BITPHONE (2012)

Western Electric Model 2500 telephone, electronics, software

BITPHONE is an installation intended to present a modern day interpretation of the classic game of Telephone (also known as Chinese Whispers, Operator, Grapevine, The Messenger Game, etc.). In the original game, one person whispers a message to another, which is passed through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group. During gameplay, errors tend to accumulate in the chain, so the original message differs significantly in the end.

Participation with the installation follows straightforward instructions. To record a message, a participant picks up the receiver off the hook switch, presses the ‘#’ key followed by a number, leaves a message, and then presses ‘#’ again to store the message. Every subsequent playback of the message on a given number bit-shifts and distorts the recorded sample. Messages can be recorded over at a participant’s desire—there are essentially 10 slots to record a message.

The outer shell of the installation is comprised of a Western Electric Model 2500 phone from 1968. The phone’s innards have been stripped and the keypad has been rewired with custom software in order to recreate the game telephone. The receiver has been kept in tact as the main speaking interface of the installation.

BITPHONE addresses the impact of interpersonal communication in the digital age. Since technological progress has revolutionized the way we communicate on a daily basis, the installation reinvents the game of telephone to address this shift. Almost all of our daily interaction right now is mediated by a computer interface. Whether smartphone, desktop computer or even the antiquated landline telephone, our social interactions have been off-loaded to our devices.

As a result of this shift, the fundamental experience of BITPHONE is a direct reinterpretation of the game telephone. However, instead of direct person-to-person communication, a computer device now mediates messages. All of the resulting message obfuscation results from the software itself. This underlying concept can be related back to Shannon’s basic principles of communication theory. Since there is now an intermediary device in the signal path, the opportunities for noise increases. In the installation, this noise becomes digital as a reflection on what our lives have become.