TRYING TO REACH YOU
14 March 2010
This piece was presented to an audience of about 50 people at the March 2010 edition of Flux Factory’s Flux Thursday, a monthly potluck and arts salon.
During the meal, I walk about the crowd, collecting future participants and their phone numbers.
Each participant is assigned a role in a scripted conversation and is provided a partial script to read. Each script distributed only has lines for one person–the corresponding participant’s lines remain a mystery. There are three conversations in total, and there are two participants to each conversation. Each Caller A is given the phone number of a corresponding Caller B who has the other half of the shared script. Each Caller B knows only that later her phone will receive a phone call, and that she will then be held responsible to execute the script that was provided to her. Each Caller A only knows a phone number to dial, and is told to execute the lines in the script accordingly.
At a designated moment in the evening lineup, I take the “stage” and give a brief explanation of the coming orchestration of encounters. I then summon all Callers A (each of which is assigned a Script 1, Script 2, or Script 3) to dial the number to their Callers B. We all press “Send” on our cellular phones at the same moment.
Silence,
followed by myraid ringtones, beeps, alarms, and bell sounds. Then, everyone begins reading their scripts.
Well, not everyone. A small portion of designated participants (1-2) had left; another small portion (1-2) lacked reception in the gallery. Another, apparently, had first read incorrectly the number given, and called a nonparticipant who had no idea what was going on.
Participant: I AM TRYING TO REACH YOU.
Bewildered Person: Hello?
Participant: I AM TRYING TO REACH YOU.
The phone number, read and dialed “correctly,” reportedly produced similar results.
Additionally, the number I myself dialed had no answer. No answer, and moreover I was told by a recording that “This number is no longer in service.”
I feel like all of the “failures to connect” in this piece actually gave it more weight, contributing to what I set out to make.
Changes for the future: more scripts, more people. Definitive ending/encouraging people to wait silently or else continue talking on their phones until everyone is consensually silent and has ended their connection.
