Main project description
DIAL ZERO is an interactive sound installation built from retrofitted rotary telephones, anonymous voices, and responsive audio logic. Audience members enter a field of phones arranged around a central booth; by lifting receivers and dialing numbers, they open lines into fragments of memory, confession, interruption, and song. Each call alters the room's musical behavior, turning the installation into a living communication network: part instrument, part archive, part séance.
At its center, DIAL ZERO is about the desire to reach someone - and the vulnerability of waiting to be heard. The work is not simply nostalgic for obsolete technology; it asks why these objects remain emotionally charged. A dial tone becomes suspense. A ringing phone becomes hope or dread. A voice without a body becomes intimate, uncanny, and impossible to fully possess.
Visitors do not simply trigger sounds. They rehearse a human gesture: lifting a receiver, sending a signal, waiting for response. Some calls reveal fragments of story; others misroute, overlap, disappear, or return changed. Each interaction is private, but never separate. As more participants enter the network, the room becomes denser and more unstable, shaped by collective attention.
Driven by a custom MAX/MSP system, DIAL ZERO routes call states, voice recordings, spatial audio, and generative musical responses in real time. The network behaves like a nervous system: remembering, misfiring, calling back, and changing in response to touch. Through this system, the obsolete telephone becomes a device for longing - a machine that asks what it means to call, to answer, to listen, and to be unreachable.
