Installation 3 : PHONEBOOK : February 2006
Transit Lounge Gallery, Transmedial Festival
Berlin, Germany.
Principle Artist : Cat Hope
Contributing artists : Katie Hepworth, Miriam Melececk
Listen to a sound sample here: sound sample from PHONEBOOK
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PHONEBOOK, is a work where where mobile phones are fitted into books. This installation consists of a 4 part composition than is interrupted and added to by people ‘calling in’ to it with their own telephones, using numbers provided. Mobile phones are fitted into certain books on a full bookshelf, and play readings of excerpts of the text that has been removed to make room for them. Here the mobile phones use their voice recording and playback facility without connecting to any ‘network’, other than the one they create by playing back collectively.
The ‘phoned in’ contributions feature interviews with William Burroughs, master of the cut up technique in literature, and John Cage talking to Morton Feldman; masters of things aleatoric when applied to music and sound works. These interviews are available from internet archives on a creative commons license.
The work contemplates the state of spoken word delivery through audio books, podcasts and telephones. Will they replace written formats? Are we a new generation of listeners?
Most of the books are ‘found’, and many come from travellers who have left them behind before moving to their next destination, and represent languages that have made part of the artists’ experience when she lived in Berlin from 1990 to 1992.
Readings from the books for the Berlin exhibition are from:
Fallaci, Oriana (1974) Intervista con la storia, 4th ed., Rizzoli, Milano
Schillmann, Heinz Ed. (1981) Unvergessene Balladen F.Englisch Verlag, Weisbaden
Beard, Charles a. Ed (1928) Whither Mankind – a panorama of modern civilzation 1st ed, Longmans, Green and co. London
Uhlmann, Irene and Hartmann, Ortrun Ed.(1982) Kleine Enzyklopadie Die Frau VEB Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig
And the phones that ‘interupt” are in these books:
Lindemannn, Dr Hermann (1911) A Pocket Dictionary of the English and German Languages , 13th ed., Langenscheidtsche Verlagsbuchhandlug, Berlin-Schoenberg
Clark, Mary Higgins (1980) The Cradle Will Fall, Fontana, London
Redd Cat Hopes article on her experience in Berlin in the ANAT journal, Filter.