YOU SHOULD CALL YOUR _____.
a community telephone booth, 2023
Mixed-media installation. Oranges, plastic grocery bags, telephone + programmed Raspberry Pi, welded phone booth, red sheer cloth, lights, flyer prints.
Growing up, the women in my family expressed their love by peeling and preparing fruit. To this day, my mom will occasionally ship a box of oranges with no warning. This social practice installation allows me to extend the love language of my mother to a broader community.
The event flyer (right) suggests that participants grab an orange and enter the phone booth to call a loved one. The act of peeling each orange allows for the slowing and enjoying of the conversation. Participants that pick up the black telephone will hear intimate voicemails from my relatives in both English and Chinese.
programming with Raspberry Pi.
programming with Raspberry Pi.
I collected a series of voicemails from my mother, father, and grandma from times when I didn’t pick up the phone. I then used Raspberry Pi, a single board computer, to play the audio files through the phone. I used Python to write a procedure that used activity from a tilt sensor as the input and an infinite loop of the audio files as the output. When participants lifted up the phone, the code activated to play continuous audio of my family voicemails.
Code written in collaboration with Nathan Lutz.
