Installation 1 : PHONEBOX : July 2005
Liquid Architecture Festival Of Sound Arts, Melbourne, VICTORIA
Priniciple Artists : Cat Hope, Rob Muir
Participating Artist : Dave Primmer
photo © grant hobson
sound sample from PHONEBOX
“Phonebox” (2005) was Metaphonica’s first installation, a work that lamented the loss of the physical Phonebox on the Australian urban landscape. The sonic experience of the installation is in the listening, not the calling.
In PHONEBOX, mp3 enabled handsets store sound art created by the artists, sourced from the sounds of telephony. The handsets were placed in museum box style recesses in a wall, behind glass doors in a busy corridor at the Swanston Street Artspace at RMIT University, in the centre of Melbourne, Australia. Sounds were chosen thematically and equalized for maximum audiabitility through the thick glass in the busy area.
PHONEBOX was devised out of a challenge – the offer of an installation space 6000 kilometers away that was made up of cabinets with glass doors, without power, in a thoroughfare. The mobile phones as installation objects provided an excellent foil to this challenge; they are compact to post, rechargeable, lasting around 24 hours without charge, do not require the artists to be present to operate them, and can have sounds shaped to travel through glass. The installation serves to encourage people to hear rather than see, hold or use their mobile phones; so their visual aesthetic is superfluous, and the handsets have their screens turned away. Mobile phones have limited audio quality, and this has been used to advantage. It provides an opportunity to make new timbres and contexts for sounds.
METHODOLOGY :Sounds are created and then systematically arranged into a composition. The handsets are then called from a computer operating specially scripted telephony software according to the preconceived composition. The artists and visitors phones may also call the installation and interrupt this sequence, as all these numbers have so called ‘ring tones’ (i.e. sound works attributed to caller numbers). No call cost is required to participate in the installation, for the artists or visitors, since the phones are never answered. The sounds just ‘are’ – they are no longer alarms symbolizing the need to answer.
The audience becomes part of the composition by the very act of disrupting it. They become physical performers in the installation when they stand in front of it and call, or even when they call from elsewhere. Visitors to the exhibition can imagine the place the phones are being called from, or think about the sounds and the way they interfere with their environment, adding elements to the work that are not always immediately apparent.