47° 31’02” N, 5° 55’12” W

Months in the making, we at Hinternet Production Laboratories are very excited to release our new audio-play, 47° 31’02” N, 5° 55’12” W.

We are artists, though contrary to what Hélène Le Goff wrote the other day, we are artists who do not mind holding our audience’s hand a bit. So allow us to say a few words about our work.

The majority of audio-plays over the past century have been radio-plays, and it is therefore not surprising that the golden age of this genre occurred prior to the rise of television in the 1950s. Even today, at least those of you with a living memory of the 20th century will know something of what happened when, in 1938, Orson Welles adapted H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds for radio — a mighty powerful medium, it turned out, and useful indeed for playing chicken at the boundary between truth and fiction! Not long after the war (the real one), radio-plays continued to thrive alongside television, and some of them began to ascend into a more refined register of creative expression, as heard for example in Dylan Thomas’s radio adaptation of “Under Milk Wood” (1954).

But it was in post-war Germany, both East and West, that the Hörspiel evolved into a properly experimental art-form. In the Bundesrepublik we may cite as exemplary Ingeborg Bachmann’s Der gute Gott von Manhattan (1958), produced by Südwestfunk studios (Funk, delightfully, is German for “radio”), and Walter Jens’s Der Untergang der Titanic (1975), produced by Westdeutsches Rundfunk. Such Hörspiele as these flourished alongside the state-radio-sponsored works of serialist composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, and of composers of musique concrète such as Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. It was a period of remarkable widespread public appreciation of often inscrutable creative endeavors.

East Germany’s main state radio studios, notably Rundfunk der DDR, were not only tolerant, but also robustly supportive, of experimental Hörspiele, including most notably those of the great Brecht protégé and “postmodernist” playwright Heiner Müller. One of us in the HPL duo can credit Müller’s Hörspiele in particular for his success in learning German in the 1990s, when these works were still being played in syndication on the radio-waves of a now-unified German Federal Republic. Indeed, at one point he practically learned by heart the script of Müller’s Hamletmaschine — performed here by the somewhat grating Blixa Bargeld, of Einstürzende Neubauten fame; there is another recording we prefer, with Ulrich Mühe, of The Lives of Others (2006) fame, in the main role, but we have been unable to locate it. Both of us at HPL listened to Die Hamletmaschine a number of times over the past months, to the extent that we are prepared to describe it now, in internet lingo, as one of the principal sources of our “inspo”.

Obviously, the flourishing of experimental radio-plays in the television-era had everything to do with the fact that TV, by being the principal channel of media stupidity in the late 20th century, effectively freed radio up to be interesting. Now TV is gone too (though there is a neighborhood of the internet that many still call, as if by courtesy, “TV”), and our reigning medium today is one that offers infinite space for the doing of infinitely many different things. And in this space it seemed to us that it might be a good idea to seek to revive the audio-play as a genre for the 21st century.

In order to be truly of our age, we have decided to work with AI voices rather than with live actors. These dumb machines are entirely uncoachable, and their frequent inexplicable mispronunciations, and inability to enunciate words the way one would if one had any feeling for what those words mean, might be heard as a defect and a limitation in the work. But it might also be heard as an aesthetic quality in its own right, accurately reflecting the true condition of our era — an era of mostly automated chatter, a great global dialogue des sourds, when no one seems to know what they’re saying, let alone what they’re hearing.

Because this is a work intended strictly for the audio medium, we have declined to provide the written version of the text here. We recommend you listen to our audio-play with headphones on, and, if possible, in the dark.

—HPL

Story: Justin Smith-Ruiu
Audio: David Lamb