Only a Phone call away

How many times have you answered your telephone only to realise you’ve been accidentally phoned by a friend while their mobile phone was in their pocket? Did you listen or hang up? What did you hear that you weren’t mean to know? And did you ever tell them? Every time you receive a ‘pocket call,’ you become a secret audience to someone’s life. Multimedia artist Bernadette Louise explores audio voyeurism by giving the audience a sense of cinematic presence within the piece.

For my part in this piece I performed the setup and administration of the Asterisk based VoIP server that drove the project. Before the piece started people were played the sound of a room with people in it carrying out their daily tasks, but not talking. For the duration of the piece recordings were cycled on a daily basis and people were given the opportunity to “Tell us their secrets” at the end.

See http://myspace.com/onlyaphonecallaway for more info and to hear the recordings. Also the Fierce festival website to read about the festival the piece was part of.