This article was originally published as  "Intimacy, Concept, Interaction: Artistic Potential of Voice Mail and the Telephone,? Public Culture, Duke University Press, 26/1998

 The voice is translated into electric signals. Stretched over a membrane it explodes into a pleasurable experience of communication. I can feel your voice tickling my ear. What are you wearing? I want to picture you as we talk.

In the 1960's AT&T spent over $500 million dollars developing the Picturephone which allowed people to view each other as they spoke. Only a few hundred of the devices sold, because no one really wanted to see the person they were talking to. As one person put it, ?I don't want people to see me when I'm on the phone. I want you to think that I'm all ears as I cook, go to the bathroom, watch the game, doodle. I'm all ears, but my eyes, my thoughts, my life is mine.? The white box gallery seemed less than an ideal space for site specific sound work. The telephone seemed perfect for point to point narrow casting. Feed back from various non-art audiences including the visually impaired, physically challenged and youth groups, was encouraging. We became intrigued by the possibilities of a familiar technology.  

Area Code (1994)

Area Code is a self-guided, self-paced walking tour through San Francisco using the public telephone. Participants pick up maps indicating locations of specific phone booths, and then call from these booths to hear recordings of fictional letters. Area Code explores the relationship of the body to its environment. It shows the ?residue? humans leave behind and the awareness of it in the present. Area Code makes the history (and in some case future) of the site visible.  

At the Gate (1995)

Across from San Francisco city hall a refugee camp is visible through a fence. Like in an anthropological exhibit, two fences separate the lot from the street access. Text on maps cites the number of refugees world wide to date, as well as the number specifically displaced in Bosnia. Other texts comment on ethnic propaganda, humanitarian aid, cultural survival and other issues about war. A voice mail system features interviews with refugees from Bosnia in the United States. This connects the abstract concepts of the map to individual identities on the phone. Besides the interviews the voice mail system lists resources for direct aid for those displaced by the war.

0 seconds, 12 minutes, 2 hours, 20 days (1995)

A voice mail installation for the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Narratives chronicle the city of Hiroshima and the lives of her inhabitants from the moment of detonation on August 6, 1945, to two fictional events sometime in the future. The piece shows an emotional shock wave travel from the through time and history. The listeners witnesses the catalog of human emotion: from horror to grief, to denial and shame; from solemn remembrance to social action, and finally to utopian euphoria or doomsday pessimism.

Museum of the Future, into the twenty-first century and beyond (1996)

What is this perpetually unknown, elusive territory called The Future? How does its long-range shadow of cultural anxiety impact on us? In this voice mail installation, narratives, theories and satire deconstruct the fantasies that drive utopian, futurist and deterministic ideology. Listeners participate and contribute personal visions of futures, which are added to the piece.

Local 411 (1997)

Local 411 features recordings and live call-out performances to public telephones in the Yerba Buena Redevelopment Zone of San Francisco. Narratives and performances are based on the lives of 4000 displaced residents of an urban renewal project. For a short time Local 411 reconnects the past of the neighborhood and asks questions of those who use it today. The introduction of live calls to public telephones was very successful in expanding the audience to include many unsuspecting users of the area.

It takes 50 years for technology to become popular, 100 years to saturate the culture. The ?killer application? for the phone is its potential for democratic communication. In its early history, the telephone challenged the long standing communications barriers between classes and cultures. Suddenly, with the help of electricity, members of different classes moved into and out of one another's territory. The same is true today. Most commonly strangers on the phone meet at the night exchange. As personal ads move from print to voice mail, with its discrete screening capabilities, phone sex, party- and private lines present libertines with safe opportunities to explore sexual terrain. Drawing on the power of the human voice to seduce, these cultural phenomena encourage anonymous encounters that are highly charged. For many people it satisfies the desire for real human contact. The telephone creates an intimate space for the listener. We whisper our stories into your ear. It's just between you and us. Like cinema, we project our scenario in the landscape by asking the listener to engage with us from public phones. As a memorial, we retell personal narratives through the phone to simulate friendly conversation. As these tales move over the wire, we transport the listener through time and space to reflect on histories and political questions.

There remains much territory to explore in telephone based art. The possibilities continue to grow as more services come on-line. We look forward to work involving live interactions, three-way calling and party lines, caller ID, call forwarding, caller return, and fax on demand. Telephones make up a geometry of fibers and networks. They offer an infrastructure that circumvents traditional distribution systems and permeates existing social structures, inviting new relationships between people.

Copyright 1998 pollock/silk