Journey by Telephone, 1995, 18’09”
From book Transmission Arts: Artists & Airwaves, Galen Joseph-Hunter, PAJ 2011
A Journey By Telephone explores the early history of the telephone, which, like radio, was imagined as a possible technology for communicating with the dead. A call which never got through among other missed calls, confessions, journeys and dead ends. The lines and receivers themselves were the instruments through which an analog network was sounded out to gather these ghosts. The Wireless Telephone Ensemble was convened in Sydney to devise and perform this project for FM broadcast throughout Australia. Members of the ensemble performed live in the studio following a score for telephones as instruments. Players interacted with other performers around Sydney and across the world, as well as timed connections with numerous automatic telephone systems. Also included were a variety of scripted and improvised material and prerecorded answering machine messages gathered during devising workshops of the preceding months and embedded in a mix of telemetry sounds.