The new collaboration project with Kathy Guo is still staying true to our original interests about creating illusion of intimacy and how to simulate care or presence of loved ones who are not here or far away.
Homesick Hotline
Phones can become an isolater when people are around but turn into our sole connection when far away. The Homesick Hotline is a listening library of nested voice menus that will guide callers to specific stories determinded by how they answer questions through the hotline. Callers can then leave voicemails which are then recorded and are turned into more voice menus. The idea is the hotline can grow itself and become an interactive database of sampling family memories and history.
Our timeline
Nov 1
-research family trauma/family love interviews
-research interview tips/styles
-make an email account
-figure out hotline system. Are there ways to hack it?
Nov 8
-Start conducting interviews, start recording them.
-get our interviewees to branch out and interview/record the people they know.
Nov 15
-organize recordings, put them into phone numbers
-start designing the white pages?
Nov 22
-keep collecting/organizing recordings, put them into phone numbers
– designing the white pages? Book of story extracts?
-start making installation
Nov 29
-make installation
Dec 5
-documentation
-presentations
-finalizing project
References
Wind Phone
In Japan there is a Wind Phone where people can talk on an unconnected phone to speak to loved ones who had passed on. It was built by Itaru Sasaki in 2010 when he lost his cousin, and in the following year the infamous tsunami hit Japan triggering a nuclear meltdown. The gesture is simple but powerful and it is believed almost 10,000 people have made a pilgrimage to speak into the Wind Phone.
Prank numbers
From rick rolling to rejection hotlines, there are so many pre-recorded voices that exist only through our phones. The structure of a hotline is interesting because the expectation is to talk to a person but often just end up interacting with recordings/desk assistants. In regular hotlines, the one number you call is the entry point to an entire system of people. In the Homesick Hotline we hope to reverse that and have the callers become the network of the hotline.
Anna Huff 