PHONE BOOTH
In 2023 Sara Keen and I created an art installation out of a vintage PacBell phone booth. I infused the booth with a glitchy, dystopian, corporate personality which lured passersby to pick up the handset for great deals, exciting offers, enticing hold music, and delightful new terms of service! Once a customer lead was secured they entered a humorously annoying broken phone tree which gave them opportunities to record and hear confessions and complaints, and constantly tried to guide them to wait on-hold and listen to ads. I created the various voices used in the over 30 minutes of audio in the project with an AI voice generation algorithm.
We brought Phone Booth to Burning Man, where it had a constant line of excited customers who recorded funny, provocative, intimate, or just drunk messages into it. Visit the website to experience the project!
For a much more complete experience visit Phone Booth (The Web Site)
Lighting
Phone Booth’s lighting is controlled by three PixelBlaze microcontrollers, which I programmed to entice potential customers to the booth during the night hours. Once inside the booth, looking up reveals an infinite mirror.
Engineering
Sara re-engineered the phone to run off a Rasberry PI, which managed the phone tree UI and recorded audio files. We replaced the speaker, mic, and wiring to improve the audio quality and reliability. A sonar sensor was installed in the front to detect passersby and activate the ringer to lure them into the booth, We installed a bullhorn atop the booth which regularly played glitchy ads and terrible chip-tune covers of all your least favorite songs.
Experience Design
PHONE BOOTH is a dystopian exploration of the absurdity and isolation that arises from the modern communication era. Upon picking up the receiver, visitors find themselves willingly subjected to extended periods of waiting on hold as they engage with the installation and attempt to navigate a complex phone tree while listening to continuous ai-generated advertising content.
The experience ended up being fairly complex, with a menu structure that allowed users to record different types of messages, listen to the messages others had recorded, play songs over the bullhorn, and listen to exciting marketing copy.
I created over 30 minutes of audio content, writing all the copy and using an AI voice generator to generate the voice overs. I manually applied glitchy effects to create a broken, dystopian AI feel.
New User Onboarding
Because of the experience’s glitchy and byzantine nagivation structure we needed a way to guide users towards various features of PHONE BOOTH. I designed a series of stickers placed around the booth which informed them of what keys to press to access different menu items. The stickers were designed to blend in with the old stickers already affixed to the phone.
I also designed a series of stickers to place around the event and hand out to satisfied PHONE BOOTH customers.
Website
I created a website to share the PHONE BOOTH experience, hundreds of people recorded hours of confessions, advice, and random giberish into PHONE BOOTH. Like PHONE BOOTH, the website is audio-driven, and is the next best thing to using the actual booth–give it a listen today!
