THE PHONE BOOK
The telephone was the first instance of acoustic deincarnation, the earliest venture into virtual reality. It took the aural/vocal aspect of interpersonal communication, split it from the visual, gestural and and physical interactions that previously accompanied it, and relocated it in virtual space. Real-time language became separated from real-time body language.
The result is that we communicate by telephone using only our mouths and ears, in effect speaking and listening blindly to a disembodied head, our attention split between two locations, one real and one virtual. The real location can be fixed or, with mobile phones, constantly changing. The virtual location is almost infinitely flexible, extending from the next room to the other side of the planet. This can make for a disembodied yet strangely intimate experience as we hold the handset tightly and press it to our head to catch every nuance of the other person’s voice in the absence of visual cues.
The Phone Book is more transient than the dictionary – phone numbers change far quicker than the meanings of words, as shown by the pre-recorded messages redirecting us when we dial obsolete numbers. It is less imposing than the dictionary, printed on cheap paper and enclosed in soft covers. It is disposable, distributed free of charge every eighteen months or so to every household and business – a vast and compliant readership.
Its transience and highly localised coverage make its authority far from absolute – issues of meaning or spelling can often be resolved by looking up a word in a dictionary, assuming it is included, but failure to find a phone number suggest that the number has either changed or lies outwith a particular area.
The Phone Book is a list of numbers, making it more modern than the dictionary – the process of naming goes back to the book of Genesis and predates writing, but the numeric cataloguing of items is related to systematic written record-keeping.
In this piece I used the image of a man holding a severed head to suggest the disembodied relationship between the two people involved in a telephone conversation. Where Salome obtained the head of John the Baptist and Perseus the head of Medusa as proof of death, the telephone is proof of life, of magical disembodied communication. Where the god Odin once consulted the severed head of the giant Mimir as an oracle, here the head can speak with any voice provided one knows the appropriate spell or magic number. These magic numbers exist in a single global hierarchy of information, as shown by the embedded rectangles of local, regional and international access codes.
The process of deincarnation is intensified and accelerated by the use of the portable telephone as a personal computer (tape recorder, mixing desk, synthesiser and sampler, photographic camera, video camera, notebook, radio, TV, road atlas, encyclopedia, newspaper, phone book, music player, games console, library, shopping mall, bank…).