GUDEMON is a radio project and sound installation conceived within the framework of the La Chambre d’Écho residency at Chalet Twin Peaks, Courtenay, in July 2026. The planned device is deliberately simple: an old radio, placed in the space, loops an audio file as if it were still receiving an emergency broadcast from another time.
A Radio Fiction as a Contact Object
GUDEMON draws from H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds and Orson Welles's famous 1938 radio adaptation. But instead of replaying the American media panic, the project relocates the event to a precise territory: Courtenay, in the Loiret. Cosmic catastrophe becomes local, almost domestic. A special broadcast, announced as coming from France Culture, describes sonic phenomena, signals, testimonies, interruptions, scientific voices, then a gradual shift toward the impossible.
Genesis
The genesis of GUDEMON comes from a central A.L.I question: how does a signal become believable? A radio voice, a jingle, a news bulletin, a cut, a witness, a layer of noise can be enough to produce a world. The project does not seek to actually deceive the public, but to study that fragile moment when a medium gives fiction the shape of reality. Radio is a passage device: it turns narration into event, text into wave, voice into presence.
The title GUDEMON works like a signal-word. It suggests a proper name, a code, an alert, an entity. It does not explain: it calls. In the installation, the word may become a mental frequency, a fragment that remains in the ear after listening.
The Old Radio
The installation is based on an old radio looping the MP3. This choice matters: the object is not only an audio player, it is a cultural sign. The old radio already carries memories of war, coded messages, official news, propaganda, weather bulletins and distant voices. Placed inside the residency space, GUDEMON produces a temporal disturbance: the broadcast seems to come from the past, yet it speaks of an event that has not yet happened.
Why A.L.I?
For A.L.I, GUDEMON is an experiment on communication, belief and the form of the signal. It asks several questions: what distinguishes fiction from information? What role do timbre, compression, noise and the authority of a voice play? At what point does a story become an environment? And if an extraterrestrial civilization wanted to speak to us, would it invent a new language or hijack our most memory-loaded media?
A Listening Loop
The audio loop turns fiction into ritual. Each restart makes the broadcast begin again, as if the event refused to end. The radio no longer merely announces an imaginary invasion; it becomes a repetition machine, a local beacon, a small transmitter of poetic panic. GUDEMON proposes one hypothesis: contact may not be a single message, but a loop that returns until someone agrees to listen differently.
