Radio Flirtmakes audible the secret narratives of buildings. Utilizing a series of wireless headphones and transmitters located throughout a building or environment, visitors are invited to follow traces of incomplete messages, hidden whispers or trembling static that appear as an ambiguous and secret narrative. Radio Flirt is an intimate radio experience that aims for the heart and explores the emotional geographies of listening.

Initially developed for exhibition at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in 2007. For the installation 5 transmitters were installed throughout the 2-storey building, leading visitors through a series of rooms and passages. Working with multiple transmitters, the work essentially locates specific audio tracks, or episodes, within specific rooms or zones, thereby creating a simultaneous and non-linear audio guide, where each episode is nested within the building or location, and is transmitted across the same frequency.

Overall, the work plays with questions of sound, space, and the temporality of listening. By placing the work directly into the ears of visitors, sound is treated as an affective medium, generating encounters with the listener through tactile sound, voice, storytelling, and the ambiguity of multiple meanings. We envision the work as sensual radio, overlaying additional meaning to a given site while entertaining the promise of the imagination to mishear, daydream, and interrupt the linear flow of the rational.

By working on-site, we also strive to lace the work with site-specific reference, amplifying found details, drawing upon local legends, histories or mythologies, and creating narratives that bring into relief embedded details of the architecture and environment. In this way, the work makes flexible the temporal and spatial coordinates of place, loosening the strict formulations of certain locations and their representations by multiplying perspectives.

Using sound and transmission, Radio Flirt is an invisible interruption.