It’s For You

Bespoke telephonic infrastructure for short-distance phone calls.

What it is

The project began with an intuition that the pay telephone, disappearing as a communication infrastructure, is simultaneously emergent as a poetic object whose cultural and affective possibilities could be explored by stationing it in a public space, as a variety of public interactives. The initial vision was of two telephones in public space within line of sight and outside the sphere of audible speech from one another.

What was built, how it works

Combining a rotary telephone through contemporary VOIP infrastructure and a custom microcontroller setup gave the barest expression of life to a dead object: dial tone, ring, and the capacity to call and be called.

Discoveries

My first and most alarming discovery: no one wanted to pick up a telephone ringing in a public place. I had thought that a ringing telephone inherently addresses a public, but whether placing the prototype on a desk or a white gallery plinth, it practically guaranteed that passersby would not answer it; the public often required an explicit, performative expression of permission.

In other words, they had to be told “it's for you!”

This was the beginning of a long and productive strain of research.