- Lines Spoken For — diagram
Lines Spoken For
- 2003
- telephone project
Lines Spoken For is a telephone project using the familiar voice messaging system format. The telephone is a personal communications device, yet it is connected to massive economic and technological structures. Together with other new communications technologies, it transcends the current time system, effortlessly traversing not only space, but also time zones. The voice however, is a visceral phenomenon of the here and now. Whether we have ‘a voice in a matter’ often depends upon our place in administrative structures that prevail inside specific geographical boundaries. Intertwining historical fact with fiction, Lines Spoken For focuses on the International Date Line, a conceptual threshold between today and tomorrow that is a fiction of staggering proportions.
Navigating through the Kafkaesque system, callers uncover the peculiar circumstances of a delegate to the historic Conference for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. At this conference, involving a select group of international stakeholders, an issue of global importance is on the table: the location of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Just as one day would fluidly transform into the next — were it not for the International Date Line — Lines Spoken For exists without temporal regulator: cause and effect and consequently the construction of meaning is determined by the caller's navigation through the system.
A parallel publication articulates the project in print format. This artist's book uses a rotating binding system and circular pages to undo the logic of the structure of the book and remix notions of time and narrative progression. Together, the two components of Lines Spoken For contribute to an on-going investigation of the many paradoxes of time by questioning the consensual nature of pervasive systems regulating nearly all aspects of society.