Dingus

"Dingus" is a six-part radio drama produced by CBS and recorded at the height of the 1943 flu pandemic that swept through Hollywood. Denied of a marquee cast and blighted by a curious obsession with the object that drives its narrative, this innovative and formally-reflexive oddity disappeared almost completely without trace. In 2010 artist Mike Cooter set out to find and rehabilitate this elusive artefact, initiating a 12-year journey that now culminates in the re-emergence of "Dingus," his first major work for radio. Ostensibly a detective drama, taking its name from an American colloquialism for an object without name or of indistinct identity (from the German ‘ding’ / ‘thing’), "Dingus" emerges across six episodes and a supplementary documentary as a rumination on objecthood itself: how we claim to understand some-thing, and the effects that it might have. At once both utilising and unpicking the narrative conceit of the MacGuffin, "Dingus" can be heard to reverse the logic of an object that serves to drive a narrative, functioning instead as an armature for the mysterious artefact at its heart: the MacGuffin as sculpture. "Dingus" was commissioned by Resonance FM.