"I overheard two people striking up a conversation about the injustice of working together"
project produced by
Carla Herrera-Prats & Tyler Rowland
February 13 - March 14 2009
Opening Reception
Friday Feb 13th, 5 - 8 pm
artist talk @ 6 pm
In an address to the Telephone Pioneers' Association in 1911, Alexander Graham Bell narrated his journey of the early developments of the telephone. His experiments with his assistant Watson, his trip to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and the first telephone conversation in a foreign language are described among others, to commemorate the invention of one of the tools that has drastically shaped the way we interact today.
Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson worked in the Boston area and filed the first telephone patent on February 14, 1876. This apparatus mimics as close as possible the way we communicate face to face and joins the photographic era, adding to the list of inventions "reproducing reality". The healthy digressions that Bell describes as his non-linear inventive methodology are a source of inspiration for our project.
We depart from Bell and Watson's experiments (and lives) in order to work as a creative team appropriating historical material. We fundamentally believe that one of the principal functions of art resides in its communicative possibilities. Hence, each piece in this exhibition, "I heard two people striking up a conversation about the injustice of working together" proposes an analysis of different properties involved in reciprocal communication and in collaboration. We are interested in translating the relationship that is integral to the telephonic experience (basically aural) into a variety of sensorial media.
Click hereHERE to view the trascript of the first long distance phone call made between Boston and Cambridgeport
Featured Artists
Carla Herrera-PratsTyler Rowland