In search of the telephone opera: from communications to art - critiquing the world wide web as an art form

Afterimage, July-August, 1997 by Peter Lunenfeld

In 1980, Allen S. Bridge founded the Apology Line in New York City. In a project that tested the boundaries between art and the mass media's evolving culture of confession, Bridge posted flyers around the city offering a telephone number that people could call anonymously to apologize for sins, real or imagined. These confessions were then re-purposed as installations, audio tapes and, after transcription, published in Apology Magazine.[8]

In the 1990s, there are also a few contemporary artists exploring the aesthetic possibilities of our most stable communication technology.[9] in Santa Monica, CA, Martin Kersels wired his dealer's telephone and fax to trigger a cacaphony of taped sounds so that anytime a ringer went off the whole assemblage would erupt in a frenzy, bringing any kind of discussion in the gallery to a grinding halt.[10] In 1997, Ian Pollock and Janet Silk organized "Local 411," a telephone project about the uncompensated displacement of 4000 people to clear the way for San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art and the Moscone Convention Center. "Local 411" featured sound installations and live performances, centered around an interactive voice-mail system, which played narratives about the area for anyone who called in. As the artists wryly noted, admission to "Local 411" was the price of "regular telephone calls, any local and long distance toll charges apply."(11)

Though this survey of art for the telephone is incomplete, its abbreviated nature is indicative of telephony's limited influence on the course of twentienth century art, avant-gardist or popular. This is obviously in stark contrast to the impact of film, radio and television.(12) Telephone art -- from Moholy-Nagy to Pollock and Silk -- has not developed forms or strategies specific to the medium itself. Telephony can not lay claim to a unique aesthetic practice, as sound recording has had with the pop single, the way television (and radio before it) can lay claim to the situation comedy or the cinema has the feature length narrative.

This essay's title invokes something that is not: there has been no telephone opera, no gesamtkunstwerk for this communication medium. This is not to imply that telephony is not important (the telephone has molded modernity at least as much as broadcast media), just that telephony is not a system that has generated sufficient discrete cultural objects to slot into the discourses of criticism and art history.

III. The Electronic Corpse & The Digital Questionnaire

So what do ruminations about telephone operas as yet unborn offer to an investigation of the web? Start with two default uses of the web as communication art: the Electronic Corpse and the Digital Questionnaire. The Electronic Corpse is the digital era's take on the Exquisite Corpse, that well known parlor game of the Surrealists in which paper was folded over and phrases or images were inscribed on the quadrants, each person unaware of the contributions of the others. The paper was then unfolded and the sentence or drawing was then seen in its splintered totality. The game takes its name from the first sentence produced using its method: "The exquisite corpse shall drink the young wine." Though created to take advantage of an unmediated communication between individuals in proximity, the Exquisite Corpse has been the inspiration for generations of experimentation and its extension into communication media has been inexorable.(13)