Hello..., 2015:
Hello… was a site-specific interactive, multimedia installation produced in collaboration with artist Andrea McMurray in October, 2015 for Articafest, a juried interactive art festival in St. Louis, MO. In an era of constant multitasking, distracted phone calls, and texting while talking, walking, and driving, Hello… reminded visitors of the caring and intimacy of attentive conversations. Stepping into the cardboard caricatures of phone booths, now nearly extinct, meant being present in the moment. The child’s game of tin-can phones was an exercise in cooperation. Participants had to work together to keep the line taught, and the act of putting one’s ear to the can to listen and mouth to the can to speak brought awareness to the back-and-forth dynamics of conversation. The physical connection between participants across distance enhanced the intimacy that they created by giving each other their attention.
This project was inspired by an earlier project, Tin Tales, which I produced in 2014 in collaboration with artist Stacy Calvert. While that project amplified tin-can phones with contact mics and loud speakers for the benefit of an audience, Hello… was more experience-oriented than performative and relied only on the simple physical technologies of the tin-can phones themselves. Participants shared their experiences with the larger Artica audience by tagging the phone booths writing comments in the provided “phone books.”
This project was inspired by an earlier project, Tin Tales, which I produced in 2014 in collaboration with artist Stacy Calvert. While that project amplified tin-can phones with contact mics and loud speakers for the benefit of an audience, Hello… was more experience-oriented than performative and relied only on the simple physical technologies of the tin-can phones themselves. Participants shared their experiences with the larger Artica audience by tagging the phone booths writing comments in the provided “phone books.”