#disembodied art

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Mail Art In Cyberspace - Chuck Welch

Interested in the history of mail-art and how the concept advanced into the fax, email and internet domains in the 1980s and 1990s?

Then take a look at this article by Chuck Welch (and all the other interesting articles linked on his website)

In the 1990s the Disembodied Art Gallery was part of this jump into cyberspace...

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Another one from Disembodied Art Gallery archives... a “Tarantinees” game to generate a film script.

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Networked Music & Sound Art Timeline

A PANORAMIC VIEW OF PRACTICES & TECHNIQUES RELATED TO SOUND TRANSMISSION AND DISTANCE.

(Babble appears in the timeline 1994)

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"Babble" - a telephone art installation; July-August 1993

 One limitation of the 1993 fax show "telæsthesia" was the limited access people have to fax machines. Although these machines are commonplace in the USA (where telephone charges are also cheap) they are less common in the EEC outside of the office environment - and are even more scarce in Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.

To address this issue, the next disembodied installation held in Brighton focused upon the humble telephone. This was an attempt to allow even more people to take part in a disembodied show, without having to track down a fax machine in an office or shop.

I also hoped that if I focused upon the human voice, this would create a more direct mental link between the contributing artist and the visitor to the installation.

The heart of Babble was a telephone answering machine which was hidden behind a false wall inside the gallery. The telephone number to this machine was distributed world-wide once again by postal and electronic mail invitations. Leaflets were also distributed throughout Brighton in clubs, shops and cafes.

A new message was recorded onto the answering machine every few days. each message asked the caller to answer one simple question - such as "Describe what you can see around you at the moment", "Where would you like to be now", or "What is your favourite smell?".

Whenever a visitor entered the installation, they encountered a red telephone in front of them, on a red pedestal. As soon as they entered the room, this telephone would start to ring; if the visitor chose to answer the telephone, s/he would then hear a sequence of answer phone messages replayed through the telephone handset. Each message was one answer left on the answer phone by a contributor. After a pause, more messages were then also replayed to the visitor through two large loudspeakers hanging on either side of the visitor. Eventually, the visitors would find themselves surrounded by a whole babble of voices - recorded by contributors who had called the installation from all around the world to answer the questions set to them by the answering machine.

Photographs of people standing in telephone boxes were strewn over the floor of the installation under the feet of each visitor. In all, over 60 people telephoned this installation from as far afield as Japan, Australia and the USA.

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The wonderful ‘disembodied body’ logo which appears at the top of this image, and also on the banner of this Tumblr site was very generously created by Reed Altemus(USA) in 1992 for the disembodied art project.