My delight on a shining night

A film shot on location at Limassol salt lake, Cyprus. Single-channel digital video, 32:00.

"My delight on a shining night" is a line from the old English folk song, The Lincolnshire Poacher, which tells of the joy of stealing game from rich landowners, and evading gamekeepers. For several decades during and after the cold war, the first bars of the song were used as the callsign of a numbers station, a mysterious radio broadcast, believed to relate to espionage, broadcast from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. As well as a large UK/US air base and a vast surveillance and air control radar installation, Akrotiri is home to one of the largest populations of Greater Flamingos in the Mediterranean.

"My delight on a shining night" was created for an exhibition of the same name commissioned by Drugo more, Rijeka (HR), and Aksioma, Ljubljana (SI), as part of the State Machines programme. It was supported by a research residency at NeMe, Limassol (CY).

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→ Related works: Radar Ornithology, Abdf, Catch and Release