No Answer

Philip Brophy and Martine Corompt (Vic)

Where: Lush Lane (off Flinders Lane between Swanston and Russell streets)
When: 1 July to 1 December 2006 (audible until midnight)

Faintly above the clamour of the city, you recognise a ringing sound – the bell of an increasingly obsolete public telephone. Intrigued and instinctively drawn to the familiar chime, you enter a laneway. The sound intensifies, gently filling the spatial volume of the laneway with tones created from the pealing of many telephones.

In the centre of a melodious cacophony, you search for the source, locating it on the wall of the laneway. A gaggle of public telephones, calling out for your response, are teasingly beyond your reach, unanswerable. An anti-interactive artwork.

Image courtesy of the artists

The city is now a place where the sight and sound of the public phone are disappearing signs of an earlier epoch of telecommunications as the ‘private space’ and the ‘public sector’ continue to conflate - Philip Brophy and Martine Corompt 

This project would like to acknowledge the generous support of:
RMIT Public Art, RMIT Product Design TAFE, Longbeach Communications

Technical information

This installation consisted of eight custom-made ‘payphones’ and a six channel pre-recorded soundscape, The Payphones themselves were vacuum formed, with painted 'Teledome' hoods that suggested the idea of a public payphone, rather than actually duplicating it.  The phones were installed very high up on the side of a building, each illuminated by low voltage lighting fitted under the orange domes, creating a glowing night-time spectacle.

The soundscape was installed at the mouth of the Laneway, conflating the strange effect of seeing and hearing the familiar in a displaced setting, with the perplexing question of 'who would actually be calling?' The sound of ringing emitted intermittently via three speakers on either side – not strictly repetitive, the arrangement was not unlike ocean waves: slightly cyclical and limited in tone, but with enough space and random interpolation of the sound to make it interesting.  The naturally occurring environmental factors such as wind, reflection, dispersion and competing surrounding noise, also contributed to the sound’s ambient nature, creating a listening experience that was always in flux.