Project Phonebooth, 2003, Interactive Telepresence Installation, installed in the Carnegie Mellon’s College of Fine Arts Hallway and the Computer Science Lounge
Project Phonebooth, 2003, interactive telepresence installation
Project Phonebooth aimed to bring two vastly different communities together using an alternative method of attention getting. Project Phonebooth consisted of two full-scale phone booths that were placed in the College of Fine Arts and the School of Computer Science. The phone booths were equipped with monitors that displayed signals from web cameras located in the remote phone booth across campus. These web cams, as well as four lights in each phone booth, could be controlled by the buttons of a typical touch tone telephone. The participants could either watch the students across campus passively, or get their attention by blinking a light and then communicate over the phone receiver. Project Phonebooth was successful considering many students entered the phone booth and chatted with each other. One group of CS students even convinced some art students to bring snacks to them and hang out with them in the CS lounge.
Tools, scripts, software, equipment and ephimera:
Two phone booths, lights, fixtures, tw pc desktops, two monitors, two touch tone phones rigged through a keyboard, four web cameras, custom software and hardware lead by Ben Buchwald
VIDEO
Project Phonebooth from Sarah Hatton on Vimeo.
Images
People on the other side
The Computer Science Lounge
student checks out the School of Art building phone booth
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