Jordan Baseman's year-long audio artwork 'Radio Influenza' revisits the 1918 pandemic

American artist Jordan Baseman (born 1960 in Philadelphia) has created 'Radio Influenza', a year-long digital audio artwork running until October 2019 that gives voice to the 1918 influenza pandemic (Spanish flu), which killed 50 million people worldwide, including Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. Commissioned for the centenary by the British charitable foundation Wellcome, which supports scientists, researchers, and artistic projects to stimulate public health debate, and produced by Matt's Gallery in London with support from Arts Council England, the work is accessible via a dedicated website, podcast, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Baseman described the project as 'essentially a soundtrack made of news articles from 100 years ago', featuring simultaneous viewpoints, contradictions, lies, and overlapping information and disinformation, developed through extensive archival research. The work draws on original materials from 1918-1919, including period reports from the British Newspaper Archive held at the British Library, to highlight scientific developments and failures, hopes and fears of families already affected by four years of war, and government action and inaction. Danny Birchall, director of creative projects at Wellcome, stated that the project raises important questions about how we collectively remember disease history and the real impact of the 1918 pandemic on daily life, and prompts reflection on how we use information during global health emergencies.