The term Dead Air comes here from the context of Heinrich Boll's short story Murke's Collected Silences. Dead Air is a radio term for silence. These bits of tape which are usually cut out of broadcast material and endup on the cutting room floor. Murke works in radio and secretly collects these pieces of tape with the ambition of taping together a long silence to listen to privately on his days off work.

The image used for Dead Air is also, in a single print form, another work titled The Gift.