Dingus
Mike Cooter
"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