Just Another 3704558

Filed under Ongoing Event, Installation, projects

Artist: Metro Color Collision

For Conflux 2007, MCC will invite 10 artists to create small, ephemeral installations for phone booths within walking distance of the Conflux headquarters.

The phone booth was once an imperative fixture in the modern city where one could communicate in private for a few cents. These unequivocally recognizable structures stood at almost every corner. Now, they are proxy garbage cans, walls for graffiti, or even semi-private dens of ill repute. The phone booth has been uprooted, disqualified, overlooked, and eliminated. This once important tool for conveying information “whether urgent or whimsical” is now devoid of utility or necessity.

For Conflux 2007, we plan to reinstate the importance of the phone booth as a chamber of communication linking one person to another in private space. For today’s cell phone/blackberry enabled world, we will re-contextualize the phone booth as a place of different communication: instead of passing verbal information through a handset, our phone booths will relay creative information to the observer.

We will invite 10 artists to create small, ephemeral installations for phone booths within walking distance of the Conflux headquarters. We will then create a map to direct people to each phone booth, reminding people that they do, in fact, still exist and creating a proposed path to find them along one’s usual route. This project encourages the visitor to stop and notice elements of change and variety in a visual field so common that it is consistently overlooked. Suddenly, we redefine the aging relic that the phone booth has recently become. We reinstate it with importance as a place of convergence, communication and equality, with one difference: no change is needed.