a radio play by Martin Conrads

In a message, posted on the nettime-mailinglist on March 14th, 2002, it read*:
"(...)
A man in Amsterdam took the most prestigious business building (Philips) hostage, forcing people to letter the windows with the words WE MISLEAD. Media coverage claims that the man is frustrated over the impact of widescreen tv on his film enjoyment - black bars.
(...)
This man has probably not read Adbusters, but he is definitely a product of the developments you sketched. Living in suburbia he started a guerilla war on his own, disseminating his grieves to newspapers and consumer organizations. He felt forced to buy a widescreen televsion and that irritated him to no ends. He picked the highest building in Amsterdam, on the 6 months anniversary of Sep 11th, the wrong tower by mistake, Philips had recently moved to the neighbouring tower. Police negotiated with him all day and reported he was confused, but sounded open and clear in the talkings. He knew what he was doing, but finally shot himself in the head, in the men's room...
(...)"

The 35 minutes radio play [WE MISLEAD] took this news as a starting point. It revolves around the idea of consumer discomfiture which turns into despair and comprises (edited) audio-files, which exclusively were found on the web. [WE MISLEAD] is probably the first radio play to use this technique. Thus [WE MISLEAD] is an analysis of the narrative potential of what was called "acoustic cyberspace" at the time.

[WE MISLEAD] has been broadcast on December 18th, 2002, on r a d i o q u a l i a via Resonance104.4fm (London), on Bayern2Radio (Munich) on December 5th, 2003, on ABC Classic FM (AUS) on July 11th, 2005, and on VPR0 (NL) on September 13th, 2005. In 2005 it was nominated for the Prix Phonurgia Nova. [WE MISLEAD] was produced as a commission by Hull Time Based Arts for EMARE (European Media Artist in Residence Exchange), October – December 2002. Duration: 34‘52‘‘.