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Concept
No Answer is an exploration of the 80s/90s style of public phone (domed 'half-booths' rather than the earlier full booths with swinging doors). The focus of the installation is on the spatial reconfiguration of this once-commonplace 'public object'. Instead of working with the public space of the laneway, No Answer is based around the audio-visual spatialization of the laneway through employing a pre-existing 'public object' like the domed phone booth.
The historical lineage of this type of 'modified object' is to be found in Duchamp's notion of 'the readymade', as well as both Surrealist and Fluxus transformations of commonplace objects for satirical effect. The irony embedded in No Answer is central to the work through its connecting the public space of the phone booth to the private space of its user. Absurdism is foregrounded in this artwork through the denial of access given to the public: the phone is ringing but you cannot answer it.
The socio-political themes of No Answer are centred on the shifting sands of public and private ownership of our telecommunications systems and networks. Possibly more than any other form of broadcast media, issues and ramifications of phone usage circulate around the nexus of public and private zones. Today, people loudly discuss private details on privatised 'public transport' while switching public networks assigned to 'private telecommunication companies'.
The 'private space' and the 'public sector' continue to conflate, invade and erase boundaries and distinctions. As labels and categories, they are becoming increasingly meaningless due to their fluid applications. This particular state of affairs is the conceptual crux of No Answer. The unanswerable ringing phones and their implausible and preventative positioning in the public zone of the laneway is born by this current state of affairs. The city is now a place where the sight and sound of the public phone are disappearing signs of an earlier epoch of telecommunications.
Audience Engagement
Immediacy, instantaneity and simplicity have been key factors in the development No Answer. The concept, form and configuration of this audiovisual installation have been designed to communicate an effect quickly and efficiently. People passing through the city are doing so more often with urgent haste than leisurely pace. Sound is a primary means by which signage works in the noise of the city-sphere (warnings are mostly sonic rather than visual). Hence, the ringing phone is sonically positioned as the introduction to No Answer: the audience will faintly hear the work prior to seeing it.
The sound of the ringing public phone in a public space is itself a slightly surreal event. For those that have encountered it, perplexing questions arise: do I answer the phone or do I ignore it? Furthermore, one would know that the phone-call cannot possibly be for you, so a level of incongruity arises in one's urge to answer the ringing phone. Humour becomes evident through the self-realization as to how Pavlovian and programmed is one's response to the ringing phone in any place or situation. All these issues are invoked by placing the sound of the ringing phone central to No Answer.
Once encountering the visual spectacle of the domed phone booths in the laneway, the comical irrationality of the artwork will become apparent. The deliberated display of the phones in unreachable positions wryly mocks the automatic urge to answer the phone. Should the audience persist in their reflex to answer the phone, the permanently-fixed phones will confirm the absurdity of the installation to those who attempt to lift the receiver.
No Answer uses a common street-level everyday object as direct means to engage a reflective audience with the wider issues of the current state of telecommunications. Today, the frustrated attempt to answer a ringing phone in a public space is an apt symbol for attempting to comprehend the wider effects of a major industry (now on the brink of complete privatization) typically ensnared by the currents of global deterritorialised economics.
Site Specificity
Just as the phone system is a matrix of accessible channels and networks, so too is the grid of city roads and laneways a map of channels and networks. No Answer envisages the site specificity of the laneway as an example of this kind of channelled networking, and aims to point to the similarities in the two form of media.
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