cold war’ reference in the form of an mock ‘intelligence broadcast’ was intended to emphasise both history and continuity. The work became implicated in conversations between Laura Carbonell, the event convener, and the speakers at the 5 day programme. The work represented an embodied ‘media archaeology’ and drew on the ideas of Vilem Flusser, Friedrich Kittler, Walter Benjamin and Jussi Parrikka.

Participating photographers included Hillie de Rooj, (‘Myopia’ book launch), Donald Weber (‘War Sand’), Thomas Hauser (‘The Wake of Dust’), Martin Eberle (‘Voyager’), and Tariq Heyboer / Mikel H. Orfanos.

Adam Brown’s Buncefield project represents a long standing practice exploring the effects of translation from one media into another. High-profile public outcomes include presentations at the Photographers’ Gallery, London , based on the establishment of a ‘record label’ which releases data as opposed to audio, a commentary on the impermanence of data storage media. The work at Paris Photo was commissioned by Punto de Fuga following the public presentation of this work earlier in 2015.