Redux: Callspace  | 2010 With the advent of wireless communication, social places have become progressively more antisocial. Mobile communication devices have the ability to remove users from their surroundings and project them into a metaspace outside the physical world. Callspace reverses this paradigm by giving a voice to forgotten places.

Callspace is a sound installation that utilizes cellular technology to network ambient sound from site-specific locations throughout a given metropolitan area. Six cellphones modified to run on solar power and answer automatically when an incoming call is received are placed in remote locations, and connections made between these cellphones and cellular telephones located in an exhibition space. The output of each telephone is wired directly to a dedicated loudspeaker housed in a monolithic speaker enclosure. Inaccessible and uninhabited locations are chosen because their soundscapes tend to go unnoticed.

The sounds inside a clock tower, atop a telephone pole, under a wind turbine: these are the voices of unique, localized areas in a world that increasingly commodifies and rarifies private space. Callspace gives listeners the ability to eavesdrop on this tacit chorus, to enter a soundscape outside of their daily experience.

Callspace is a project of Creative Capital.

More >>