Dear friends,

This is the first group letter of the second game of Telephone. They'll come to you from time to time unless you ask me to remove you from the list. Apologies that English is my only fluent language - my German, Hindi, French, Polish, Persian, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, and Japanese are not great - though I can speak as much Spanish as a three-year-old child in Colombia.

As for why we're playing our second game now, five years after the first, it seems obvious to me. Never before have all people on Earth shared so much in common. It's dangerous for us to meet face-to-face and so we need the internet (which usually runs "a mile wide and an inch deep") to become something more than it has been. We need to connect deeply and intimately across borders and across great distances. A game for children seems the perfect tool for us to do so.

This email is going out to 57 of you (in 44 cities, on four continents) who have all been approved to play the second game of Telephone. There are about 100 folks going through the process of getting approved. That may seem like a lot of artists but it will only get us half-way through the fourth iteration of this game. Soon, hopefully, there will be hundreds and hundreds. Invite every artist you know. And also know that, as fast as the current artists are working, it will take a month or two for most of you to get assigned a work to interpret.

In the last game, we got a ton of involvement in the US and Europe and some in Southeast Asia and Australia. We didn't get as many players in South America, the Middle East, parts of Asia, and very few in Africa. That is my fault and, with your help, I hope to do better this time. If you know any good artists in those ways, send them our way.

Three more little things. 1. The Message. 2. Internal Projects. 3. Suggestions.

1. The beginning message for the last game was simple. This one, as the artists working on it right now can tell you, is spectacularly complicated. If the last game was Roshambo (or tic-tac-toe), this one is Chess or Go. There are reasons for this but I won't spoil the game by revealing the secrets. My heart is with the folks currently wrestling with it.

2. Internal Projects mostly include development things like programming the front end and back end of the exhibition site. I'm soliciting people I worked with at Microsoft and my current job but if you know any talented coders who want to do something meaningful in this world, send me their information. The other project is just outreach, trying to find clusters of artists in countries that haven't played with us before. I'm already hearted by the artists on this email from places like Russia and Iran but I don't know any artists in Central Africa for example. We need help.

3. For some of you, this is your second game of Telephone. How could it be better? How do you wish you had become more connected to other artists? What do you wish the last exhibition showed that it didn't? The time for brilliant ideas is now.

The last game I ran out of Brooklyn, New York. Five years later, I'm in Seattle, Washington. It's raining pretty hard now, washing the air clean. Tonight I read books to my two boys and sang them to sleep - neither of them were alive the last time we played. It's a dark time for humans, an amazing time, a historic time. We'll never get this chance again and we eagerly await hearing from you and your friends and to get the honor of seeing the work you were born to do.

Love to you where you are, from here,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

March 23rd, 2020

Dear friends,

Our last TELEPHONE update went out a week ago. I promise not to write so frequently going forward but, at that point, there were 57 artists signed up and now there are 136 artists from 95 cities in 25 countries (with many more in the application process). In a week! It took us 11 months to get that many artists the last time we played this game. By my estimation, to run this second game of TELEPHONE correctly, we'd need about 475 artists or more, so we're about 30% of the way there.

Firstly, we're in need of good musicians and good poets. It's so funny! I'm a poet. But during the last game, five years ago, I had the hilarious realization that, "Wow, poetry is kind of useful!" Haha! Any high quality artists you know, of any genre, would be most welcome to play. This project relies on word-of-mouth and solid recommendations.

Secondly, because we've had so many artists join so quickly, it's possible you may have to wait a while to play. A single message is passed to a few artists, and those works are passed to a few more. It takes time but then grows exponentially and suddenly 50 or 60 artists are being assigned a work of art to translate in a single day. So, if you don't hear from us for a some time, just hang tight.

(And again, my apologies for this letter being in English. I don't know how to say "hang tight" in Polish or Portuguese or Russian or French.)

Third thing. Over the course of the last game, I felt like I did all the talking. I wrote these types of letters and felt so lucky to get responses from all over the world. It was magical! I'd stroll down the street in Brooklyn and feel connected to the entire world. I felt illuminated and the opposite of alone. But this thing, this little project of ours, this little game, ought to feel like that for all of us.

So... how? Do you want us to assign you artist pen-pals from other countries? We have a Facebook Group for Telephone. But I'm down for any suggestions. I'm very protective of your personal information and very protective of the original secret message (which makes the game fun). I would like those of you who want to be connected to be connected during the year or so this game will take to develop, and not just at the end, when we publish the exhibition. We now need for the internet to be more meaningful than it's ever been. This email is going to some of the brightest minds. Let's connect for real.

Last bit! This is clearly a historic moment everywhere on Earth. Humans have never had more in common and we are artists, alive at this time. The work we do now matters. This sickness doesn't care what color you are, what language you speak, your religion, or what your government is called. Neither will we. We'll play a game for children with the open-heartedness and spectacular curiosity of children. I hope we'll look back on these dark days as a time when we did together something unexpectedly beautiful.

Your pal from Seattle,

Nathan | TELEPHONE
April 3rd, 2020

Dear friends, amigos, copines, tomodachi, חברים. venner, دوستان, bạn bè, друзья, etc.,

This is my third update in three weeks and now I'm writing to more than 200 of you - artists and brothers and sisters and pals. More than ever, we're all in the same little boat. Currently, there are 30+ people all over the world, working like crazy in the strangest of times, to translate the works they have been assigned. Many of the art works we've received back so far are almost supernatural in quality. Though the game grows exponentially, such an astonishing number of artists signed up so quickly that some of you may experience a frustrating delay - months even! And yet! In two or three months I will be begging all of you to invite MORE of your compatriots to become players in our little game. I believe we have less than half of the artists we'll ultimately need. Currently, we could use more prose writers and more dancers. It's understood that dancers/choreographers generally don't have their studios or stages but there are strange and wonderful opportunities for dancing in homes and private spaces.

When last we played, five years ago, the biggest question was "How do you pick artists to whom to assign each art work?" This game could either be a scientific experiment or a work of art itself. Personally, I would love to run this project (with the help of theorists and neurologists) as a pure experiment but this game, like the last one, is not very scientific. That said, there are a few rubrics.

1. Try to assign a work to as many forms as possible. So... a poem should turn into a painting and a film and a dance, rather than a painting and a painting and a painting. 2. Try to assign the works as far apart as possible. If a work comes in from New York, it shouldn't be assigned to Philadelphia and Boston and a different part of New York. It should go to Japan and Australia and Argentina. 3. Try, in general, to assign abstract, non-figurative works to narrative, figurative artists. So, if you get a work that's just a splash of colors or weird sounds, give that to someone who writes prose like a newspaper reporter. Haha! None of these are possible to achieve perfectly and all of them are very subjective rules, but we try. Moreover, as best as we can guess at the characteristics or style or intention of a participating artist and how they will respond to an assigned prompt, we're not very accurate. This game is perpetual surprise. Which is FUN. What else? Well, I'm still looking for ways to make myself less the only hub of connection between all of the participants in this game. We've got a Facebook Group, fine. I guess we could do an Instagram - the art works that I've been getting for application purposes are OFF THE HOOK. Group chats? I don't know... someone please be smarter than me?

Here in Seattle, everything is closed. The mayor just closed the beautiful track and field stadium across the street from where I live. That was where I took my two boys, neither of which were born the last time we played TELEPHONE, to play soccer, far away from other people in a bright empty expanse of green grass. Now we play soccer in the hallway of my apartment and wrestle for exercise. All schools and daycare are closed and currently I'm trying to teach them about the idea of harmony (music and between people), and wind tunnels, and dividing numbers, while working my job from home and running this game at night.

Here's Rainer, my 2-year-old son, playing with weird reflections of morning sunlight on the wall (like a tiny Olafur Eliasson!):

Anyhow, I've met barely any of you and love you all.

Inspiration and encouragement from where we are to where you are,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

April 11th, 2020

Dear friends, fellow artists, humans,

Collectively, you are located in 135 cities in 37 countries and we're just getting started. So far, 49 of you have played or are currently playing TELEPHONE. I also keep a little calculator going when we assign works out for translation. If a poem from Boston is assigned to a painter in Philadelphia, that's 307 miles. As of today, our little message has traveled 228,824 miles or 368,256 kilometers over the face of the Earth.

The moon is only 238,900 miles from our planet. So we'll definitely get there by tomorrow! Then we'll get back home. And we'll make that trip many times, easy.

I find comfort in thinking about the moon now - something (just like this game) that belongs to all of us - that belongs as much to New York as to Tehran, as much to Buenos Aires as to Johannesburg and Rome and Tokyo. A celestial body that is always the same and always changing, and that shines much more brilliantly in the very clean air of these strange and difficult days.

Business items! As far as recruiting artists, we're going slow for the moment, as we don't want anyone currently signed up to have to wait longer than they already will. That will change drastically in coming months. Still, we need more music, dance, and prose (of any language). And of course, we'll still take any quality artists of any forms but they may have to wait longer to play. That said, I'm attaching an invitation template at the bottom of this email if you want to send it to your colleagues. We're still looking for more players in Central and Northern Africa, South America, and parts of Asia.

We're also still in talks for putting together our internal team - looking for more designers, developers, programmers and engineers to pull off what will certainly be a complicated online exhibition of our project. We've got time, as this project will take at least a year, but earlier is always better. If you have ideas or people on this front, send them my way.

Last business-y thing: Want to again thank Human Hotel and Wooloo.org for featuring TELEPHONE on their platforms. Sublimely cool. If you like TELEPHONE, it makes sense to check out both of these organizations.

It rained here in Seattle this morning. I read in the newspapers about the troubles in New York and Italy and Iran and Japan and China and Spain and the UK, where we all have collaborators, real people all. The future is unknown. Perhaps this is just practice for dealing with something as massive and global as climate change. Who knows? Not me. It'll be a surprise how we change.

But this is true: We'll do what artists have always done. We'll try to make something beautiful and meaningful in an uncertain age and face the difficulty of these days by doing the good work we were born to do.

Now, after morning rain, it's a perfect evening outside in Seattle - so beautiful that it almost hurts to look at. This is from the empty rooftop of my apartment building:

Love and strength and inspiration from where we are to where you are, your pal,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

April 18th, 2020

Dear artists, colleagues, pals,

Our little game started a number of weeks ago with a single message. Since then, 76 of our fellow artists have played or are currently translating and transcribing works into art of their own. Today, randomly, we simultaneously got back finished works from buddies in Israel and Iran, so six more artists on the planet will get to start working tonight. So far, this tiny message has traveled 602,796 kilometers (or 374,560 miles) - through cleaner air, across the oceans, over the curved, blue, brown, and green surface of the Earth.

The best and worst thing about TELEPHONE is how secret it all is until the end! The collective reveal, the surprising gift of unveiling the whole project to everyone at the end, makes for such intense joy. On the other hand, It's a struggle in the meantime to fully convey to you the sublime translative prowess of these works being returned. It actually kind of freaks me out! I sometimes call them "Supernatural" or "Telepathic" but it's not that, not entirely. It's partly that art conveys (and we humans receive from them) more information than is currently defined or explained by art criticism. Regardless, my hair is standing up on end.

The core of our technical team is starting to take shape - designers, developers, programmers, engineers. Understand that presenting an exhibition of this size is major technical feat. Understand that these folks, highly in demand by giant tech companies, are doing this for free - because it's kinda cool, and fun, and might do a small amount of good in this world. They're building the gallery that will house this exhibition and designing the experience of how visitors will experience your works as much as any renowned curator at any museum in the world.

In the coming weeks, we'll start to vastly ramp up recruitment of new artists. Currently, 39% of the players in our queue have played or are currently making art. But this game grows exponentially, so we'll max out very soon. We need to more than double our community to at least 500 artists. There is a very specific reason for this but I can't tell you what it is yet! It's a secret that will make sense at the end! Haha (It's a good secret but seriously, this is true)!

For those of you who have signed up and are waiting to play, sincere gratitude for your patience. We look at your names every day and can't wait to assign you a work!

Got this today from an artist in South Africa upon the completion of their work:

"The poem was received when we were already in COVID 19 lockdown. We are now entering our fifth week. It has been time of introspection. Of slowing down. This played a role in my translation of the poem and of the quilt created. This period in our history will become one of those times we will remember for the rest of our lives. Sometime in the future we will ask 'do you remember what you did during the lockdown'? This artwork will in my mind always be linked to this time. I will remember exactly when it was made and the circumstances around it. That is why this piece is important to me."

Yes. That. I'll sit with that and hold it. I'll sit in my chair in this part of the Earth and think about you on your spot of the globe. I'll worry about you a bit and be scared sometimes. I'll look at satellite images of decreased pollution. I'll carefully guard my expansive hopes for the future. I'll drink a cup of coffee and I'll always remember this moment for as long as I live.

Here's a look at TELEPHONE Global Headquarters in Seattle tonight.

Love to you from where we are to where you are,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

April 26th, 2020

Dear friends and colleagues,

You're receiving this in one of the 151 cities in 41 countries participating in a single work of art. This second game of TELEPHONE started 38 days ago. Since then 106 artists from around the world have played or are playing this game. The game began with one message and has now been passed back and forth over the curvature of the planet a total of 529,617 miles or 852,335 kilometers. Meaning that we've now whispered our message from the Earth to the Moon and back. We've touched the heavens and returned home and are just getting warmed up.

To those of you who have been waiting to play for a long time, this may sound strange, but we're getting to the point where recruiting new artists is the most important thing. This is because, like a virus, this game expands exponentially. Even though we have 100+ artists waiting to play, we'll run out of artists in a few weeks and the game will stall. That wouldn't be the end of the world but we hope to avoid it.

So here's a sentence you don't often hear: We truly need more musicians, more poets, more prose writers, more filmmakers and soon. We also need artists from South and Central America, Africa, and some parts of Asia, especially Russia, China and India, where we only have a few buddies. You can send me email addresses of good artists or I can send you an invitation template. Whatever is easiest for you. We need at least 250 more collaborators to finish our project. The bigger, the better. The more, the merrier!

More than anything, I wish we could share some of the art works that have been created so far. I have cried numerous times (maybe I'm just super emotional) and have filled the space of my apartment with the sound of laughter. I actually got a a work back yesterday that caused me to happily scream and a neighbor knocked on my door to see if I was okay! Hahaha! Today, we got one so good that I had to go on a walk to process it.

But we'll keep our secrets, probably for a year, as though it's a surprise party or magical gift that you, yourself, have helped to create. Any temporary glee caused by giving you a peek now is far outweighed by the breath-taking fireworks this little game will cause on numerous continents when it launches. A joyful time capsule from a dark time. That's cool.

It rained lightly in Seattle today, then gave way to an exceptional cloudscape at sunset. Same sun as yours, wherever you are. Same sky with clouds that are distantly related to your clouds.

Miss you, even those of you I've never met. Stay alive and illuminated,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

May 2nd, 2020

Dear friends and 朋友们,

These dark days will prove hard on everyone, especially for impoverished people and marginalized groups. It will also be exceptionally hard on artists, not just for economic reasons, but because we tend to be open-hearted and sensitive receivers and transmitters of what's going on with life on Earth. TELEPHONE, this gimmicky little children's game, can't fix that trouble.

But hopefully it's a small reminder that, as an artist, your work right now is more important than it has ever been in your lifetime. It's for hard times like these that art was invented in the first place. As an artist, as a resource, you are more valuable to your community and loved ones than you have ever been. That's the job: metabolize what comes your way, however hard, into sense and beauty and truth.

So we continue forward step by step, and mile by mile and kilometer by kilometer. As of this moment, 166 artists from around the world have played or are currently playing, and the message has been passed 808,427 miles or 1,301,034 kilometers, back and forth across the face of this planet. That's to the moon and back and to the moon again - from artist to artist. More will be playing after tonight.

But here's a real thing! We have to get more artists signed up. This game is growing WAY faster than the last one we played, five years ago. We especially need more musicians, but poets too, and every type of art really. Sending me a batch of emails is awesome. But you can also send folks to sign up here, which makes it really easy on us: https://phonebook.gallery/

On the back-end, the layout and interactions of what will become your exhibition are beginning to come together. As far as tech and design go, it's so refreshing and illuminating to be around folks who are smarter and more talented (and more ambitious) than myself. Being humbled can be kind of cool.

Out my windows, all open because of a very hot day in Seattle, I can hear the sound of the train whistle in the distance. Is that sound so haunting and beautiful everywhere in the world? Does it always sound so true?

You're here with us and we're there with you. Keep going!

Nathan | Director | TELEPHONE

May 9th, 2020

Dear partners, collaborators, pals,

We've now whispered our secret message, from artist to artist, more than a million miles, back and forth, across the curved horizons of the planet we share. Something like 1,011,215 miles or 1,627,389 kilometers; from a studio in Johannesburg to an apartment in London, from a cabin in California to a house in Tehran, from a flat in Saigon to a tower in New York, from a room in Buenos Aires to a workshop in Athens - from actual place to actual place, from actual person to actual person, each as real as you, each as real as me.

This is the 53rd day that this strange, little game has been running.

We have been impossibly busy at TELEPHONE Headquarters (which is just our apartments in New York, Seattle, and Austin, Texas). The queue of emails almost gets cleared and then, the next morning, there are 20 more finished works waiting in the inbox to be reassigned to other artists. So if you sent in finished art recently, know that we're running about four days behind. We've had zero time for Instagram or to address the idea of a documentary being made about the project.

Luckily, we just got some much needed administrative help and will probably need more. That's the thing! When you run a project of this scope and scale, trying to make no money, in which all the artists and all the people building the exhibition are not being paid, we are set apart from companies and corporations and brands. We have advantages, one of which is that when we ask for help, it just kind of appears out of nowhere, like magic!

Here is the help TELEPHONE needs now:

We need Musicians and Poetry/Prose writers to sign up. Like, 100-200 of them, and soon. Otherwise the game will have to slow or stop for a time while we find them. We have so many splendid painters and photographers, but the game is boring if it's entirely visual. PLEASE help by sharing this link to every musician and poet you know:

https://phonebook.gallery/

There is a very specific, important reason that we need that many artists but it will remain a secret for the next two or three weeks. Haha! This whole project is such a tease!

It's been raining softly in Seattle all day. I'm drinking a mug of black tea and gearing up to work into the night on the Pacific coast. I had a strange quarantine birthday that made me remember that it is still a lucky thing to be born in any age. I've been listening (over and over) to a piece of TELEPHONE music, while staring at a TELEPHONE sculpture. The two works are only distantly related, not from the same thread, but it's as if they were soulmates or created by the same person. It's miraculous and makes me feel the opposite of tired. "It's working! It's really, really work, again," I smile to myself.

You will definitely remember this time for the rest of your life. You will remember the work you do right now. So get sad, get depressed, despair, sleep, fight through it, pick yourself up, and make the art now that you want to remember until the day you die. This is your time and this is your moment.

Sending you an encouraging wind from over here to over there, your friend,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

May 16th, 2020

Dear pals,

A great blue heron just few within feet of my apartment windows! If you've never seen one, they are immense, graceful dinosaurs, the sort of bird that makes everyone on the ground hold their breath as it passes above. I didn't plan on writing about that but it happened right now and was amazing.

Which is to say that I'm a real person with a real body in a real place on Earth, just as real you in your place with your people, and just as real as the other 357 artists I'm writing to now. It's exactly like what Walt Whitman wrote in 1855:

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

Equally real are the hilarious, brilliant people working to build this hyper-ambitious TELEPHONE exhibition. Ben Sarsgard is our Lead Engineer and Matt Diehl is our Lead Developer. These fellows are flabbergastingly talented coders and we'll need every ounce of their genius to pull off this far-fetched digital museum. Our two User Experience Designers are Jen Spriggs (Google, Dropbox) and Ramon Rodriguez (Microsoft, T-Mobile). They're figuring out how to present hundreds and hundreds of artworks in an intuitive way - a hard project for even the most accomplished gallery curators. And our new Director of Operations is Katelyn Watkins who has already devoured so many internal projects and is making life easier for everyone involved.

Remember, we are creating TELEPHONE for no money. We aren't a company and we aren't an institution and we aren't a brand. We're just a bunch of people. We're playing this game because it's FUN, because it's authentic, edgy, strange, and HOLY. It matters to us what this looks like when remembering back on it a decade from now. It matters to this what this means to younger artists. Plus, it just beats feeling lonely and trapped during this dark time.

Currently, we're running about 4 days behind but it's a holiday weekend in the States and we're going to grind out the queue. There are currently 280 of you who have played or are playing and our secret message has been whispered from artist to artist more than 2 million kilometers - more than 48 times around the circumference of the planet. These statistics are cool and funny but it's not the numbers that matter so much - it's that these artists are real people in real places, just as real as you.

Night has fallen on this part of the planet. I should probably do the dishes but I won't. I'll keep going until I can't and will fall asleep exhausted and happy, imagining all of us together in person, perhaps in the courtyards of the Alhambra or in the pubs on Portobello Road or some rowdy spot in La Boca in Argentina, where it's autumn instead of spring...

It will happen. But until it's possible, we'll meet you there in dreams.

xo Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: My soundtrack tonight was all finished TELEPHONE musical works. So absurdly good. But also this - https://youtu.be/9PydvdEdGwE

May 23rd, 2020

Dear pals (all 417 of you),

This 10th TELEPHONE update is a long one but good to read. The second half is more fun than the first.

One of our designers, Jen, led our very small internal team through a number of exercises, like little games, to help us think through what we ultimately wanted TELEPHONE to be. One of the games was to figure out who our audience was and for whom we were creating this massive online exhibition. After a ton of work (play), we narrowed our most important TELEPHONE audiences down to:

1. The artists. You. Us.

2. People looking back on this in 10 years.

3. Young artists.

4. Lonely people.

Lonely people!

I remember when we first played this game five years ago, I'd sometimes walk to the grocery store in Brooklyn and it felt like there were three hundred invisible people, brilliant spirits from all over the Earth, strolling alongside me down the sidewalk. It was the opposite of lonely. I felt a sense of vastness and communion. But it didn't feel like that for everyone. I was writing a billion emails with artists and looking at all the works, and watching this garden of art grow exponentially. Many artists just played for a couple weeks and then, a year or two later, looked at the final exhibition.

This time should be different. Right now, so many of us are stuck in isolation or quarantine, separated from our communities. Many of our various countries (my own, to be sure) are wracked by division, hatred, inequality, stupidity, fear, poverty, and a distain for the beauty that makes life on earth worth living. And loneliness! Many of us just feel totally alone.

In my opinion, art, at its best, is a form of medicine and we hope TELEPHONE will reflect that. Every artist that has played so far has given permission for their contact info to be made available to the artists that interpreted their work. So, in a few weeks, we'll begin introducing you to your "families," meaning introducing the creator of the "parent" work to the creators of the "child" works, which, all coming from the same parent, are "siblings." We won't make these introductions until all the child works are finished, as we don't want to bias translations. We will also ask you not to share the actual works with each other but you can talk as much as you want about the process and how the translation felt.

I know that if I had created an artwork for this project, I would be utterly fascinated to talk to other artists who had interpreted my work! Anyhow, one of the points of this simple, difficult little game is to help you remember that you are not alone. You are there with all of us and we are here with you.

Okay, I'll just shut up and share some words sent from your fellow collaborators. Every TELEPHONE artist is asked to write a description of what it was like to translate the message they were whispered. These descriptions are, to me, almost as fascinating as the works of art! There are so, SO many of them and I just grabbed a random handful and deleted any info that would give away parts of our secret message.

Remember: Even though you have not yet met, these are your people. You aren't alone.

Love from over here to over there,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/325334410936165/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/telephone_community/ (And as always, apologies for SO much English!)

*

To a certain extent, I knew what was coming and I didn’t. I am still to this day in awe of Telephone and remain connected to some of the artists over social media as literally oceans are between us. I received my telephone message at 6.45am 10th April 2020 – Good Friday. I savoured the anticipation whilst I spent the day re-organising studio space in preparation for making new work. I let my imagination run riot about what my message could be? I knew it was audio…. Music? Interpretative sounds?... it felt like a very precious gift, a wonderful fantasy day out amidst the new lockdown norm.

- Washford, England


It was an absolutely challenging experience to translate this incredible work of art! At first I was totally blocked. It seemed almost impossible to translate without trying to copy or doing a reinterpretation.

What's a translation, anyway? That was my question…and I had to answer it to myself…

I left the imagine in my PC screen for some time, letting it flow… And as days went by I became with an idea and I began to work on… Slowly it began to have shape and I really felt the connection between both works. And they seem to have a strong bond in fact!

- Buenos Aires, Argentina

When I email Nathan to join Telephone, life in Singapore was, as usual, undisrupted. But by the time I received the Telephone assignment, the situation in Singapore has nosedived to the worst. Life has come to a halt, and they only allow us to leave the house for essential activities. After reading the poetry composed by _________, images zip through my mind and an idea struck me.

- Singapore


I literally had to sit down and put a blanket over my head to fully take in the piece of music I received for interpretation. I was paralyzed by its multi-layered complexity, high production value, sheer simplicity, clarity of purpose and mesmerizing beauty. It truly was a work. It took me more moons than I would have liked to wrap my head around how to pass the message - which was indeed crystal clear - on through a single photograph, or even a series of photographs.

- New York, United States


I loop played the audio file that I received, the volume was very low and my
surrounding was noisy, it just became the background sound of my day as any other sounds around me, only few moments I noticed it, then it blent with other sounds again. Its like all the things happened in the life, it happened then it gone; like every thoughts raised in the mind, it bubbled then flown away…the time river runs too fast.

I always feel I didn’t drink enough then I have to swim. If time is money, young people more rich, or older one? Life is a container, we all are measurable, the time we gained, also the time we lost.

- Shanghai, China


I am the ninth child of a family. At the age of 12, I lost my parents and received my diploma in industrial electricity from a high school in Babol. I have developed an interest in art, drawing and painting, and I have realized that I have a different talent for acting. I feel like I can turn emotions and words into shapes, and I love it as much as I do my life. I have reached the age of 24. I would like to continue my life in this work, even if I do art and art in Iran. They are not worth much, but I will not give up :) Thank you very much to you and other artists for preparing and directing this game and the opportunity to connect with different people in the world. I also thank the land for the opportunity of a lifetime given to me.

I wish good health and success to all ...

- Babol, Iran


In this instance, my message came all the way from an artist in Brooklyn, New York whose work evoked feelings and imagery throughout that creative process in order to prompt and stimulate a discourse amongst others. This kind of interaction from initial message to the developmental changes of ones theme and other meanings created, allotted or even assigned during this game was a true experience of sharing and seeing…learning and understanding…giving and transmitting…a true communication.

- Christchurch, Barbados


When converting a written text to a visual image, it is tempting to do an illustration: just draw what was described. But an illustration shines when it is viewed in conjunction with the text, so that the two art forms support each other. A translation needs to stand on its own for those without access to the original, and a translator needs to make choices in how to communicate best. So while it is possible to draw a ____, a _____, a ________, and a ___________ just because those are all words that were mentioned in the text, it isn't possible to draw in the same way is, and, of, or when. A text is more than words, it is sentences and lines and paragraphs; it is themes and ideas; it is intentions of the author you didn't catch; it is your interpretation that the author had no way of predicting.

Throughout the many attempts, iterations and sketches a few elements always surfaced - both pictorial and technical - and it was in the end upon those elements that the final work was constructed. Does it mean the final work is more a distillation than a translation?

- Hamina, Finland


Each work of art in any medium just contains so much. There are so many images, themes, potential symbols, emotions. For me the hardest part of this project has been the process of picking which details I wanted to use as the foundation of my own work. What aspects resonated the most with me, and what could I do with those elements? At that point the translation becomes more an issue of fidelity, inspiration. Only then can I really start to put a voice to those aspects that I’ve kidnapped and held close to my heart.

- Los Angeles, United States


I tried to see the earlier artists message and the artists before him too. It was a very intriguing process, opening one up to how everything is connected. When I finally had made my mind up about what the piece meant to me I started working on how to transmit it onwards. I wanted to make a body of work replicating what I felt was the original message, what the past artists message was but also keeping true to my own way of working and my own aesthetics. Like many other places in the world right now South Africa is affected by the corvid-19 virus. In writing time we are 40 days into a nation wide lockdown, and we are only allowed to leave our residences for getting food or healthcare. Fortunately I stay on the property of a very nice family and they were happy to model out all my mad ideas.

- Cape Town, South Africa

May 29th, 2020

Dear pals, dear artists, dear friends,

I’m writing to you and about 440 other TELEPHONE artists from 243 cities in 46 countries.

Let’s begin by revealing a closely kept secret!

As we approach the half-way point of this game, approximately 398 of you have played or are currently playing. The work so far has been of incredible quality. But, halfway through this process, the entire structure of TELEPHONE will change. This change has been planned since the beginning of the second game.

In the first game, five years ago, every finished work of art was assigned to two or three other artists, so the game kept expanding exponentially, branching outward. So far, this game has followed that pattern. But this time, when the chains of artworks reach a certain number of translations, the process will invert. This means that each artist in the second half of the game will be assigned two or three works of art simultaneously.

Why?

The first game of TELEPHONE examined Ekphrasis, the process of translating one art form into another. This game does that too but Ekphrasis is only one element of how art history works. Another element is Synthesis - combining numerous influences simultaneously.

Usually, an artist doesn’t base their work on a single inspiration, like Guernica by Picasso. No, they’ve been looking at Guernica, listening to a song by David Bowie, reading a novel, watching the news, and remembering a movie. Somehow, a good artist COMBINES all of these many influences into a single work. The voice of an artist is partly what it can synthesize.

It’ll be a little like this, where every dot is a work of art:

[There's actually no limit on the number of structures & shapes TELEPHONE could employ]

So! This is the reason we really and truly need 400+ more artists to finish this project. The second half of the game needs the same number of artists as the first half. We don’t have even close to that many artists right now. But we will find them! If every artist receiving this email could sign up one other artist to play, we could easily finish TELEPHONE.

So share this with everyone: https://phonebook.gallery/

Here, near the middle of the game, is also a good spot for a deep breath.

There is such division, and fear, and grief, and loss in every corner of the Earth. We all feel alone sometimes but, because we all feel alone, none of us actually are - we have something in common, something we share.

For example, every artist sends back a description about what it was like to translate their work. We got this message back from a TELEPHONE artist in Brooklyn:

“The pandemic had already made us feel our physical separation deeply, and the distress erupting in cities all over the country cast the message I'd received as a call for unity and acceptance. It was difficult to pull myself away from the news and constant updates, but in a time that requires so much destruction--of systems, ideas, and the policies that perpetuate them--the act of creating felt like a positive gesture toward a better future. To create something demands faith that there is a future at all.”

This is EXACTLY why we started TELEPHONE now, in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of the most divisive and exhausting times. These are the moments in which art and connection are most important, and this why we will continue doing the complicated and emotional and vital work we’re good at - the work we love.

Sending you some of that love and encouragement and fortitude,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

June 6th, 2020




Dear 497 pals from 263 cities in 52 countries,

The last game of TELEPHONE took between ten and two years to run, depending on how you count it. This one will only take a year. After living so closely to the last one for so long, I could only see the failures. One failure was not following up with everyone after the launch and helping to weave the game into something like a functional community. I forgive myself for that though because my first son was born a couple months after we published the first project. And I immediately realized that there are many things in life more important than art.

That was five years ago and 4,590 kilometers away. My baby boy just had his fifth birthday and got some binoculars and a book about unicorns and a weird kit for building blanket forts. I did, in fact, use it to build the boys a fort.

But that of course led to the boys helping me to build a model for TELEPHONE.

And then I started using this toy for children (similar to the way we're using this game for children) to model possible three-dimensional, molecular representations of artistic influence and distillation and translation for TELEPHONE. Of course, three dimensions is simple. For example, the recommendation tools employing implicit matrix factorization used by Spotify (which heavily influences the work of musicians and probably other art forms soon) renders something on the order of a 50 dimensional space - which is impossible to visualize, except in mathematical formulas.

Though recommendations by Pandora or Spotify often pale in comparison to the recommendations by a savvy artist friend, algorithms will win just about every game against humans (seriously, watch the documentary AlphaGo). And though art history is many magnitudes more complex than the paltry few mechanics probed by our little game, perhaps future data scientists (or my boys!) will do better. Moreover, though algorithms are better at winning games than humans, our minds remain better at INVENTING games worth playing. Inventing games is an art form. Just ask Sol LeWitt or Alighiero Boetti. TELEPHONE is also not really a game that can be "won."

Aside from the theoretical complexities of this game, I've been so inspired (sometimes to tears) by the restraints faced and overcome by some of our TELEPHONE artists all over the world. A dancer doesn't have her studio. A photographer can't safely leave the house. A musician only has the equipment in his apartment and can't use other musicians. A sculptor can't get her usual materials. A filmmaker is stuck in place.

From the messages we are receiving back from artists everywhere on Earth, the difficulty of making art in the usual way right now is so palpable. The symphonies and ballets are closed. The museums and galleries are closed. The dance clubs and theaters are closed. The bookshops and libraries are closed. AND YET! The constraints may be making us more creative.

I'm particularly inspired by the works and messages coming back from parts of the world that are experiencing the most severe difficulties. It makes me feel that, even if the world was coming to an end, we would still make art. And also that, because we are making art, the world will not come to an end.

Sending you love from where we are to where you are, your mate,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

June 13, 2020




Dear Iván, Claudia, Peter, Miranda, Holly, Karen, Silvino, Karen, Sara, Zsolt, Bart, Harald, Ryan, Mari, Kirsi, Trygve, Sara E., Aliki, Τhanassis, Michalis, Irini, Eli, Austin, Zachary, Kate, Emily, Maya, Brittany, Katelyn, Jenny, Sean, Elizabeth, Eileen, Shannon, Aaron, Mohamad, John, Linette Marie, Barbara W., Larry, Jamie Lee & Eric, Maria, Enda, Marina, Ebba, Angela & Robert, Ramin, Emily, Laura, Beatriz, Onno, Stefanie, Marc, Veronika, Pete, Joxean, Abbey, Dorota B., Lana, Gabriel, Maria, Asia, Allison, David P., Jane, Gary, Mandy, Matt, Allison, Dinie, Konnie, Abi, Maya, Beryl, Robyn, Rosemary, Amy, Rebecca, Madeline, Robert, Alice, Margot, James, Nina, Lesley, Annie, Emerie, Kalila, Brittain, Robin, Jessie, Laura, Paula, Corina, Angela, Analia, Francisco, Fausto, Sole, Kelly, Bernadine, Susan, Janet, Sahar, Erin, Nancy, Julia, Michele, Sarah, Patricia, Andrew, Sophie, Aron, Claudette, Calvin, Emma, TO, James, Lynnda, Joy, Michael, Azadeh, Kadiejra, Vera, Hank, Andrea, Cara, Andreas, Ben, Kathy, Patricia, Stelth, Erin, Kelly, Dorene, Brenda, Alison, Kate, Jan, Dorota U, Monica, Molly, Calyn, Ann, Michael, Rae, Cariad, Jessica, Brian, Ann, David, Chelsea, Shelby, Ally, Erin, Wes, Geraldine, Sierra, Joanna, Melika, Jeroen, Monika, Dan, Lora, Alejandro, Ivan, Checa, Walter, Lijel, Inari, Aldobranti, Cate, Liza, Josefa, Brad, Almaz, Laura, Tamera, Clayton, Arlea, Julie, Çağıl, Hulya, Ilke, Charles, Clinton, Jackie, Sean, Gulaboff, Robin and Carina, Sharleene, Nico, David, Victoria, Craig, Derrick, Setare, Sarah, Dante, Margaret, Ronda, Naoko, Victoria G., Kateryna, Julissa, Nina, Huda, Kimberly, Harriet, Suzanne, George, Linda, Fiona, Carolina, Sandy, Amy, Secret, Julie, Eve, Zoe, Jo, Vesna, Rodrigo, Rachel, Lillian, Darryl, Charlie, Kimberly, Sean, Howard & Ena, Randi, Yusuf, Macy, Sebastian A., Laura, Marlys, Ari, Michael, J. Rick, Ben, Linda, Freyja, T.R., Kasia, Stephen, Jana, Michael, Daniel, Shaun, Judy, Forest, Madeleine, Diana, Casey, Bob, Eric, Dorothy, Thomas C., Wang, Mark, Deb, Tad, Roberta, Autumn, Rebecca, Jacqueline, Amélie, Baharan, Chadi, Élisabeth, Ian, Patrick, Tim, Cristina, Erisson, Maureen, Ann, Nancy, Luke, Elizabeth Joan, Carin, Margaret, Bianca, Lisa, Robin, Ellen, K Linnea, Christopher, Marisa, Jill, Olga, Ellen, Kristin, Kate, Mary, Zoe, Mary, Slavena, Kathleen, Allee, Kate, Lauren, Thomas, Chrissy, Sarah, Jennifer, Harald, Michael, Clint, Nick, Tom, Jenna, Lisa, Jaim, Andrea, Aleksandra, Kari, Ernestine, Sarah, Stig, Lupita, Alaina, Michael, Brian, Anna-Marya, Pauline, Mehdi, Liv, Christina, Hura, Mikel, Paul, Muriel, Lucie, Christine, Lois P., Marah, Ann, Marc Alan, Fi, Akira, Abram, Kevin, Janusz, Michelle, Gavin, Deesha, Mary, Chris, Jeff, Kelli, Leesa, Olivia, William, Kally, Adam, William, Kristen, Ian, Robin, Emily, Mercedes, Alisha, Lindsay, Matt, Lolo, Bonnie, Amy, Alicia Jo, Barbara, Merridawn, TJ, Craig, Martha, Johanna, Richie, Amy, Jackie, Thomas, Rachel, Matt, Jenifer, Rage, Penelope, Jana, Melissa, Travis, John, David, Celia, Daniel, Andre, Ni, Nilson, Mariana, Camila, Denise, Illuminate, Leila, S, Lorenzo, Cherie, Jo, Joe, Trever, Lancee, Maria, Laura, Sheila, Arzu, Matt, Julie, Julie, Michele, Mary, Dean, Charlie, Jeff, Jane, Nels, Mary, Gabriela, Elena, Marco, Mirela, Megan, Brittany, Billie R., Carmen, Kate, Jennifer, Maggie, Kevin, Michele, Debby, Levi, Anne, Josh, Carl, Elizabeth, Siolo, Anne, Alexis, Susan, Suzanne, Risa, Panos, Shu, Joe, Steve, Dustin, Colin, Anna, Froso, Pamela, Richard, Andrew, Mary, Cecilia, Viljam, Andrew, Joas, Kim, Afolabi, Chih-Fen, Esther, Angela, Yekta, Lana, Tetsushi, Betsy, Robin, Sarah, Paola, Roberto, Maria Rosa, Elaine, Douglas, Bruce, Selina, Vincent, Antonino, Michaela, Kate, Pierre, Zoran, Donn, Scott, Valerie, Yulia, Emanuela, Herbert J., Analia, Chris, Kim, Emma, Marie-Eve, Lorrie, Elizabeth, Kyle, Martin, Joshua, Moriah, Lisa D., Grietje, Jeannine, Elizabeth, Sarah, Oz, John, Magdalena, Marija, Iris, Edna, Marieke, and everyone working to build TELEPHONE...

Somehow, we all found each other and we're all connected. We're all creating a single work of art together, composed of hundreds and hundreds of works of art. Here, almost at the halfway point of this second game of TELEPHONE, we have now passed our message, back and forth, across the oceans and continents, over 3 million kilometers. That's 75 times around the circumference of the Earth and almost four round trips to the moon and back home home again.

We share so much in common. For one, a vast majority of artists writing back to us describe the intense difficulty of "accurately" translating the work of art they were assigned. In the first game, five years ago, I felt that acutely. If a finished work came back and didn't seem to be an accurate translation or distillation, I sometimes actually got upset. "You're not getting it! You're not seeing it!," I'd think. This time, while I still appreciate the acuity and rigor of so much of the work, it feels softer to me.

At a certain scale, this little game becomes a living thing with a mind and spirit of its own. In that way, it's more like gardening than engineering. We groom the garden, certainly, and water it, and cultivate it, but what we're growing belongs to itself, not bound to anyone's intention. The game has a will of its own now.

On our side, managing the game, we do the best we can to care for it. We try to keep the branches growing at the same rate. We put a lot of thought into the assignments we make, but you can never really tell. Sometimes we assign a work to three artists and all three have to drop out - maybe due to health, or employment, or some crisis - which, of course take priority, because TELEPHONE is just a game. And it's like that, isn't it? As both an artist and a human, there are a few things we control and so many things we cannot.

That said, every work, every thread, will be passed through into the end of the game. To get to the end of this game, we really will need to recruit 500 more artists to play. If every person on this email were to get one other artist to play, we would have enough to finish this astonishing project.

Invite everyone: https://phonebook.gallery/

Reflecting back to you an inkling of your own vastness and illumination,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

June 20th, 2020




Dear 565 friends,

The original message for our first game of TELEPHONE, five years ago, was called The Breton Fisherman's Prayer. No one knows who wrote it. It goes: "Oh God, Thy Sea is So Great and My Boat is So Small." We passed that through 315 works of art and it took on a life of its own and became many unexpected things.

There wasn't really any religious angle to it, or not exactly. I latched onto it when I moved from a small city on the west coast of the United States to New York, without really knowing anyone. I felt small. I felt very lonely. I thought maybe this game would be a clever way to meet other artists.

Apparently, President Kennedy kept this quote on his desk during the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis and all that old trouble, when most of the world - including school children - figured the world would end at any moment. I liked the idea that any person in so powerful a position could want to continually remind themselves of how small they are, how ultimately helpless, how there is so very much that cannot be controlled by will and force. I liked that some random "nobody," presumably a fisherman from Breton, thought up a little thing that wound up on the desk of world leader on the precipice of war.

Plus, that message had some theoretical advantages. It had a bunch of little parts, little words, that could each be traced from one translation to the next to see how well the information in it held up as it was passed from artist to artist. The starting message for this game is totally different, more complicated, and I've been very careful to give zero clues about it in any of our communications. Wouldn't want to bias your process! Wouldn't want to spoil the fun and surprised!

But all these years later, that original message sticks with me. We're approaching the hardest, heaviest part of the game. This hardest part will last for another month or two. After this email, I have 48 unanswered emails, most of which I assume are finished TELEPHONE works. Katelyn, our Operations Director often works 8 hours to keep up. Our designers are tackling absurdly difficult problems. Our engineering and development peeps are about to get assigned massive amounts of tasks. And all for no money. Just because it's beautiful and fun and cool. And all in the midst of a global pandemic, massive social turbulence, and worldwide economic upheaval.

This isn't to complain. This is to say our little team is working so hard to earn the brilliance you have poured into this project. This is to say that, during this spectacularly difficult time, the work we all do now is worth more than it has ever been worth in our lifetimes. That's a gift.

And when I get overwhelmed, when it all seems like too much all at once, I say to myself, "Oh God, Thy Sea is So Great and My Boat is So Small." I don't know who came up with that or how it made its way to me and to us. But someone thought it and passed it to someone else and to another person and another over hundreds of years and it's still alive, as a small comfort during dark days.

So, thank you stranger for your gift. Thank you stranger.

Your buddy in a different part of the world,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: This is the song that's driving me tonight. Sahara Desert music that reminds me of California surf rock: https://youtu.be/z_eeIJj6LY8

June 26th, 2020



Dear pals and colleagues,

Firstly, we are in need of one or two people to join the operations team of TELEPHONE. Over the last month, we’ve become overwhelmed by the sheer number of submissions and finished works. It’s a very beautiful problem but a problem nonetheless, slowing down our assignments process. We need help.

As with everyone working on this project, it pays no money. It would simultaneously be very boring work and incredibly inspiring. At the very least, it would look remarkable on a resume and most likely fill you with a sense of purpose and wonder. We’re looking for help from someone with some time on their hands, a belief in this project, and an aptitude for organization and detail. If that sounds like your scene, please contact Katelyn, our Director of Operations, at katelynwtkns@gmail.com. It would be an honor to have you on board and, if you don’t get it, well, that’s a bunch of free work you don’t have to do! Ha!

I’m taking a brief break from the spreadsheets and emails and Slack channels and Instagram and Facebook and the brilliant open-source code base being built to house this freelance museum exhibition. I’m looking out my sixth story window and the moon is almost full. The dark, forested hills across the horizon are already full of pops and booms of every-colored fireworks, exploding above the treetops and the rooftops. Loud drums lighting up the clouds blue and red and white. It’s now the Fourth of July here in the States.

As I’ve stated before, TELEPHONE is primarily apolitical. This is to be understanding of our artist collaborators in parts of the world where such discussions may be sensitive. But it’s also a central purpose of this game. For the most part, we are assigned our nations, in the way we do not choose our families. We belong to them, for better or worse but they do not define us as people. You may live in Brazil or Israel or South Africa or China but you are human, and thus spectacularly more complicated and wonderful and embarrassed and hilarious and nervous and sexy and hopeful than whatever story the media presents about your particular country.

Back when I was touring the States with a band, I felt this very strongly. We would put 50,000 miles or more on an old van from state to state, playing bars and theaters and taverns. My experience of the people I met and the towns and cities I visited seemed totally divorced from my country as it was displayed on the TV and on the internet. The disconnect between the representation and the reality of my country was shocking and extreme. I can only imagine that this experience basically holds true for every person in every country. We’re just people on different parts of the Earth at the same time.

So on this Fourth of July, I celebrate the view out your window, and the book you’re currently reading, and the song in your earphones, and the music of the language in your mouth, and your family, and your friends, and the dream you barely remember from last night, and the breath going in and out of your singular body. I celebrate all little moments that make you human.

All our countries matter and, also, countries are just a bizarre concept. As far as I’m concerned, the best thing about having countries is the World Cup. In that one, specific instance, I will shout USA! USA! But it’s just never going to happen for us. We still kinda suck at soccer.

My boys are sleeping peacefully through the explosions outside and I wish the same for you and yours.

Love from here to there,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

July 4th, 2020




Dear friends,

Since the beginning of this pandemic, I've had light days and dark days, inspired weeks and depressed weeks. They come in undulating waves and this last week was a hard one. I'm sure the same has been true for most of you. To me, it doesn't manifest as crippling sobs or panic attacks in the night, but occurs to me as an overwhelming fatigue, draped over me like a blanket of lead. Gravity just seems heavier.

I can't read any books or play music or write poems. I stare at the unread TELEPHONE emails and can't bring myself to open them. I can't think about how we still need to recruit 500 artists to finish, or how we should properly format our database, or how to approach our media campaign, or that we still have 8 months of hard work in front of us. I just think, "I'm going to watch five hours of tv in a row."

But it’s always the dark times in which the purpose of art is thrown into the sharpest relief and definition. The selfish reason I wanted to start the second game of TELEPHONE four months ago was that I wanted to feel less alone, more connected, and to have something beautiful propelling my mind and heart through this time of deep turbulence. The unselfish reason is that we want the same for everyone else as well.

This last week, in my numbness, a very lucid critique arrived from a friend and TELEPHONE artist in Paris. She was wondering about how we would promote individual artists within such a communal project. Here’s my raw take on it.

If Bob Dylan or Beyoncé or Ai Weiwei or Sofia Coppola signed up for this game, I would promote the hell out of that, knowing that their involvement would drive up engagement for all our young and new and emerging artists as well. I may currently have my own biases and favorites and won't beat myself up too bad for my own excitements and enthusiasms. Firstly, we’re not yet conducting a media campaign. The publicity effort will start being planned in October. Currently, we're only talking to our own players and community through Facebook and Instagram and these emails. Secondly, my personal biases won’t effect the fact that every work – whether by a Pulitzer Prize or Grammy winner or a suburban kid newly excited about making art – will receive the exact same treatment in the finished exhibition.

Now and again, I pause from the actual work to post this or that but I can guarantee you that I'm unable to share more than a percentage of a percentage of a percentage of what is being sent in. Only the final TELEPHONE exhibition will be large enough to tell this whole story.

What little I am able to share about our fellow collaborators between now and our launch in 2021 is meant to humanize us, one to another. I can say there are 1000 artists playing, but unless we all feel in our bones that these are all people as real as ourselves in real places on the Earth, it’ll be just like the rest of the internet – a mile wide and an inch deep.

I woke up lighter of heart this morning. Something had lifted. In the afternoon our full TELEPHONE working group met. We saw the newest designs of page states from our designers Jenn and Ramon and they are so gorgeous that I just started laughing. Katelyn updated us about the progress of our Operations. Matt showed us a completely automatically rendered game map. Ben previewed how the back end can automatically import artworks and artist information and bios and photos and make them ready to populate the eventual exhibition website. Like you, and like myself, no one on this project is working for money and it was staggering. Just totally staggering.

After the call, I even got some tears behind my eyes. Because it's going to work! Because it's working already, doing what it's supposed to do. I just didn't feel so alone anymore.

I love every last one of you involved in this game and am so deeply thankful for being allowed to be a part of it. Okay. Back to work!

Your pal,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

Only 500 more artists to go. Share this with everyone: https://phonebook.gallery/

July 12th, 2020




Dear pals,

I’m writing this to you and 630 other TELEPHONE artists from 287 cities in 51 countries and wish you a good evening, good night, good morning, or good afternoon – depending on where on the Earth you are when you receive this.

Our whispered message is coming up on 4 million kilometers that it has traveled and we are approaching the halfway point of the game. Lasting until mid-August, this is by far the hardest and most complicated phase of the game. Currently there are about 82 artists still waiting to play but we have 70 finished works, waiting to be assigned out, meaning that we need more artists now. After August, things will become easier and easier but, until then, we're going to keep asking for help. Please send this to every good artist you have in your contacts: https://phonebook.gallery/

Aside from trying to get through the crucible of this phase of TELEPHONE, I had such a splendid phone call with one of my oldest buddies, an artist of the highest caliber and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met (he’s still waiting to be assigned a work to interpret). We talked about dreams and Walter Benjamin and secret rooms and indigenous religions. It was the exact, weird conversation I wanted to be having with a fascinating person on a flawless sunny Saturday afternoon in Seattle.

Before we hung up, I asked him what I should write about in my update today. He asked me to write about my role in this project, why I’m suited to it and why it’s worth all the effort.

Answering this gives me a bit of discomfort. In the first game we played five years ago, I felt that too much was made of me personally and not enough credit was given in newspaper articles and such to our team or the artists who played. It didn’t happen on purpose but it stuck to my ribs. What I would most love is if I could remove myself from this central position and be replaced by your interactions with your fellow artists. But I guess, for now, I’m still the one writing these emails.

When this project occurred to me, some 15 years ago, I had just moved from my hometown on the West Coast of the United States to New York, where I knew nobody. I was so deeply lonely and thought this game might be a neat trick for meeting other artists. Certainly there were fun intellectual and theoretical questions at play but, really, loneliness was the core driving the TELEPHONE.

It’s always been that way for me. I’ve always felt socially adept, getting along with everyone, good at talking, but mostly feeling alone. I can usually say all the right things at a fancy party but almost always feel as though I am on the outside of it, looking in through a window. It’s advantageous as almost all humans feel this, at least sometimes. And loneliness can be such a blessing, as it is a reaction in the body that, like hunger or thirst, illuminates so clearly what we most need.

Actual human connection. Actual communion.

And how do we get there? We try saying or writing our thoughts and feelings to each other with words. Or we sing and make music for each other. We use colors and rhythm and shapes. We use time-based strategies like dance and film to convey a gesture of experience. We make sculpture to express ourselves in three dimensions. We cast our heart out like a message in a bottle and dearly hope that it washes upon an empathetic shore. We don’t know if anyone will ever understand what we’re trying to say but it’s very, very human to hope and to try. I guess that’s why I wanted to be an artist.

In this way, TELEPHONE is about the many reasons WHY we want to connect, as well as the specific mechanics of HOW we connect. Both issues feel very close to my heart.

There’s definitely some strategic thinking but, for the most part, my personal work behind the scenes is super dry. Katelyn Watkins, our Director of Operations, does a ton of this work too. Once my boys go to sleep, I put on music or maybe an old soccer game and then it’s just hours of spreadsheets and data entry. Playing music and writing poetry is much sexier and way more fun.

But there are aspects of shepherding TELEPHONE that feel like a strange form of art. Since university, I’ve been fascinated by interdisciplinary art and feel like I do have some inklings of what forms will work well together. Selecting artists to assign a finished work to often feels almost like creating a collage. But it’s still just a guess. There’s not really any predicting how an individual artist will interpret a work.

In fact, the main role I play is just as a cheerleader, a huckster, a salesman. If the goal is to convince more than a thousand strangers to create a single work of art together via a children’s game for free and to ask some absurdly smart people to pour hours of work into building a spectacularly complex online exhibition... well, I guess a lot of my job is as a pitchman, trying to sell an idea from door to door. And I don’t mind that role. I kind of like it and have probably been doing it in one way or another since I was six years old.

So there you go. As uncomfortable as that was to write, that’s how I see myself in the midst of this project. But, as I said before, I dearly hope this project is not about me but about unexpectedly deep connections between artists and strangers from different parts of the world. If we do our jobs right, hopefully we’re creating an environment rich in opportunities for further collaborations and more meaningful exchange. Hopefully, TELEPHONE will be a starting place.

Sending you a fierce benevolence, your friend,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: Last personal note. When the first game was published, I was a couple months away from becoming a father. Like now, it was SUCH an intense time. I could barely sleep. This song by Bon Iver was one of the only things that could calm me down then and I've been listening to it tonight as I've written this.

https://youtu.be/TWcyIpul8OE

July 19th, 2020




Dear TELEPHONE pals,

I'm writing to you and about 700 of your fellow artists from 310 cities in 53 countries. To the 98 of you who were accepted to play this game with us in the past six days - a wholehearted welcome to our little international crew of high-hearted participants. It's such an honor to have you among us.

A few cool milestones. About 600 of you have now finished artworks for the project or are currently working on them. We also surpassed 4 million kilometers that we have whispered to our secret message from artist to artist, which is more than 100 times around the circumference of the planet. And we also added Kelly Jones to our Operations team and she's already killing it. That brings our little internal team to 8 people, all of us working our asses off for free.

But dark times! Bleak and dire days. Some places have it easier than others. Some people have it easier than others. But everytime I open my phone or a newspaper or turn on the radio, there is a physically palpable weight of dread and uncertainty. I've gotten so many emails from artists all over the world who have lost their jobs. One of my (subjectively) favorite TELEPHONE artists just got her leg amputated. A number of our artists have written to me that they have had family members and loved ones die from this virus.

What should I write back, when there is nothing adequate to say, when there's no words (in any language) that could properly hold that grief and hope to assuage it?

I'm not so idealistic as to believe that TELEPHONE will magically fix anything. I think our project goals are little and possible. We'll give artists a small push, a small prompt that will hopefully jumpstart artwork and practices during a time when it feels real hard to work. We'll connect artists from different parts of the planet because it's healthy and inspiring to be influenced by someone who is living a much different life than your own. I hope some of you will come up with schemes to create collaborations outside TELEPHONE.

There is no wise old man for us to consult now. Shakespeare and Li Bai and Homer and Rumi will not tell us how to make art for this moment. It's just us. And hopefully we'll be remembered for creating something ambitiously beautiful during a difficult time.

When I get overwhelmed about the world, overwhelmed about trying to do right by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of artists, I just remind myself: It's only a game! It's a game that little kids play. Certainly, I have witnessed happenings within our project that have been amazing and almost impossible and possibly holy (or just very improbable). But despite all the theoretical and philosophical verticals of TELEPHONE, it's still just a game. And the purpose of games, among many purposes, is just a lit glimmer of fun.

In the grand scale of world events, art is often the tiniest thing, arriving at the precise moment, and delivering the maximum, most important impact. I'm happy to be among you, doing that work right now. I don't believe I would pick another time to be alive and at play than the one to which we've been born.

Your buddy,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: In the spirit of silly gameplay and thinking about the internet as an actual artistic medium, "Chatroulette" was such an amazing experiment! Let's just put total strangers directly and randomly in touch and see what happens! Sometimes it led to amazing situations like this. And, when we finish this TELEPHONE, I promise to embarrass myself by dancing to this pop song (which I love) on live video. But just remember, I'm like... a real, real artist that knows all about Duchamp and Proust and de Beauvoir and stuff.

https://youtu.be/-gnNyyipqZ0

July 25th, 2020




Beloved artists and pals (718 of you from 320 cities in 54 countries),

First, the “meat and potatoes.” Is that a saying in other countries? Dang, maybe not! In the States, it just means the main course, the main subject, the real business. The main thing for TELEPHONE, the meat and potatoes, is that in the midst of social upheaval and economic turmoil and a global pandemic, we’re still looking for more artists – hundreds more. Specifically, we’re looking for more artists in African countries, India, Russia, and China... though anyone and everyone are welcome of course, from all over our little planet.

Please share this sign-up page with all the best artists you know everywhere: https://phonebook.gallery/

But what I really feel like talking about is the silly video I shared in the last TELEPHONE Update. I got soooo many responses from people about it. It’s probably because we crave something light right now but there’s actually a funny story about how I came across that video and it has to do with games.

I love games. Like art, I think games distill many of our human impulses into fun, funny, and amazing gestures of strategy and ability. I like the ones that are played very seriously and like the ones people play with no emotional investment. I like watching children play games, how they make up the rules as they go along. I like watching a GO master play against the best artificial intelligence on Earth. Games teach us so much and we don’t realize we’re in school because we’re having so much fun.

John Forbes Nash Jr., the mathematician from Princeton University in the 1950’s, has always been compelling to me. Back then, Game Theory was a big deal. The idea was that by studying how people played games, you could understand how they were measuring values and calculating the ways to “win.” Back then, the Cold War was in full effect. School kids practiced hiding under desks and countries were trying to figure out what to do if other countries tried to wipe out their cities.

It was all a game. But they were primarily studying zero-sum games, where one player won and another player lost. “If I get this job, the other person doesn’t, so I win.” Chess, Go, Poker, Baseball, Soccer... This side wins in the exact measure that the other side loses so... Zero sum.

The mechanics of a collaborative game, or a semi-collaborative game, are fantastically more complicated. I’m into those sorts of games! The Dadists did it. Fluxus did it. Marcel Duchamp did it. Boetti did it. Hermann Hesse wrote about it. Sol Lewitt kind of did it. Georges Perec and Italo Calvino definitely did it. TELEPHONE is a non-zero-sum game. It is collaborative but no one will be declared winner or loser. It’s just played because it seems fun and interesting, and maybe that there are some aligned interests and some spectacular insights.

Back in the day, Jennifer Spriggs and Ramon Rodriquez (who are both busting ass to invent the interface for this TELEPHONE exhibition) and I were all in design school. There we played a funny game called “One Up.” The idea was that the first player showed a video on the internet, and the next person had to “One Up” them by playing a video that was related but even more amazing. There were probably 10 or 15 of us that played regularly, so I can never remember who posted what.

But I did realize that the human mind is still a vastly superior aggregator of content than recommendation services driven by algorithms. The current truth is that there are just too many variables when it comes to what someone thinks of as beautiful or amazing or funny or true or “the best.” Suddenly, I felt like the internet was much wider and more wild than I was led to believe. Ten cool humans in a room can still outperform an algorithm when it comes to recommending videos and songs and movies and paintings and almost all else. All you have to do is to get ten humans in the room.

TELEPHONE is like that, except it will be 1000 humans in a room.

And, in fact, when algorithms come to beat us at every game there is, the real challenge will be inventing games. What are the rules of the most worthwhile game to play?

Like the last video I shared, this new one also came to me through our old One Up game. It’s silly and it was obviously created at home and I still love it so much. This kid recreated a professional grade music video by Beyonce at home!

And after I send this, I’m going up onto my roof with my boys to play. Apparently, we will be playing something called "Robot Tag," where if you get tagged, you have to act like a Robot.

Beep boop, your friend,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xscmqv

July 31st, 2020




Dear 758 artist pals,

For those of you who have submitted finished works or are signed up and waiting in the queue to play, deep thanks for patience. I got sick this week! I think it was just a regular cold but, these days, one always imagines the worst. Feeling normal again seems like a superpower. And though my inbox was 100+ deep, the incredible quality of work we have received was an inspiration and felt like vitamins and medicine. And of course I would get sick the busiest time of the entire project (maybe the month leading up to the launch of the TELEPHONE exhibition will be more difficult, but I doubt it).

We’re still very much in the market for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other artists to play with us. We’ve been so encouraged by new players from new countries but, of course, high-quality artists of every art form are most welcome. If you know anyone, please send them this link to sign up:

https://phonebook.gallery/

I’d like to think about that link. Not the page that it leads to but the mechanism of the hyperlink itself. In San Francisco, in 1968, Douglas Engelbart presented the oN-Line System (NLS), a system he had worked on at the Stanford Research Institute. In 90 minutes, he introduced the computer mouse, word processing, advanced graphics displays, collaborative editing, and video conferencing. All at the same time. It was called “the mother of all demos.” The presentation also utilized hypertext “links,” which very few people had every seen before.

The links themselves were actually invented by Ted Nelson as early as 1965, but Nelson didn’t come up with the actual idea. The actual idea of links was dreamed up by a fellow named Vannevar Bush who, in 1945, wrote an article in the Atlantic called “As We May Think.” In it, he describes a device, the size of a matchbox that could store entire encyclopedias of knowledge. He called it the “ Memex,” and it was based on the idea of links. Here’s what he wrote about links in 1945:

“It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.”

When I was a kid, I was really into “Choose Your OwnAdventure” books. Ones I remember are “The Cave of Time,” “ Deadwood City,” “Sabotage,” and “The Throne of Zeus.” When you read through to the bottom of a page it would say, “If you want to go find the sword, turn to page 54. If you want to explore the castle, turn to page 78.” It was like a video game! I’d go to the library and check out the maximum number... which I think was 8 books at a time.

These books were examples of non-linear fiction. The most famous, early non-linear fiction utilizing links on the internet was called, “Afternoon, a Story,” by Michael Joyce. But non-linear fiction had already been utilized by James Joyce in “Ulysses,” by Jorge Luis Borges in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in “Pale Fire” by Vladimir Nabokov, by Italo Calvino in “TheCastle of Crossed Destinies,” and a ton of other authors.

When it comes to TELEPHONE, I often think about walking through the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The place was a treasure house, a labyrinth of wonders. I could easily get lost. One time I would start with a left and then stairs and then a right and a left. The next time I would start with a left and then a right and then the stairs and then a right. My experience of the same rooms was entirely different. Sometimes, I would find myself on the roof. A multiverse of a museum. TELEPHONE will be more than a 1000 works of interconnected art and there will be countless ways to navigate through it. Even those of us involved in building this new museum will not know all the ways or the best ways to walk through it.

This project will take one year to build but many, many years to fully explore. Personally, I can’t wait! What we’re creating is otherworldly but very real.

Your buddy in a place on this changing planet,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: While writing this, I was listening to the soundtrack of a television show about how the internet was invented.

https://youtu.be/1f8zdS4cYyI

August 8th, 2020




Dear TELEPHONE compatriots and colleagues,

This message is meant as a fervent, every-colored burst of celebratory enthusiasm because we are now OFFICIALLY at the halfway point of this game. [Me, taking a deep, restoring breath].

We started TELEPHONE 152 days ago.

We now have 781 players from 365 cities in 60 countries. We have no budget and we’ve whispered our message, from artist to artist, over 4,798,712 kilometers, back and forth over the gracious curves of our shared and gorgeous planet. We are in the midst of a global pandemic and are now halfway to the end of our game. We have so far yet to go but I am possessed by wonder and joy.

As I’ve described in previous updates, the second half will be quite different. In this phase we are studying synthesis. Instead of assigning a finished work to two or three other artists, we will be assigning two or three artworks to a single artist, asking them to find the common message within the very different works.

We’ve never done this before. It’s new and exciting and we don’t know what will happen. In some ways, I imagine it to be much more difficult than getting one work to interpret. It’s just such a huge volume of information to process and assimilate into a single work.

On the other hand, maybe there are parts of this half of the project that are easier for artists. It’s possible that artists who are assigned three works to interpret simultaneously will have more latitude for interpretation than an artist who only has to translate a single work. We just don’t know yet and it will be spectacularly fascinating and inspiring to watch it happen.

The other thing about reaching the halfway point of this game (and dang, now I’m starting to cry a bit) is the absurd amount of work that has been done by our internal team, who have all worked entirely for free. This includes Katelyn Watkins, Kelly Jones, Ramon Rodriguez, Jennifer Spriggs, Sergio Rodriguez, Matt Diehl, and our engineer Ben Sarsgard. On the backend, this exhibition is starting to look really, really real. We’ve been crushed by a volume of applications and submissions for a month and probably will be for another month but the hardest part is over.

The second half of this game is going to be so utterly fun.

We’re studying a basic trait of the artistic process while essentially launching a countdown to the publication of this project. There’s so many hilariously amazing things left to come from TELEPHONE. I can’t wait. And, I don’t know about you, but the works and the messages from artists all over the world have fully restored my faith in humans. We’re going to do this. This is going to work. This is going to spectacularly beautiful.

Sending you such real love,

Your pal,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: My celebration music tonight is some Melanesian Choir hymns. They’re religious, for sure, but I don’t know what they’re saying and I think I get more joy because I can’t translate it. I'll just imagine what they are singing about.

https://youtu.be/j924qaMb0d8

August 14th, 2020




Dear colleagues, dear resplendent luminaries, dear buddies,

We are certainly in the thick of it now! Our internal design and engineering team for the TELEPHONE exhibition is currently wrestling with, among many other things, information architecture. This is a common project for websites and tech products but it’s also familiar to an art curator. How do you arrange the space or spaces in a way that makes intuitive sense to visitors. I scrubbed out the words because we don’t want to give away any secrets but this is how it is beginning to take shape. From our internal meetings, this will probably be more complex.

Furthermore, we’re leaning heavily into the second half of the game, which, in many ways, is almost like a different sort of game.

A few threads of TELEPHONE are still in the first half of the game, meaning that a number of you will receive a single work of art to interpret and translate. One of the challenges of running this game is that artists work at different paces and some art forms simply take more time than others. Our team tries to be as accommodating as possible to all of our lives and the strange circumstances of these difficult days. So some branches of the tree don’t grow at the exact same speed as others.

Side note: My boy and I just met his kindergarten class for the first time today. Watching 16 five-year-olds on a Zoom call at the same time was pure, adorable, absurd chaos. We get it. Life is weird right now. We will make it work.

But many of you players will now begin to receive assignments that consist of numerous artworks simultaneously. We are asking you to try to understand what those (sometimes very different) artworks have in common and to express that within your own translation.

It is spectacularly complicated for us to assign works this way because we don’t want to cause any tangles in our game map, while still following our rules. It’s even more challenging for artists to be assigned numerous works to synthesize. Sometimes an artist will get two or three works that seem to be expressing the exact same message. But many times, artists will be receiving works that seem, on the surface, to have little to do with each other, even though they came from the same source.

Today, after my boy and I got off our kindergarten call, I got a number of questions from a poet. She had been assigned two works to synthesize and had several questions. I answered them as best as I could. I tried to imagine what it would be like to translate and combine several works at once and the complexity of it blew my mind. We ask for so much in TELEPHONE. Then I looked her up online and found out that she had won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Such an amazing relief! I’ll let smarter and more talented artists than myself show us how to play this game rather than me telling anyone how to play it.

That’s where I’m at right now. Sitting in my chair, my boys asleep in the other room, I stare out of my window toward Mount Rainier. We all got fevers last week, the little one got it worst. We went for tests and were negative for Covid-19. The clouds are backlit and illuminated by the moon. Like you, I am assailed by crisis and uncertainty and find political and social upheaval on all sides.

And I don’t entirely understand TELEPHONE. Like the world, the connective tissue of the 700+ finished art works (so far, not counting the ones in process) from 373 cities in 62 countries has now grown too large to fully comprehend. We know how to run it and enact the rules of it but it has a life of its own now, a life unto itself. This placeless museum we are building will be understood as much by you as by any of us actually compiling it. None of us know what it is but all of us know it is becoming something amazing.

From the chair by my kitchen, by the window looking out, your pal,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: Tonight, I was listening to classical music while I wrote. Some good friends. Ravel’s “Bolero”, some Nico Muhly, some Stravinsky, a bit of Tschaikowsky. But when I get worried about the world, I turn to the old comfort food of Aaron Copland. The whole thing is amazing but, if you’ve got other things to do today, the main theme starts at 17:35. He did not write this theme. He “stole” it. It was a Shaker hymn written in 1848 and the lyrics were about simplicity. I love that a theme about simplicity turned into something so complex and grand! I first heard it when I was about my oldest boy’s age and the quiet spot at 19:43 has always made me cry. It still gets me.

https://youtu.be/8e3rVcSy3IQ

August 22nd, 2020





Dearest TELEPHONE friends,

We now have over 700 finished works for our exhibition by artists from 378 cities in 63 countries and have passed our message more than 5 million kilometers, though we are only half finished with our game.

I was exhausted, not just by this project but by work and kindergarten starting soon (entirely from home) and the numerous horrific grotesqueries of the moment. So I took a couple days off and took the boys south from Seattle to Portland to see my parents and then to Cannon Beach.

The strange thing about both my parents' house and this beach is that they have always existed for me. They've been pretty much the same since I was a baby, since before I had a functional memory. To me, both places are just as old as the sun and the moon. I've been every age here and will be every age here. It's even more remarkable to have my boys here, riding bikes in the sme street and digging holes in the same sand.

Since the beginning of TELEPHONE we've called the waves of artistic interpretations and translations "Iterations," or "Rounds," but they could just as easily be called "Generations." Among many other things, TELEPHONE is meant to be an ultra simplistic and sped-up simulacrum of art history. Each generation absorbs the message from the prior generation, then translates it (or filters, distorts, responds to, interpets, metabolizes it) to the next generation.

Occasionally, there are certain places or ideas or themes that never really change - love, birth, death, etc. Every generation inherits it, translates it, and passes it on to the next. Though we're playing a simple children's game over the course of one year, our species is playing something similar over the course of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years.

In the background of the pictures I'm attaching, you can see a dark object rising from the water. It is Haystack Rock, stands 235 feet tall, is made of volcanic basalt, and has stood in that spot for approximately 16 million years.

I feel less tired now, as the sun sinks into the curvature of the Pacific horizon and a pale moon rises in the south east. It feels like a relief, a deep breath, being reminded that something came before me and something will come after.

Sending you a deep breath,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

August 29th, 2020




Dear buddies on numerous continents of Earth,

I don't have time to write an emotive, meaningful update this week. Instead, I'm sending a semi-stream-of-consciousness write up about where the project stands. Usually, I would even send this to our internal team. Just writing and writing helps me get my mind around things, even when I end up saying the same things over and over. Though I write these often, part of the reason I never send these to people is that they are so long and rambling and I certainly don't expect anyone to read the whole thing. Still, maybe a few of you will find it interesting - especially our internal team as we have a ton of things to tackle.

Also, one of our Values was transparency. So here's where we're at as comprehensively as possible.

Your pal,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

Internal TELEPHONE Assessment and Upcoming Projects

Game Stats

We started the second game of TELEPHONE on March 23rd, 166 days ago. If we stick to the basic concept of running this game for one year, we would publish the final exhibition in 199 days. Of course that date’s not locked in but that’s the idea.

So far, we have 760 artists signed up to play and 715 finished works from 385 cities in 63 countries that have been processed. The message has been passed from artists 5,210,235 kilometers or 3,238,182 miles. Definitely a bunch more after today. There are now nine of us working on the exhibition team.

Operations Team

For the last two months, we’ve been killed by volume. I was definitely fighting burnout and I imagine the rest of us were too. That’ll maybe be true for another month or more. I know Katelyn was putting in absurd hours and Kelly was doing at least 25 hours a week when she had originally only expected 15. Luckily, we’ve passed the halfway point (depending on how you count it) and each month should now get exponentially easier. Assignments for the second half of the game are definitely more complicated and take longer but also achieve 2-3 times the amount of work per row.

When everyone gets back from time away, we’ll have a backlog of finished works and artist applications, as well as cancelations. Luckily, we just added Sean to the Ops team and he already seems badass. Katelyn has a plan for taking over assignments so I can pivot out of that to other projects for the next couple rounds or so. Currently, I’m handling so much email volume that I don’t have enough time for assignments. I can’t even respond to 20%.

In terms of concerns, I was stupid in not scheduling enough time for assigning works into our overall plan. Like, this certain Round doesn’t all go on the 1st of a month, It takes weeks to assign everything in each round. Luckily, volume will decrease exponentially through synthesis every round now so hopefully we can make up some of this time.

I’m also worried about recruitment. We’re almost running out of available artists and have a long way to go. This may be one of the initiatives Sean takes on. We legit need 700 more artists to finish and plan to get super choosy in the final rounds. Balancing recruitment to assignments will be a trick because we want everyone accepted to play so we don’t want TOO many artists but too few artists will also slow up the rounds.

The second half synthesis assignments are also exposing a bunch of errors (probably mostly me entering things into the spreadsheet incorrectly late at night). So far, we’ve only had one or two P1 errors that take a ton of time to address. Often it’s just labeling errors with no significant harm done. Still, I imagine there will be way more errors that we can only catch during a careful audit, which will most likely take at least two or three months of the most monotonous work. Some of the errors in actual markdown / text files for artists will be handled by the Artist Edit Portal that Ben is building. But it’s still going to be just a ton of grind-it-out work.

The last thing is making sure those cancellations go out (and I’m terrible at this). I really like that we’re being as accommodating as possible but we need to start being firm with deadlines. The later rounds get held up if a certain cluster is adjacent to a possible childless node. Basically, we’re taking the current round piecemeal and leaving all the possibly necessary gaps in the game map. I dig that we’re accommodating especially in such trying circumstances but we have to learn how to say no to an artist who has missed multiple deadlines and not checked in after numerous emails from our team. We just can’t hold up the entirety of the game.

Also we no longer have to worry about the “assigned” designation in sheets because the map/backend are now being refreshed numerous times each day.

Design Team

Ramon and Jenn’s original assignments are nigh on complete. Ramon knows the edits we need to make in order to allow threads to generate from the middle of the map (next and back along with thumbnails). Jenn is owed audit comments but it’s damn close, aside from tightening up the left Nav.

The Search mocks were a solid start but, per Matt’s comments, it could do more, be more ubiquitous on other pages, and possibly be combined with Artists as there’s a ton of redundancy between the two. So search is still an open question. Matt, be opinionated (oh and goddamn it, Sergio, I still owe you information architecture elements! Dang.) That said, I still think Ramon’s main project is still core to exploring sequences of art works as intact threads.

I’m slightly stressed about finishing all these mocks. If Matt and Ben say they can get built in a month or two, I’m not going to get worked up. But there’s also Game Map and Global Map and all the other features we’ve laid out. I don’t want to rush things and not allow for proper exhibition design but I also want to make sure that, after build, we have plenty of time to test and audit it.

The style sheet looks sick. I’m still wondering about the responsiveness to resolution on various devices. Seems like the current consensus has been we’ll figure out edge cases as they arise but I’d like to see the grid stack. Also still uncertain about UAT or user testing. Anyhow, I’m planning on pushing a little hard on the design team in the next month. We gotta get this part locked and then there’s a ton of fun stuff after.

Engineering & Development

In terms of engineering, not a ton on my mind. Thanks Ben/Matt for upping the pulls of the sheet to the map to make it easier to read. Already noticeably helpful.

I also continue to (idly) worry about load times for pages. I don’t want the mini-maps to cause lag (though I suppose we could do an Ajax loading situation). And of course the artist portal by Ben, though I’m sure I’m worrying about things that are like... super simple? Also, looks like we’re at 65 of the 100 GB on Drive. I don’t think we’ll need more but... maybe? We still look fine on Vimeo and those updates still come through regularly.

In terms of dev work, gosh, it just seems absurdly intense to build everything currently scoped but Matt seems extremely chill about it. I currently have the exhibition features list at like... 19 items? Anyhoo, I know design needs to be done prior but I want to make sure we leave more than enough time to have all the rough corners polished. Will we need more coders to pull it all off in time?

Lastly, I think we reached consensus on early-round artworks without children. The two options were just keeping a thread count on each page (which might be messy because you could get to the node in numerous ways) or to just define a work’s round by its siblings, forward it in the map on the x-axis to its siblings, tag it somehow, and maybe have some sort of messaging about dropouts. I think we kinda settled on the second option but would like confirmation on that. Does that require a new designation on the sheets?

Upcoming Projects

There’s just a ton of stuff I can’t work on while neck deep in Ops. This is part of the reason while Katelyn will entirely take over, at least for two or three rounds. These projects include...

Recruitment

This (as always) remains a major concern. If the second half of the game is to be reciprocal to the first, we’d need 1400 artists total. Recruiting 700 more artists to play is still a major project, and while we still have a slow, steady stream of unsolicited players coming in through the signup form, and can keep hitting up already enrolled artists (though it’s a bit unfair to keep asking them over and over), this will be a major project. We’re going to task Sean to some of this – looking for message boards and open call sources, especially outside the United States and especially in the areas of dance, music, sculpture, film.

Media & Public Relations

So many artists have poured so much time and heart into this game that we owe them a big reception. Certainly, some of it will come from internal sources. If all 1000-1400 artists in all 63 countries share and promote the project, collectively, it could have a major organic footprint. This is primarily what happened five years ago. But we could still do a better job with promotion than last time (I kinda did it all last second and by myself five years ago).

We’ll need a tight press kit. Luckily, it’s going to be a very easy project to pitch and very newsworthy. It’s an inspiring story in a dark time. We’ll also need to start collecting media contacts from everywhere. The current plan calls for starting this project in October with long range publications, then medium range toward December, and smaller last-second pitches in February/March. We’ll be getting some promotion help from Satellite Collective but need maximum range & impact. Not yet sure how heavily social channels need to play into it. We’ll def be looking to hit both cool / pop outlets as well as more academic publications. And of course, we already have the publications and universities interested that I’ve mentioned before.

One thing I’d like to develop is a longer tail than last time. Last game peaked with a crazy ton of traffic up front but then petered out somewhat quickly to the low hum of interest it still kinda enjoys today. It would take a visitor months and months to actually trace all the threads of the game – maybe longer. I’d like to continue a promotion campaign even after launch so as to develop a higher base level of traffic for the next decade or longer that the exhibition is live.

Partnerships

So far it’s Human Hotel, Satellite Collective, and Baltimore Review. They’ve all done right by us and we should do right by them.

Satellite Collective (which I helped start in 2010) hosted – and still hosts – the first game of TELEPHONE. Though I’ve stepped back since my time in NYC, I’m still on the board and still want to give the company the honor it’s due. Plus, they’re hooking us up with an actual publicist who has hit legit homeruns for us in the past. In exchange, Satellite just wants to publicize their Fellows program, which actually kicks ass for artists, at better fiscal sponsorship rates than Fractured Atlas or any of those. Furthermore, if we find ourselves in December needing an actual budget, we could possibly use their 501(c)3 umbrella to collect donations or get grants. That said, it’d be amazing not to incorporate this project and to continue doing it for basically zero dollars.

Human Hotel is based out of Copenhagen and run by my pal Martin. I guess the super reductive description would be an AirBnB that is curated for artists and illuminated people looking for deeper experiences in travel stays. They (and their other project Wooloo.org) hooked us up with a ton of artists and we’d like to pay that back somehow. I mean publicity, yeah, but it’d be cool to figure out ways that TELEPHONE artists could physically visit each other after the pandemic subsides. This is still TBD but there’s some amazing potential here.

And the Baltimore Review is just the absolute best, hooking us up with absurdly high-quality poetry and prose writers. Not sure what they need from us other than just traffic but we’ll figure it out.

Plus, there may be more partnership opportunities. Obviously, we don’t want anyone to coopt our autonomy but there are a ton of cool possibilities in this space.

Critical Papers

This was another idea from the last game that got barely any attention at the last second. The idea is that the mechanics, meaning, and implications are super complex. We’re addressing ekphrasis, synthesis, iterative exchange of generative process, emergence theory; the list goes on and on. As a data set, it’s just an incredibly rich and original source of exploration. Without exaggeration, this is many college courses and many doctoral theses. We’re directing the process but it would definitely take people much smarter than me to figure out what is actually happening.

To get some decent explanations from smart people will entail recruiting them to write critical essays about the project and providing them both access and a guide through the more than 3575 files we currently have (certainly more by launch). We have Pulitzer Prize winners, Pushcart winners, an Academy Award winner, and so many Professors and Educators already playing. It’s worth writing and thinking about and we just need to get those brains going on this.

Launch

Holy shit. This is such a massive project by itself. In coordination with media and PR, we may need to do several weeks of rollout events. The actual launch five years ago was cool but it could have been SO MUCH COOLER. Basically, we had a very gorgeous party in Manhattan, New York, alongside a bunch of much smaller get-togethers of artists in various cities in different countries. At the last second, we added a chat channel and tried to do some semi successful video chats.

Essentially, one of the main initiatives of this game is that, even if there’s 1000+ artists in 400 cities in 70 countries, how do you make those people real to each other? Certainly, we’re introducing directly related clusters of artists to each other but how do you convey, in remote event form, that everyone who participated is a real person in a real place on Earth?

I watched both remote political conventions here in the United States, looking for clues and tips and actually didn’t find as many as I hoped. Both were entirely one-directional conversations – US talking to YOU. The exception was maybe in the Democrats’ convention when they did about a minute of video from every state, where delegates stood somewhere cool in their state and made a statement about their state and why they were casting their votes for so and so. That was cool and kinda beautiful. But still only in one direction. US talking into the camera for YOU.

So if we can’t host in-person parties all over the globe (for most of day, like New Year’s Eve, since Jakarta is 14 hours ahead of Seattle), what would be cool? A Zoom or Google Hangout with 1400 sounds like a mess. Rooms? Little symposiums and talks and chats? We want to not only convey the sense of community but actually try to build one. Social media sucks. We want to foster conversation and communion and collaboration. How? How? That’s a major, major project within TELEPHONE. Trying to do something substantively cool there is a massive challenge over the course of the next 199 days.

The Moon

When I started writing, it was right on the horizon, huge and almost full and deep red. Now it’s high in the window and white. With all the lights out in my room, I can see my shadow from its light on the floor. It belongs to everybody. That’s how it’s supposed to be. It belongs to everybody, everywhere, in every age, past and present.

xo and godspeed, NL

*

Oh and send your more most amazing artist pals:
phonebook.gallery

And though it has nothing to do with this message or this game, this is what I was listening to tonight while I wrote this, watching the moon go up and up in the sky: https://youtu.be/rQEEvDcMurE

August 6th, 2020



My dear strangers, distant neighbors, and 768 pals,

In the last game of TELEPHONE, five years ago, the main thing for me was the mechanics of ekphrasis – the tangible, neurological, human process of translating information from one form of human expression into another form. I was obsessed with trying to understand what brain functions were involved in turning the information in a ballet into the information in a painting (and all the various parings). I’m still obsessed with that mystery, as well as synthesis – another deeply mysterious process of art that we’re exploring.

But among the many, many implications and areas of intrigue within TELEPHONE, the mechanics are no longer my main thing (of course, I’m only saying this as personal opinion - the game now belongs to so many people). Today, I had such a long, beautiful, fascinating conversation with my good pal Martin Rosengaard, who started both Wooloo and Human Hotel. We once lived in NYC at the same time and had some great times and don’t get to talk as much as I’d like anymore because Copenhagen is nine hours ahead of Seattle. Per usual, the conversation was funny-as-hell and inspiring and we talked about the main thing – meaningful connection.

In our conversation, I told Martin all about the pandemic in the States, the 190,000 people who have died here, all our political craziness, and the vast wildfires burning the entirety of the west coast in the United States. In Seattle, the smoke has been bad enough that my boys can’t play outside but we’re lucky. In Oregon and California and elsewhere, people I know have had their houses burned down. One artist, a musician, wrote that he needed to delay his TELEPHONE assignment because he had to disassemble his music studio so as to evacuate to safety with all his equipment.

Personally, I don’t see these various, simultaneous (and horrific) problems as separate. In fact, that’s kind of one of the central things about TELEPHONE – trying to understand the ways in which seemingly separate things are connected. When I wrote earlier that TELEPHONE is not political (partly because such things are difficult in certain countries), I got some good-hearted pushback from artists who thought that we were abdicating our responsibility as an international project. However, I think just connecting people directly together is implicitly political... or... I don’t know... counter-political or above politics.

In my conversation with Martin, I came to realize the main problem is the concept of “diffusion of responsibility.” It’s a pretty simple idea. If one or two people see a crime, they’ll feel personally compelled to do something about it. If fifty people see the same thing, everyone will think, “Well, SOMEONE else will probably do something. I’m only 1/50 responsible so I’ll just continue on with my evening.” When it comes to any global problem, the diffusion of responsibility is much more extreme. In a pandemic or confronting climate change, I’m only 1/7,800,000,000ths responsible.

A good example of this is how worried I am that my hometown of Portland, Oregon (US) will burn down, as so many towns on the west coast have already been destroyed. But I felt that urgency less during the massive, massive wildfires in Australia or during the Fukishima earthquake disaster in Japan. Even the recent and vast tragedy in Beruit seemed far away from me and, mixed in with silly cat videos in my news feed, seemed somehow less real, like a story from 100 years ago, as though those people, long ago in black and white photos, were not as real as me.

That said, the Internet (despite it’s myriad and extensive grotesqueries) is a very new gift for our generation, wrought for us by some super smart people. Now we CAN easily connect people in very different parts of the world, living very different lives, but it’s the quality of connection that is difficult. People sometimes say awful things to each other on the internet that they would never say in person because it seems like the people on the other side of our screens are not real. Beirut and the southeast of the United States and Japan and Brazil and Australia and Colombia or Oman or Russia or Denmark or Oregon... they often don’t seem like entirely real places.

But they are! You can stand anywhere on this Earth and fill your lungs with air and shake hands with a person there (your skin touching theirs), try to find a place to pee and look up at the sun and the moon and wonder what it will be like to die and laugh at the crazy, imaginative games kids are playing with each other there. All of us really are as alive as you. But how to convey that and encourage that via the few, rudimentary tools and tricks of the internet? In my opinion, that’s the main thing now. As much as it hurts my heart and as vulnerable as it makes me feel, how can I come to believe that everyone on the planet is as real and as alive as me?

TELEPHONE is only a children’s game but it’s a neat trick! One artist interpreting and translating the art of another is a deeply personal activity. Maybe it isn’t as personal as sex but it is an extremely intimate act with a stranger! Martin's company Human Hotel is trying to physically put artists into each other’s homes! They call it “social sculpture,” which is such a gorgeous and admirable term.

Martin and his friends and our friends are all trying to figure that out now; how to connect people in a real way. Obviously, you can’t force people to connect but how can you create an environment that makes it more likely? It’s a problem that has always been central to the arts as we’re all trying to convey to other people what we’re thinking and feeling, using whatever tools we have at hand.

I want you to be inside my head and I want to be inside yours. I want you to smell the wildfire smoke outside my windows and I want to smell the flowers in your garden. I want to hear the sound down the street that makes you feel afraid and taste the food in your mouth that makes you feel young again. I would like you to so accurately translate your grief that, though we’ve never met, I find myself weeping in my kitchen on the other side of the planet. When you are rolling around in laughter and elation, I want you to make that real to me. I want you to be real to me. That’s the very first small step toward counteracting the diffusion of responsibility on a global scale. That’s my main thing.

***

Other Notes:

1. Katelyn Watkins, our Director of Operations at TELEPHONE has taken over the assignment of works. That was real hard for me to give up as it’s the heart and soul of this game. But she’s going to kill it and I suddenly have time to devote to other aspects of this project.

2. So many artists have generously offered to play again in the second half of the game. That generosity is deeply appreciated but (for this game) we’re only giving every artist one assignment. The idea is that we don’t want any translation to be biased by a previous work an artist has done. I don’t know if that’s smart but that’s what we’re doing. Everyone gets to play TELEPHONE once.

3. Stats: 732 finished, processed works so far from artists in 395 cities in 64 countries and the message has been passed 5,440,198 kilometers.

4. Soon we'll be starting the process for soliciting critical, scholarly (but cool) essays about TELEPHONE. That'll be fun. We're also just starting to develop our media and promotion plan. Also fun!

5. We are definitely in need of more artists. Dig deep. We literally need 600 more artists to play. It’ll happen but we need your help. No joke. So, again, send everyone to:

https://phonebook.gallery/

Sincerely, your pal, who is as entirely real as yourself and your 768 artistic collaborators,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

September 11th, 2020




Dear friends,

For me at least, this has been the hardest week of the year so far. The smoke from the wildfires has been so thick that, here in Seattle, we've been unable to go outside because the air is hazardous to breathe. It's been the same for most of the west coast of the United States. Add to that the continuing pandemic, massive political and economic and social upheaval, stress at my day job, and my oldest boy starting kindergarten (entirely remotely from home, which doesn't really work)... I can feel the fatigue and weight and pressure of unwept tears in my muscles and bones.

But, like sunlit grass illuminated in front of a darkened sky, all the small joys suddenly seem so vivid by contrast. My boys, of course. A couple beautiful dinners and some phone calls from family. But a surprising joy was a question from one of my favorite artists on earth: "I'm curious how you found your team. Was it through work connections? Just seems like you got a good team."

I do not rightly know the answer to this question. Jenn Spriggs and Ramon Rodriguez, we all went to design school together years ago. A few of us from our little class stayed in touch and they were the first people I thought of when thinking of taking up TELEPHONE again. Ramon's legit one of the funniest dudes I know and has done exemplary design work for T-Mobile and Microsoft and a ton of indie projects. Jenn is one of the most accomplished people I know and I've always sorta wished she was my boss. She worked at Microsoft and Google and is now a senior product designer at Dropbox. My only problem with her is that she makes the rest of our class look lazy. That said, the design of TELEPHONE could not be handled by smarter brains.

I have not actually met any of the other TELEPHONE staff in person. That includes Sergio, who is assisting on this project in order to transition from graphic design to UX design.

As for building an online exhibition that could import some 10,000+ files, I had no idea. I started writing to folks I knew at Amazon and Microsoft, as well as my own company, but was getting few responses. So I posted it in one of these emails. A tremendously talented artist named Emerie Synder in New York recommended an engineer friend named Ben Sarsgard from Google. I had a video call with this guy and he was intimidatingly intelligent and seemed chill to work with. Ben didn't have a ton of front-end interaction work and so he suggested a developer pal that he had worked with before (also at Google), Matt Diehl. Without exaggeration, both these fellows are way smarter than me and it's neat that they were already buddies in New York. Matt shared with the team a HILARIOUS video of Ben trying to ride a huge piece of styrofoam out into the Hudson River.

Our operations have been the hardest. That means any interactions with the 800 artists currently involved in our little game. Once it became too much for me alone, I asked for help in one of these emails. An artist who had participated in the game, Katelyn Watkins responded in April:

Nathan,

I'm currently playing telephone for my second time, and I saw in a previous email that you may need others to step in for more administrative roles. I was laid off from my previous post as a writer / project manager / content developer / consultant for a Swedish consulting firm about a month ago (the current state of the world hasn't been kind to the traveling developers of the world) and would love to offer my services pro-bono if you're still in need of help. I'm very good with people + making charts, lists, email reminders, and calendar notices and have always been a big proponent of this project. If you find yourself in need of help, please do let me know, as I've got time on my hands and would love to help in any way I can. I can also send over a resume to illuminate further, even if just to satiate curiosity.

Best,

Katelyn Watkins

Katelyn is now the Director of Operations for TELEPHONE and basically runs the entirety of the game, which is a massive portfolio. We've now been on almost 600 emails together. She also helped us bring on Kelly Jones who has a Masters degree in Library and Information Sciences as well as a Masters degree in Fine Arts Poetry. The work and hours that Kelly has put in so far has been... I don't even know, it makes me want to cry. And the both of these impressive peeps helped us recruit Sean Redmond, our newest member, who attended the Austin Center for Design, was the editor of an arts journal he started and led his own startup. So even though we may need to add a couple foks to help with advertising and media, Operations is very strong.

All of these people are working for free. Literally not one of us is getting paid anything. That seems legitimately bizarre.

Or maybe not I've come to believe that Developers, Engineers, Product Owners, Financial Analysts, Data Scientists, all of us corporate workers, some of the smartest people on the planet, dearly desire to use our skills and knowledge and dark arts to do something radical, something beautiful, something meaningful. All of these people make good money but often have their brilliance dedicated to really boring and morally absent projects. In my heart, I believe that these corporate behemoths are overflowing with people who want to do something good in the world. We just need to find them.

It's raining hard now outside. I can hear it and it will clear the air. Though I asked for it, I did not cause the rain. It belongs to all of us. I didn't make it rain but, somehow it happened. I'm probably going to cry. I'll wonder how every culture equates rain to tears. Things are really, really hard now and I have such deep gratitude in my heart. This thing we're doing together is worth doing.

Your pal,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: Listened to so much music while writing this. Band of Horses from Seattle. KoKoKo from Kinshasa, Congo. Sylvan Esso from Durham, North Carolina. Talking Heads from NYC. Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash. But what takes the cake is "Bolero" by Maurice Ravel from 1928. It starts so small and gets so big. If you listen to the whole thing, you will have an adventure.

https://youtu.be/mhhkGyJ092E

September 19th, 2020




Dear 791 colleagues and compatriots,

We recently got the most amazing complaint from an artist who was upset that he was only granted 2 weeks to do his work. He was very sincere about believing it was rubbish to try to do a translation / interpretation / synthesis of numerous works in only two weeks. So I thought I'd write about why we have it set up that way (at least in this particular incarnation of the game).

The first time I tried TELEPHONE, 10 years ago, I didn't use the internet and just took physical artworks door-to-door throughout New York. I didn't give a hard deadline and so, a couple times, an artist would ask for another month, and then another, and then just say they couldn't do it. I had hard feelings at the time, though I don't anymore. But each time, it did set the game back two months or more and after a year, I only had five finished works of art. So that's one thing our structure tries to mitigate.

But this fellow was very serious about the assignment. He felt like pumping out an artwork in that amount of time would be a disservice to the artists that had proceeded him. That is a very splendid and noble complaint. A proper translation or synthesis could take many months in order to do justice to all the work that came before. There is real generosity and concern in that complaint.

One very interesting thing we've observed is that if we increase timelines for due dates, the response rates go down. Why?! My guess is that (and I'm mostly thinking of myself) a longer timeline makes it possible to put it off and then it never gets done. Personally, I need someone or something putting a gun to my head in order to finish a work! Haha! But it's not just that artists procrastinating or a bit unmotivated.

When you have a severe deadline (and we're pretty forgiving with ours), it short-circuits the self-critical executive functioning of the prefrontal cortex, all the parts of your brain that say "this isn't good enough, this sucks, this isn't accurate, I'm not doing this correctly. Why are you even doing art?" There is a game called "The 20 Song Game," which is far more brutal than TELEPHONE in this regard.

Supposedly, it was "invented" by the Immersion Composition Society in California. Pretty much, the game is to get together with other musicians and everyone tries to write 20 songs in 24 hours. I've played it 3 times and it's impossible and inspiring and frustrating and exhausting and revelatory. You have to plan out your meals and have all your instruments and recording equipment ready to go. The most songs that I've written in 24 hours is 16, so my experience has always been a failure.

EXCEPT I wrote 16 songs in one day. SIXTEEN! IMPOSSIBLE! In each game, listening back to what I made, most of it was shit. But there were always six or seven gems that were surprisingly good. Like, actually truly good songs. So, my failure was writing seven good songs in a single day of my life. All by being gifted an impossible deadline.

As a game, TELEPHONE is like that - as much an instigating prompt as a sincere, clinical investigation into the mechanics of making ekphrastic and synthetic translations. All my data science pals in tech and commerce would say we're half objective and half subjective data collection.

And without shame, whenever anyone points out a serious flaw in our methodology of conducting this project for 1000+ interconnected works of art, I'm just going to keep coming back to the same thing. It's a game! It's just a game. It really is just a children's game! In the midst of tragedy and tribulation, we are playing a game across the planet for our own delight

In fact, in the midst of local, national, and global calamity, my little boys have been such inspirations to me. When I'm exhausted and defeated and feel as though I want to sleep forever, they push me out of bed. "Papa! Papa, we want to play!" When I want to make sense of the whole world all at the same time and am crippled by the magnitude of it, they just start scribbling and laughing.

Let it be like that for us now. Just scribble. Your buddy,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

A few notes:

1. We need more artists. Now. NOW! Send them to https//:phonebook.gallery

2. We need 2 more folks for our team. An operations person (good with details, data, systems). Also a person for communications (good with media, PR, press releases and contacts). Send emails and blurbs to our Operations Director Katelyn Watkins at katelynwtkns@gmail.com

3. October is the start of our press and media campaign. If you know any writers or reporters I should be talking to send those to me in a separate email.

What I was listening to when I wrote this:

I wrote about Bolero last week. A fellow wrote a harrowing tale about how his grandfather's life was saved by that song in WWII (thus allowing our TELEPHONE artist to be born). On our facebook, a different TELEPHONE artist said she thought it sounded like a story from a Wes Anderson movie. So here's a song from a Wes Anderson movie composed by Mark Mothersbaugh. I have it in my heart.

https://youtu.be/4bL5Ql-4nl8

September 26th, 2020




Hello all!

This week, I (Katelyn) have been blessed with talking with all of you. I've spoken with a great number of you, corresponding in ways big and small. To those I haven't, I'm currently the Director of Operations for TELEPHONE- this is sometimes serious (I do try to direct and operate) but is also mostly a joke (when Nathan and I first spoke, I made a crack that everyone on the team should have the title of Chief of Financials- a team of 8 people, all CFOs, but no money to manage).

As Nathan mentioned in a previous update, I lost my job earlier in the year. This was a job I invested in deeply- long nights of work, lots of creating content, managing projects, people, presentations. I cared for the work I did and I loved being recognized for it, but I also battled feelings of exhaustion, meaninglessness, and emptiness. I drank a lot of red wine on overnight flights. I kissed a few babies. I worked hard for my promotions.

I was told, "You need to work on being more elegant, more sophisticated". This was a task in itself, as I am someone who grew up eating hot dogs and getting kicked out of bible study for cursing. I tried, though- I sat down and studied Katherine Hepburn. I bought an expensive blazer that was completely unbreathable in the Texas heat. After work, I took endless finance classes that bored me to tears. With every promotion, I remember having a first celebratory drink and thinking immediately, "Okay, how do I get to the next promotion?"

When I lost my job, I felt like the center of myself was sucked away. I felt hollow. I felt cast aside, unnecessary, despite all that previous recognition. All of the sudden, all of the things that made me feel whole, or seen, were gone. I wasn't even sure who I was anymore. The awful truth is: despite all the emptiness or exhaustion I may have felt, I would have done anything to keep that job. I would have let them chip away at the edges of me until I was fully smooth, if only they let me stay.

But it was gone, and I was a month into quarantine, and I was fully adrift and unanchored. I cooked a lot, I listened to sad records (many repeats of "You Are What You Love" by Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins, fully pitying myself), I tried to grow plants on my windowsills. I disco danced alone (a lot). I watched Madame Butterfly. I played a video game for the first time (the premise of the game was "you are a person who has a job" which says a lot about why I loved it so much). When I got the email from Nathan, asking people to help run TELEPHONE, I jumped at it. I thought it would fill the space that a paid corporate job had left- something to do, some way to be productive in the world, some way to begin to love myself again.

What this project has brought me is beyond myself- beyond my own need for recognition or "productivity". In fact, I've had to rethink my definition of "productivity" and redefine my concept of what brings me peace, joy, fulfillment. In these times of strange and new despair, all of you- your art- have shown me that our (my!) purpose is much larger than any one job- we are all quilted together in an eight-billion-person multitude and there is so much goodness, and humor, and forgiveness, and strength, all without an end goal or a "what's next". It just is. All the time.

I recently revisited "You Are What You Love", my go-to sad song and heard it differently: there are the sad lyrics but also the uplifting chorus. Towards the end, a friend professes that he believes he's "fraudulent, a thief at best" and Jenny reassures him, "you are what you love, not what loves you back". For many years, instead of focusing on the things I loved, I spent so much time heavily focused on the things I wished loved me back: always running, like a dog chasing a car.

So here's what I love: I love the fact we all exist in this strange universe together, creating art and sharing it because we believe that the best part of art is creating + sharing it with others. Nothing could take that from me; no job, no paycheck. That's a great feeling.

Overwhelming love, all the gratitude my tiny body can muster, and always- always- illumination,

Katelyn I Director of Operations I Ja Rule Enthusiast I eternal CFO I Your friend

PS: If you care to listen to my sad/ happy song.

PPS. I've included a list of things I love + consider very holy, whether they could ever love me back. Please email me and add to the list.

Skinny-dipping

Standing in awe of things that took thousands of people to build and feeling communion with them. We built the Colosseum, Machu Picchu, St Peters and One World Trade Center

The taste of a cold beer (or ice water) after feeling completely parched

The experience of the forest or the desert and the immense stories they have to tell

Movies in the theater and the sensual joy of waiting in silence in a dark room with strangers

Knowing that the light from Jupiter takes 50 minutes to travel through space before it hits our eyes

Falling asleep to the sound of surf, or car alarm, or resounding nothing at all

Naps with no set time

Actual, desperate prayer

A ripe strawberry

Going to a concert and openly crying

Understanding your parents are fallible human beings

People who care so much about a story or topic that they write a whole book about it, whether it's read or not

Making peace that low art is still art and relishing in it

The fervor with which children love trains or space or dinosaurs or anything at all

Medieval monks faithfully transcribing greek texts they couldn't read and preserving that knowledge and culture for us as an act of devotion

Accepting your body as soft and kind because it got you here, goddamnit

Cheese

Cheese again

Baby sea turtles making their first run to the ocean, following the light of the moon and millions of years of instinct

Kissing

The potential of kissing

This game: the work that calls us all to it, incessantly, unendingly

October 3rd, 2020




Dear buddies,

I sent this out last night but got hundreds and hundreds of rejected emails - Google must think I'm a little suspicious now that we're sending out 800-900 emails every week. Ha! So now, I'll be sending these out via a professional service rather than sending from my personal email.

The game of TELEPHONE has now passed our message from player to player, artist to artist, back and forth over the curvature of the Earth, in excess of six million kilometers (almost 8 round-trips to the moon).

For a change of pace this week, I recorded a meeting with my dear friends who are actually building and running TELEPHONE.

Two things are true: 1) I need to figure out how to better record these things! Recording my computer screen was total rubbish. And 2) I need to get better at moderating these things! Oh well. We've got 5 months to practice. I'll be forgiving of myself and I hope you will too!

Besides, the most important aspect was to give you a sense of the folks who are building this exhibition for you. They are:

OPERATIONS
Katelyn Watkins
Kelly Jones
Sean Redmond

DESIGN
Ramon Rodriguez
Jenn Spriggs
Sergio Rodriguez

ENGINEERING & DEVELOPMENT
Ben Sarsgard
Matt Diehl

Here's our meeting (if you have trouble with YouTube in your country, let me know): https://youtu.be/7R0s_D5LG24

Enjoy! Take it easy on us as this is our very first try. And keep sending more artists to https://phonebook.gallery/. We've still got a few more million kilometers to go.

Your pal,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: Ramon expressed regret that he was eating sunflower seeds during the segment. Hahaha!

October 10th, 2020

Dear Collaborators, Colleagues, Comrades, & Pals,

We've now passed our secret message 4,000,000 miles between artists from 443 cities in 66 countries. We only need 150 more artists to finish this project. Please send all talented artists to https://phonebook.gallery/.

Continuing our initiative to make everyone in this game real to everyone else, I asked one of your fellow TELEPHONE artists to write the update this week. Nick Jaina is a writer, musician, visual artist, and a very old friend of mine. Buddies, you're in for a treat.

Love you all, NL

TELEPHONE MISSIVE

Nick Jaina

The Magician is the first card in the Tarot deck. A robed figure stands in front of a table with the four elements on it. In the Magician's hand is a wand held up to the sky, while the other hand points towards the ground.

The Magician's role is to summon new forms out of the ether and bring them into the Material World.

Here is what has always pained me about the Magician's job: the better the Magician is at manifesting a new idea into reality, the more inevitable the result feels, and the less visible all the work that went into it becomes. The best compliment a creator can get from an audience is an expression of inevitability: "I feel like I've known this my whole life," which borders on disbelief: "Did you really come up with this all yourself?"

A long time ago I led a band under my own name that featured your TELEPHONE founder Nathan Langston on violin. You might know him as an indefatigable cheerleader of the artistic process and the organizer of this strange "What the hell is this exactly and how does it work?" phantasmagoria in which we are all participating, but I once knew him as a catalyst for magic out on the road.

We had no resources, no label supporting us, no publicist promoting us. We just drove east and then south and then west. It was always too hot or too rainy, except for a random five minutes when we could sit in a little patch of grass at a rest stop in Wyoming, pluck dandelions and try to feel the earth as it was meant to be felt: still, unmoving.

In every city we tried to summon good fortune from the air. I was the singer/ songwriter, the leader of the band, and the one who had to worry about logistics like, "We have to be in Iowa City by five thirty, and it takes eight hours to get there, so let's go!" Everyone else went along for the ride, playing poker in the backseat, then spilling out onto the pavement of Boise or Jackson, and performing with all the fervor of that pent-up wanting.

So many times we would play in a terrible bar in some place like Kansas City, and when we started our show there would be absolutely no one in the room. Not just no one, but no sign that anyone even lived in the town or could possibly come to the show. And halfway through the set, somehow, the room would fill up. Where do random bar people come from? Does someone call them on a payphone like in a movie montage of a band playing their hit song for the first time?

I know I was only a tiny part of this summoning. Nathan was the Magician in the band. He was never daunted by the empty room. He saw something that wasn't there, literally. He saw the pretty ladies who would attract the handsome fellows, who would lead all the other people to gather around.

I've learned more about performance from Nathan than from anyone else I've ever met. One of the main concepts that I absorbed aftert hundreds of shows is the idea of amplification. Not of guitars, but of energy. He took his shimmering love for me and my songs and he beamed that power out to the audience. He reflected all the crooked strains of light and focused them into a beam that made the people appear, and once they appeared, they would dance and holler in approval.

What can we learn from this?

An artist sees something that is not "actually" there, and patiently tries to document what they see, despite there being no guidebook or handrails for this adventure into nothingness.

We are artists. We build scaffolding that only we can see. We test the steps. Some days our confidence falters. We think of a cruel email we received from someone, or we remember how hard our father worked at his very real job building very real things out of steel and concrete, and our job feels like an embarrassing game of pretend.

But we keep building, and eventually we step up onto this invisible construction of ours, a plan we made in a state of half-sleep, or during the last stretch of a bike ride, or while hanging from the boughs of a manzanita tree.

And we do this all while living in the real world of bombs and pepper spray. We cannot imagine our way out of living through the suffering around us. We still have to pay rent with real money, not just sketches on napkins.

Artists must be liminal creatures, in between worlds, spirits who cannot ever fit comfortably in their own bodies. We are circuit breakers; we feel the surge of energy and explode so that nothing further gets damaged.

Tyrants can play music over speakers to agitate emotions at their rallies. Billion dollar companies can use the music of your childhood to get you to feel sentimental about a minivan. There isn't enough money in the world to make up for selling the soul of something you dreamt up, something that once lived only in your head. But sometimes we must do what we must do.

We are the Magicians. We pull things out of thin air and bring them into the Material World. And, like a plumber pulling gunk out of a sink drain, we're never sure what we're going to find. Sometimes it's a ball of hair. Sometimes it's the top of a toothbrush.

Very occasionally we'll pull out something that glimmers a little, and once we clean it off, we see that it is a very old, tarnished engagement ring. Then a whole new line of questions begin: "Who? How? When?"

Then we trace down the leads of our new discovery. We further cement this find in the Material World. We brace ourselves for ridicule or praise. All the while we think, "Isn't this whole process all so much stranger and uglier than we can ever let on?"

Thank you, Nathan, for a thousand moments of comfort along the road to being an artist. And it's a pleasure to work with you all on such a strange and, let's not forget, completely made-up thing.

Best of luck to you all,

Nick Jaina
www.nickjaina.com

October 17th, 2020

Dearest friends,

Two quick points and then something radical.

Firstly, we're looking for someone to join our little internal TELEPHONE team that has some solid marketing experience. There's no money in it (none of us are getting paid) but it'd be super fun and this is an exciting project as we'll be trying to get good coverage all over the world. If you're interested, email me or our Operations Director Katelyn Watkins at katelynwtkns@gmail.com.

Secondly, we're still looking for maybe 125 more artists. We'd like to end this thing with a bang so, if you happen to know Bob Dylan or Ai Weiwei... definitely hit me up or just send them to https://phonebook.gallery/

Lastly, and most awesomely, I had such a fantastic conversation with my pal Martin Rosengaard, one of the co-founders of both Human Hotel and Wooloo.org. TELEPHONE has partnered with these peeps, mostly because they totally helped hook us up with some exquisite artists from all over the planet. Martin's one of the smartest dudes I ever met with such a quick mind and immense vision. Plus, I just miss him and it's such a joy to get to hang out.

My favorite thing about this interview (which... I'm getting better at it and might even be decent by next spring) is that you can actually hear me learning new things. We talked about creating space for the slowness of community, how time slows down when the mind is trying new things, and how making content go viral is probably not what humans actually want.

I hope this conversation lights your mind up and is even slightly as pleasurable for you as it was for me. It was such a fun and hilarious privilege to talk to one of the most illuminated minds in Copenhagen.

High-fives and handshakes to you all,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: Here's a FASCINATING article Martin wrote for Medium called "COVID-19: A Chance to Make The Internet Great Again"

PPS: I do realize my hair was greasy as hell in this video but I did actually take a shower and wash it later on in the day.

October 23rd, 2020

Dear artists, collaborators, players, contributors, scholars, editors, Dear friends, Dear 840+ strangers and loved-ones from 444 cities on 6 continents:

I believe that the reason TELEPHONE is not “political” in this most political of environments gets to the very heart and purpose of our entire project. Sure, we could weigh-in on whom to vote for, particular policies to support, and point out the various egregious positions of our 66 individual countries. But to me, as an artist, that seems like a waste of the magnitude of the very global and very human moment before us now.

It isn’t that I don’t believe politics to be unimportant. Hell no! Politics affect our lives deeply and I hold deep political convictions of my own. And if you are afforded the privilege of voting where you live, 100% do it! It’s just that I often see politics as supremely binary. Us versus them. She versus him. You versus me. Whereas art is the opposite. It is the impossible, beautiful, never-ending attempt to use every trick of expression available to us to understand and connect with an experience that is not our own.

Furthermore, politics are extremely didactic. "Here is what you should do, this is the correct and right thing to think." But didactic art sucks. I hate reading stories that end with “and the moral of the story is... don’t cheat your friends out of money or you will be sad.” Blatant agendas make for art that is boring, flat, lifeless. (All of this is, of course, only my own opinion). I like those works that open up a vast horizon of questions and, like a school workbook, provide a ton of fascinating blanks to fill in on our own. The poet John Keats called that “Negative Capability.” That’s what gets my mind lit up and makes me feel alive.

Similar to advertising, politics is also reductionist. It reduces people to “Black, college-educated, upper class” or “Hispanic, rural, middle class” or “White, religious, lower class.” But art doesn’t see humans that way. Most art complicates things and recognizes individual people as spectacularly complicated puzzles, fathomless and perfectly unique enigmas. Every last one of us, brimming with memories and desires- gorgeous mysteries, all!

Most importantly, I do not believe that someone’s value is defined by where they were born. Would we deny an artist playing TELEPHONE from North Korea? Never. Though the media in the US tells us about the dangers of Iran or China or Russia or Venezuela, does that in any way determine the worth of artists working in those places? Absolutely not! In fact, those are the most vital connections to make – intimate and direct connections between people divided by political narratives, who are fully alive and fearful and joyful and angry and hopeful and difficult and complicated and complex.

I bet I could have been a good politician. But I’m an artist and what is important to me is that, when the first game of TELEPHONE was published in 2015, my first son was just about to be born. Yesterday, I carved faces into pumpkins with him and we made a robot costume out of cardboard boxes (truly my best work of art in ages). We went to the park and the wet grass in the sunlight was a perfect green and the autumn of the northern hemisphere of the planet had painted the trees vibrant reds and golds. It was the day he got his first loose tooth! He opened his mouth and wiggled it with his tongue. Creeped-out and fascinated, I touched my own teeth with my finger and tried to remember what it felt like to have a bone fall out of my body.

I also know as well as anyone on Earth that the politics of my country often do not represent me as a breathing, dreaming mortal. Do I believe politics are unimportant? Nope! My friends and I are all sweating bullets over here! It’s pretty much the only thing we’re thinking about now. But the purpose of art is older and runs deeper and wider than the politics that divide us. And if an election disappoints me, I will turn to art to help me mourn. And if politics go the way I hope, I will turn to art to help me celebrate. During a pandemic, during a social uprising, during an economic meltdown, during a war, during a personal crisis, during a time of chaos... art still works. Art always works.

If I’ve never met you or if you’re an old friend, I love you and am sending you this very real love from my small spot on this expansive, complicated, colorful planet.

Your fellow collaborator,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: I was listening to Queen while writing this.
PPS: We're still looking for someone to help w/ marketing
PPPS: We still need about 100 more artists to join!

October 31st, 2020




Dear pals in 66 countries,

It’s been a bit of a week here in the States. The emotional fatigue and mental exhaustion has felt physically palpable, as though the gravity in the marrow of our bones had increased by many orders of magnitude. And all of this in the midst of a global pandemic, social upheaval, and economic chaos. I suppose this is just how we do it in the year 2020, a year that will be remembered for decades and centuries.

It’s hard to say whether falling asleep or waking up was more difficult. Making a cup of coffee was such an overwhelming chore and folding the laundry seemed an impossible trial. The process of pouring milk onto cereal and spooning it into the mouth felt as though it was happening underwater, in slow motion. For my part, I found myself taking two or three showers every day.

Today brought a softness and a deep breath. I read about church bells and fireworks in other countries. I saw posts of people waving flags and getting drunk in the morning. I watched videos of people weeping and singing in the streets and listened to some amazing music. But I actually felt very quiet and read books to my boys and thought about zero-sum and non-zero-sum game theory.

I’ve written about it before but a zero-sum game is when one player gains at the same rate that another player loses (plus one and minus one equals out to zero). If I score a touchdown, I get seven points and you are minus seven points. If I eat 60% of the apple pie, that’s 60% that you do not get. I win and you lose and that’s the end of it. Politics is often described as a zero sum game. But, if you want to go down the rabbit hole of the math, read about the Nash Equilibrium and how, in certain situations, all parties, pursuing personal interests, result in mutually destructive behavior.

TELEPHONE is actually and really a game, though it is an epitome of a non-zero-sum game. If a player does well, it doesn’t decrease the success of other players but actually increases it. These are weird games! Sometimes it feels like if there isn’t a winner and loser, it isn’t really an actual game. But all of the major crises facing us, from the pandemic to climate change to human rights to the practice of art are all non-zero. In each of these games, if you’re doing well, it’s helping me too.

I cancelled all the internal working group meetings for TELEPHONE last week. I figured all of us, mostly in the States, were too stressed to also discuss the complicated progress and challenges of our work. I was wrong, especially in regard to two people on our team. Nancy Kim, our newest addition to Communications, lives in Bologna, Italy. Her husband was recently diagnosed with Covid-19. AND YET, any of our splendid social media posts like Instagram came to you from her (plus, she has a bunch of ambitious initiatives behind the scenes).

The other exception was Ramon Rodriguez, one of our exhibition designers. He’s in charge of designing one of the main ways to navigate TELEPHONE, a spectacularly complicated tool in which visitors are able to compare one work of art to the works of art that came before and after. Dude got some harsh criticism for a previous prototype and felt like a failure (in the midst of all other collective stress and turmoil). I would’ve buckled but Ramon ripped up his entire concept and returned with a design that is far more intuitive and simplified and beautiful. His imagination during this most intense of weeks has been totally inspiring and his work is toward the benefit of us all.

Celebrations and insanities aside, there is SO MUCH real work left to be done. A long, deep breath. A stretch and a stroll through evening light. Face in hands and a recommitment to doing something spectacularly beautiful in a time of deep calamity and strife. Tomorrow morning (10am Pacific, 12 noon Texas, 1pm Atlantic, 7pm Italy), our team will turn our shoulders back to the plow in order to create something impossible during an impossible time. By god, it's time to have fun again.

I know in my heart that we will finish this otherworldly gift.

Your buddy,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: Including this song. Let’s just say I’m including it for no real reason.

November 7th, 2020

Dear beloved strangers and friends across the face of the planet,

Personally, 2020 is not the worst year. Naw. For me, last year, 2019 was easily the hardest year of my life. Due to host of causes, mostly of my own doing, I found the entirety of my existence and personality just wrenched apart. I had no home, very little inkling of who I was, and the sublimity of my grief and loneliness felt nigh on absolute. “Not being around anymore” was certainly on the table. And, on a particularly bereft night, when the self-immolation of my mind was most acute, I found my loss and devastation physically dragging me through the neon streets of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, desperately trying to go nowhere.

I passed the basement dance club, Barboza. A band called KOKOKO! was playing that night. I had never heard of them and, without thought, bought a ticket and wandered down the stairs into one of the best live shows of my life.

Turns out, KOKOKO! is from the Ngwaka neighborhood of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, some 8,535 miles (13,736 km) from the tight, low-ceilinged little club I entered. Many of the slaves brought to the United States were abducted from this country and the people in this band had lived through the Second Congo War from 1998 – 2003 in which 5.4 million people were killed.

The members of KOKOKO! were into bands like Devo and Talking Heads but didn’t have easy access to the synths and electronics they needed to make something similar. So they crafted their own instruments out of buckets, engine parts, plastic containers, and invented their own guitars. Analog instruments that sounded electronic.

Now, not to shit-talk my own city, but Seattle does not dance the way New Orleans dances. We are a reserved people. But what I can say is that night’s dance party was the most holy that I’ve ever witnessed. It is the second hardest I’ve ever danced in my life and what I saw that night was miraculous. At one point, KOKOKO! managed to convince everyone in the packed, sweaty basement, to lay flat on the floor. I've never seen anything like it. And when they ended their show, a cappella, every single person sang along (not understanding what words they were singing in Kituba) and I was perfectly exhausted and in tears.

Dance is a particularly effective medicine, especially when dealing with trauma, as trauma is not written into the intellectual, language based pre-frontal cortex regions of the brain, but into the limbic system, which does not comprehend time. That night, my mind went entirely into my body and rewrote portions of my hurt. It was just one instance (of billions and billions) in which art came to the rescue.

The odds of me seeing that band from another continent, from across an ocean, on that specific night when I needed it most, were infinitesimally small. This is the way of it with art. You just never know. The odds that a single lonely person will get the medicine they need at the moment they need it are always low. But that’s why we keep doing the work. Flood the market. Metabolize your own grief and joy into more medicine and look to engineer more opportunities and environments in which to increase the odds that it finds the one human who most needs what you have to offer. That’s part of what TELEPHONE is about. A message in a bottle. A small and gorgeous chance.

2020 has been a fucking hard year for us; a lonely year, a fearful year, in which so many of our neighbors have suffered a myriad of traumas. But we are the unexpected dance party and it was, is, and will continue to be our job to keep singing, painting, writing, filming, photographing, sculpting, playing music, and translating this short, mortal experience into a dance.

Dance alone in your socks in your bedroom and we’ll be dancing together soon.

Love to you, where you are, from my heart in Seattle and Kinshasa,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

Other things I'm dancing to alone on Friday night:

Before I Let Go by Beyonce
Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads
D.A.N.C.E by Justice
Contort Yourself by James White and the Blacks
I Wanna Dance With Somebody by Whitney Houston
Loosing My Edge by LCD Soundsystem
Let Me Clear My Throat by DJ Kool ft. Biz Markie, Doug E Fresh
Lisztomania by Phoenix
I Feel Good by James Brown
Come and Get Your Love by Redbone

Oy. We're going to have to make a playlist for our Spring Launch Party huh? Better add that to the to-do list.

November 13^th, 2020

Dear buddies in 455 cities,

One of the many things I love about kids is how they’ll just suddenly say something totally random and awesome, seemingly apropos to nothing. Today, from out of the blue, from the backseat of the car, my five-year-old son said, “Papa! Everything in the world is connected!” Haha! What?! I have no fathoming of where he would have learned or heard this. “Son, that is a very astute observation you cooked up there!”

We were stuck in traffic so we made up a game (kids are good at just going along with new made-up games). I asked him to pick something, anything. He picked French Fries. Well, what are French Fries connected to? Potatoes! What are potatoes connected to? Dirt! Yes, what else? Rain! Yup, what else? Sunshine! True! And what are rain and sunshine connected to? Rainbows! Totally! Good answer. So French fries are connected to rainbows. What is connected to rainbows? And so on, following the threads. An amazing way to pass 30 minutes until we got home.

Obviously, this is deeply intertwined with the mechanics of TELEPHONE.

Translating from visual works to language was called Ekphrasis by ancient Greek teachers of rhetoric, the students of whom would try to use words to so perfectly describe a vase or a sculpture that someone who had never seen the object felt as though they were standing before it, as though the object itself was speaking. Though super talented art critics still have this skill of formal analysis, it isn’t as used as much as it once was now that we can just look up an image of that vase or that sculpture for ourselves. But there is one place that still uses it extensively.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York (as well as many other museums) offer tours for blind and partially sighted visitors. With permission, I went on a couple of these tours. Sometimes I kept my eyes open and sometimes I kept my eyes closed. It felt really important to the folks who took these tours to participate in act almost totally geared toward vision, finding it important to be in the communal space and in the physical presence of these masterpieces. The specially trained museum docents who led the tours said they tried to use tangible and tactile descriptions. So they wouldn’t say, “this painting is 69 inches wide,” they’d say “this painting is about the size of a refrigerator laid on its side.”

Also, the tour guides weren’t shy about talking about color. Blind people live in a world of color and know so much about it, though they can’t see it. A blind person has a very strong understanding and relationship to the color red. The same goes very much for how deaf people experience and understand music.

Traditionally, ekphrasis is understood as a translation from the visual to the linguistic. But TELEPHONE uses that fancy word to describe the translation of ANY form of art or sensual expression into the language of ANY other form of art or sensual expression. Dance can translate poetry. Painting can translate film. Music can translate sculpture. Each is a beautiful and important language on its own but all the practices are tangled up together, affect each other, and these communities are engaged in parallel work, often unbeknownst to one another.

Our little game of TELEPHONE is just fooling around in the playground of the arts. But the practice of ekphrasis could be further expanded into computer science, politics, math, philosophy, history, engineering, and all other disciplines. In fact, what I eat is related to the shoes you are wearing, which are related to the sky, which is connected to the ocean, which is tethered to the moon, which has to do with satellites, which have to do with the measurement of time, which is intrinsically affixed to location, which is connected to your city and your friends, which is tied to my city and the chair where I sit, eating salted rainbows with ketchup.

“Papa! Everything in the world is connected!” Buddy, that’s just really, really true.

I’m over here and you’re over there and we are connected.

xo Nathan | TELEPHONE

Other items of interest:

We have just added the artist / professor / choreographer Madeline Hoak to our internal team. She’ll be assisting with gathering critical, thoughtful essays for the TELEPHONE exhibition. If you like nerding-out about art theory and game theory and ekphrasis and complex philosophical subjects as much as me, let me know. I won’t be in charge of our panel for deciding what to publish but I will make sure to pass on your pitches, concepts, and possible essays. Space is pretty limited.

We’re starting to wind down our open call for TELEPHONE artists a little. Interest in playing has become so intense worldwide that we just don’t want to be in the position of rejecting 95% of applicants. It’s amazing that so many people want to play and a few will probably still get remaining slots.

The design and coding development of the actual TELEPHONE exhibition is really starting to take shape. I was clicking around through it this week and started shout-laughing and dancing in my living-room. That felt really, really good.

Tonight, I've been rocking "People, I've Been Sad," by Christine and the Queens. Seems right for Covid isolation. Plus, I love songs in two languages. Plus she sings - "If you disappear, then I'm disappearing too." We're all connected. You know the feeling.

November 21, 2020

Dear players and partners,

Since the beginnings of the pandemic in March, our magical little game has blossomed exponentially, branching out across the globe. Now, we are approaching the end game. It’s starting to feel very real. December, February, March, Launch. We’re now at the beginning of fourth quarter of this year-long game.

For those of us on the internal team working behind the scenes, we’re starting to feel the clock ticking down toward the final exhibition. There are a dozen beautiful and complicated projects that we are tackling simultaneously. For example, our designers are racing to finish the remaining pieces of the interface so that our development team has enough time to code it and our operations team has enough time to test and edit it. I saw a prototype of one of the tools today that made me so excited that I walked laps around my apartment, clapping my hands and laughing.

We’ve also begun planning the launch itself. The question: How do you hold a week-long party of events for 950+ artists in every time zone on earth in a way that will make folks feel connected and engaged with each other, rather than just lost in a multitude of screen names? What platform should we use? How should we organize and connect players? It’s a super fun and incredibly complicated problem.

And then there’s media. The first of three public relations campaigns will begin next week. We have researched hundreds and hundreds of newspapers and blogs and radio stations. Everything from the New York Times and Le Monde to smaller local ones like Boise Weekly. This is not to mention getting press kits translated into Chinese and Dutch and French and Urdu and Finnish and Spanish. Eventually we we need the help of everyone involved.

Simultaneously, we are attempting to introduce every artist to the artists that came before and after you, a spectacularly complex undertaking that involves writing more than a thousand emails. Simultaneously, we are organizing critical essays about TELEPHONE from scholars. Simultaneously, we are grooming many thousands of files from artists so that they populate in the exhibition seamlessly, as well as contacting artists for missing files we need from them. Simultaneously we are still assigning works and artists are still creating translations. Simultaneously, we are looking for jobs, changing children's diapers between meetings and going to grad school.

And yet, every now and again, the maelstrom of spreadsheets and emails and endless to-do lists and checklists lifts like a veil of heavy fog and it's possible to see the whole game shining in its entirety. In those quiet little breaths, it doesn't seem like work at all. The 900-1000 connected artworks all exist at same time and in the same space and the faces of all the artists are visible. And you're all here with me on my rooftop, and we're all there with you in your studio or your backyard or bedroom or walking along with you to your favorite park.

And then the lightness passes and it's time to put our game faces on. The next few months are going to be so difficult in so many ways and I hope we can all look back on this as time when we did ourselves proud.

By the way, this song is startlingly close to exactly how I feel about this project right now (recommend good headphones and high volume):

Sending such love and wishing luck to us all,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

November 27^th, 2020





Dear beloved strangers and pals,

Allow me to get to the point in the most roundabout way.

Art theory and criticism stirs a fierce ambivalence behind my ribs. When I was a kid at college, I often felt a deep antipathy toward the intellectual side of art. I felt like these people were try to tell me what was good and what was bad and what I should do. Many of the wordy, almost purposefully obfuscated run-on sentences in my textbooks gave me the impression that these thinkers and philosophers wanted to kill art so that they could effectively dissect it.

I got angry sometimes. I’d be reading a museum wall label next to a painting about “the liminal slippage of the superpositioned other” (or some such bullshit) and want to physically tear it off the wall. Truth be told, I was a terrible student because I felt perfectly convinced of what I knew and what I wanted. I wanted the animal to come springing out of the speakers and off the page. I wanted stabs of color and shape. I wanted art to be as powerful and universal and obvious and necessary as sex. I wanted spilled blood and gut-wrenching weeping and spiritual transcendence. Compared to that, all the high-minded theses and elite discourse of the very educated felt as empty and as pointless as a game.

Art theory and criticism really does seem more like a game of chess than making or experiencing art. But I’m a slow learner. It took me a long time to remember that I really love games and that they can be very beautiful and revealing. Maybe I just needed to go out on tours with bands and dance-scream drunkenly on bar tops. Maybe I just needed to get a little older and quieter. Maybe I just needed to play these games with the right people.

For me, the first was Hermann Hesse but soon followed Federico Garcia Lorca. I figured Lorca was the wildest, most passionate poet but then I found Theory and Play of the Duende, maybe the sharpest lecture ever given. And then Walter Benjamin came along and showed me his library, took one book after the another off the shelf and blew my mind. And Peter Schjeldahl, who’s real love and enjoyment of art came shining through his fancy critiques. And then a bunch of super smart artsy friends who, by way of their tirelessly nerdy curiosity, didn’t strip art of its mystery but actually increased it.

When I started the first game of TELEPHONE in 2010, it was primarily because I was so, so lonely. But by the time TELEPHONE was published in 2015, I was very into the theoretical games of the mechanics behind it. What is happening inside the human brain when a person tries to turn words into a visual expression? What types of information can be expressed in sculpture as opposed to dance? Is the model for how art history presented even accurate or testable? Is synesthesia extremely more common among artists? Is rhythm present in every form of human expression because of neurological mandate? How old is the children's game of Telephone?

And on and on like that. As with TELEPHONE, these questions are games. They aren't as important as having enough food to eat. These thought-games are not as important as a pandemic or loneliness. But They connect people. They sometimes distract us when we need it. Games are fun and part of the fun is that they are surprising. When played well, they can reveal something new about a subject you thought you had totally figured out. At their very best, games (intellectual or otherwise) can give way to awe.

So here’s the point.

TELEPHONE is soliciting critical and art theory essays for and about the final exhibition in April. So far, we have commitments from Dean Rader at University of San Francisco and Dr. Julia Prendergast at Swinburne University in Melbourne (though we expect more acceptances to be forthcoming). Contributors will have full access to the entirety of the game before release, including our warehouse of some 8000 artist files. We are shooting for 8 to 14 essays and acceptance will be by committee. If you would like to play this thinking game with us, please send a possible subject, brief bio, and writing samples to Madeline Hoak at Pace University [madelinehoak@gmail.com], who is graciously managing this endeavor.

Such wonder coming your way from over here to over there,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: Here's Hillary Hahn performing Caprice 24 by Paganini, widely considered to be the most difficult piece ever written for the violin.

December 6^th, 2020




Dear friends,

It’s a dark season and no mistake. On Wednesday, over here in the States, we had more than 3,000 deaths in a single day for the first time. 3,055 real people who could not be touched by loved ones as they turned into something else. Trying to comprehend that grief all at once is beyond reckoning. And that’s just where I live, here in one of our 68 countries. And it will get worse.

The New York Times just released their Year in Photos. They do it every year but this one was not like other years. Photography makes certain information more visceral than language and flipping through images of the months made me cry. I’m a bit of a crier. But, intense as it was to SEE this year, it was strangely comforting.

Yes, this year has been just as strange and hard as you thought. Yes, the entire human population on earth has been affected at the same time. Yes,you are now far tougher than you ever thought you would be. Yes, the grief and loss and distress you feel, which has woven itself into the fabric your everyday experience, is real and warranted, regardless of how you’ve muted it to get on with your day.

Rest assured that, on our side, we don’t think TELEPHONE can assuage or metabolize that volume of loss. But! There are some amazing symmetries between our project and the tragic course of this global pandemic. For one, we started it when things began to get bad, knowing that in-person events were suddenly impossible and that we had to use the Internet to connect during a time of isolation in ways we hadn’t done before.

Also, TELEPHONE spread and grew exponentially, often by word-of-mouth, from person to person. It was spread virally among us but spread beauty and amazement instead of sickness. At a certain point in the game, we hit an apex and then began to contract exponentially, dwindling from hundreds and hundreds of players down toward a single work of art. Hopefully, the shape of our game will mirror the shape of the pandemic as well.

And, in the Spring of 2021, about one year after starting, TELEPHONE will conclude as an interactive, online exhibition of original works by artists from more than 471 cities in 68 countries, entirely for free, as an absurdly generous gift, given to each other and to the international public by all of us. Around that time, at least up in the Northern half of our planet, the rain and cold will subside and the sun will come out. Simultaneously, the most vast logistical project in human history – manufacturing and distributing vaccines to every person in the world – will be well underway.

This does end. Know it in your heart. There is a time that comes after this one. There is a time when we will look back on this time and I hope we’ll remember this gorgeous, wildly ambitious marvel, this silly little game, that we played together.

Until then, feel all the feels. Grieve your grief. Laugh your laughs and dance your dances. You are an artist and that is your job. And your job during this impossible time is as important as that of a nurse or a doctor. You are a doctor of the soul and your friends and family and neighbors need you now. Do what it is you were born to do.

Flat-out holy strength to you pal,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: You know that our little team of 10 people is building this exhibition for zero money. Hard to know how many working hours will have gone into TELEPHONE but, conservatively between 5,000 and 10,000 hours internally. But I did think of how you can pay us back! Travel will be a real thing again soon. What if you agree to put us up? If we’re passing through Scotland or Japan or Brazil or Germany, you agree to lend us your couch or an extra bed if you have it. Or if we’re staying at a hotel in your town, you agree to come meet us at a coffee shop or pub or restaurant. It may be three or four years from now. But that seems like a fair trade, yeah?

December 11^th, 2020

Dear collaborators, Dear strangers, Dear homies,

It has been stunning to see TELEPHONE weave itself together. Behind the scenes, our elegant exhibition platform, which is fabulously complex, is beginning to feel as smooth and intuitive to use as wandering from one room of a museum to another. Meanwhile, finished artworks from 474 cities keep coming in and they are cripplingly beautiful in their variety and splendor and almost telepathic and supernatural sensitivities. Trying to think of the whole thing at the same time is overwhelming and I end up either crying or dancing or losing many hours just wandering around through the hallways of your works, hours I should be spending on working through our long to-do list.

So sometimes I just focus down on a single aspect, one little project within TELEPHONE to play like a game. One of the games that’s been taking on more prominence of late is getting TELEPHONE media coverage and publicity. It’s already so much like a game! Compared to art, compared to a lasting and inspiring meaning, “Likes” and views and reactions and traffic analytics are so easy to measure and score like a basketball game or a cricket match. Similar to money (which has no place in TELEPHONE), clicks and shares and engagement are such utterly basic and reductionist ways by which to measure value and importance.

You’re an artist. You get it. Every last one of us has to had to hustle to put ourselves out there, to be seen and heard, to earn our bread. And simultaneously we have to work so hard to remember that the numbers are not the real value – that the book that sells the most copies is not the best book, that a double-platinum album is not the most poignant music, that the movie that makes the most money is not the most meaningful film. Especially when the ego, that beautiful and competitive scoundrel, gets swept up in the game, it becomes exceedingly difficult to remember that the art with the most media coverage may not be the art that matters most. Often a clumsy high school poem will make a bigger difference than a Nobel Prize winning one. It’s just so hard to remember that while trying to sell paintings or get a play staged at a theater.

All that said, publicity can still be a fun game and an important one. In the case of TELEPHONE, our internal team has already put thousands of hours into the project and, between all of our participating artists, tens of thousands of hours have gone into creating this exhibition. So I feel as though we owe it to everyone involved to get as much coverage and as many visitors as possible. It will be a gift to those visitors when they see the impossible thing we’ve all done together!

But it’s even more basic than that. I believe to the marrow of my bones that one person on this planet needs to experience TELEPHONE, that it will significantly impact the course of their life for the better. I don’t know who that person is, what country or city they live in, what language they speak, if they are a woman or man or identify as something else. I don’t know their namebut this project needs to reach them. It’s simple math. The more the publicity, the better the odds that they find this exquisite thing we have done during the most difficult year.

So, by god, we’ll play this game and play to win it, but we’ll need your help. Already, we’ve received so much! Our pal Harold in Amsterdam translated our first press release into Dutch and sent it to 60 publications. Our fellow artist Wania translated it into Urdu and is distributing it in Pakistan. Our friend Janet is passing it around in Vermont. Our buddy Tamera took it on herself to spread the word to all the publications in China and surrounding countries. Our compatriot Inari is doing the same in Finland. Our partners at Satellite Collective have donated the time of a spectacularly talented publicist focusing on the New York City market. It’s already happening. It already makes the hairs stand on end.

I’m attaching the text of our first press release at the bottom of this email. If you know any reporter or writer or podcaster who would be interested, please send it to them. If you can translate it into your language for publications in your country, that would be unbearably amazing. If you want to re-write it to tailor it to your own purposes, go for it! If you'd like to wait until our next press release at the beginning of February, that's cool too.

And when we launch, if you share it to 100 friends and family, and know that everyone else is doing the same… well, that’s a 100,000 people right there and, in the age of a virus, we’re well on our way to making something gorgeous go viral. And will TELEPHONE find that single person that needs it most? I don’t know. Who could?

Maybe that person isn’t even born yet.

Such light in the darkest days, your buddy,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: While writing this, good ol' Joanna Newsom kept me company. Somehow it fits the season and the cold, shadowy rain falling against the glass of my window.

December 19^th, 2020



Dear buddies,

With highest respect to our beloved Muslim and Jewish and Buddhist and Hindu and Atheist and Pagan and Pantheistic artists, I’ve been thinking about Santa Claus today and his relationship to TELEPHONE.

Yesterday morning, before dawn, I used my key to quietly tip-toe into the basement of the house where my boys and their mother were still asleep. This was not a creepy, breaking-and-entering situation but a planned event and I carried a bag of presents and a bag of little toys for the stockings hung above the fireplace. With such purposeful silence, I put the presents under the tree — fragrant of pine and beautiful with all its ornaments, each a memory — and filled up those big, fancy socks. Then I waited around, reading wikipedia on my phone until everyone woke up.

When they did, I heard shrieks of glee. Haha! Mama made up some coffee and the boys climbed all over me and pointed at the stockings and shouted that Santa had come into the house! “Papa, how did Santa Claus even get in here?” asked my eldest. Well...

Here in the States, I grew up imagining a sort of fat, jolly man, big white beard, red clothes, black boots and belt, white wool around his cuffs and the brim of his pointy red hat. He landed his sleigh (with 9 reindeer!) on the roof, came down the chimney with his sack of toys, and left presents and filled up the stockings. He has rosy cheeks and a rosy nose and his laugh sounds like “Ho Ho Ho!”

Of course, this image was popularized by the Coca-Cola company advertisements in the 1940’s and 50’s. Those were kind of stolen from the advertisements of the White Rock Beverages company and the look of Santa was based on the work of a cartoonist named Thomas Nash, who drew a picture of jolly, fat, pipe-smoking elf for the cover of Harper’s Weekly in 1863, during the American Civil War. Nash may have also been the first to suggest that Santa lives at the North Pole. But his cartoons were based on the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” (usually called “The Night Before Christmas”) from 1823. That poem was either written by Clement Clarke Moore or by Henry Livingston Jr. That particular Santeclause / St. Nick was described as a little person, not like the big Santa Claus I knew. Between those two works was the depiction of the Ghost of Christmas Present in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”

Before that? Santa Claus was depicted in 1809 in Washington Irving’s “A History of New York.” Christmas at that time was bonkers! Tons of sex and folks robbing houses under the guise of wassailing! “Santa Claus” as a name was first used in 1773, Anglicized from the Dutch Sinterklass. And now things get crazy!

Part of this Yule character comes from Wodan (Odin), the Norse god who rode his eight-footed steed Sleipnir out of the north to give presents, dressed in a blue hooded cloak and with a long white beard. Of course, he was synthesized together with Father Christmas, dating back at least to the time of Henry VIII. And both of these were synthesized with Saint Nicholas (270-343 AD), a Christian Bishop in Myra (now called Dmyre) in Turkey. Most of the bones of his skeleton were stolen from his sarcophagus and taken to Venice. Aside from being the patron saint of Amsterdam and Moscow, Saint Nicholas was famous for his generous gifts to the poor and paid the dowries of three women so they would not have to become prostitutes. During the Middle Ages, on December 6^th, children were given gifts on his name day.

This doesn’t include Befana from Italy and how that lovely gift-giving witch was always covered in soot from her trips up and down chimneys. Nor does it include leaving out a carrot for reindeer or a cookie for Santa or a beer or mince pies. Nor Belznickle or Krampus. Nor does it include the rural mailman I know who personally writes responses with a silver-ink pen to every letter that children on his route send to Santa Claus.

When I was seven, I crept out of my bed with such purposeful silence. It took a million years to sneak down the dark hallway of my parents’ house to look for Santa. I laid on the couch in front of the fireplace and tried to keep my eyes open as long as I could. But I fell asleep and, in the morning, my stocking was full. And yesterday morning, I snuck into a house to deliver gifts while my children slept.

It’s just one long game of TELEPHONE played over 1,700 years. Sometimes the message splits into hundreds and thousands of (often unexpected) branches. Sometimes very different stories are synthesized together. And “Santa Claus” is only one game of billions, maybe trillions, of similar and interwoven games being played simultaneously. I’m staring off in space at a red Christmas tree ornament, thinking all this, when I hear, “Papa! Papa! Santa brought me some Unicorn stickers!”

I hope you’re feeling aglow. Wherever you are and whatever you celebrate, I feel lucky to be playing this mysterious game with you.

Your friend,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

December 26, 2020

Dear friends,

Happy New Year! That last one was so hard. And while 2021 just an arbitrary number, much like the 7,116,407 kilometers we've passed our message, the milestone does feel as though a slight psychological burden has lifted. So why not start this year off with a bit of fantastically exciting news?

Here is a letter from the Editorial Director and Creative Director of Crosstown Press, a new publishing house in New York City, followed by a brief addendum of my own...

Dear Creators,

We hope this note finds you healthy, happy and hopeful in this brand new year. When Nathan and Madeline originally offered Crosstown Press the opportunity to turn TELEPHONE into a catalogue, we were thrilled, and overwhelmed. With dozens of countries, hundreds of cities and nearly 1,000 artworks represented, we weren’t sure if we would be able to make it through the project archives, much less design and publish a catalogue.

Our worries were unfounded. The project is too compelling to turn from, too inspiring to look away from the screen. Moved and motivated by the intense talent and vulnerability on display, we went through every work of art, bio, statement, workspace photo and profile picture in less than a week.

The work is exceptional—diverse, thoughtful, razor sharp, evocative. We feel so privileged to be publishing a fraction of such an expansive project.

Our goals are twofold—to represent the scope of the project while accepting the limitations of print, and to create an open door for future TELEPHONE publications, so all the work can one day be published.

We will be publishing two collections of curated works. One book will be dedicated to the visual arts, the other a curation of writing. Each book will feature several dozen artists (as many as possible without crowding the work), and count at roughly 150 pages. While we cannot give every artist a full spread in these first curations, every artist will be honored for their work by name.

The books will be available to all the TELEPHONE artists at cost: $30 for the collection of writing, $40 for the visual art catalogue, or $70 for the pair. The retail prices are $50, $60, and $100, respectively. We look forward to delivering the books in tandem with the opening of the physical exhibition this April.

We are truly so excited to be bringing this project to print. It deserves to be seen by many, in various formats, and endlessly treasured. It is a work of art, a time capsule, a sweeping gesture of generosity in a lonely year. We all need art like this, and we cannot wait to bring it into physical reality.

Warmly,

Caroline Hurwitz, Editorial Director
Lindsay Bevington, Creative Director
Crosstown Press

Wow. Remarkable, yeah? Well, a few important points from us at TELEPHONE.

Firstly, we consider this publication an autonomous project, related to ours but separate. We're not involved in the selection of artists and none of this will in any way effect your presentation in our final TELEPHONE exhibition. Anyone their team selects for the first series would be contacted for permissions and we at TELEPHONE have no financial interest in this endeavor.

We never planned a physical publication (or a physical show) because of the prohibitive costs and labor - the entire budget for TELEPHONE is like... $150. Crosstown Press is assuming all the design, editorial, and printing costs as well as the risks of producing this ambitious set of books. The hope is that it will highlight and promote our artists, which has been one of our primary goals since the beginning of the game.

We're trying to help gauge how many of our folks would like to get catalogues at cost. I set up a little survey that takes 20 seconds to fill out. If it's not for you, don't give it a second thought.

Let us know what you think

If you have any questions, please feel free to give me a holler. Regardless, our little team will be doing astonishing things this year. Hang tough friends and so much love to everyone.

Your pal,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

January 2^nd, 2021

Dear actual human people,

Wow! It’s been 290 days since we started and it’s been kind of a day here in the country I live in, one of the 70 countries now represented in TELEPHONE. But to our dear friends in Israel and Iran, to our pals in Moscow and our buddies in Ukraine, to our exquisite artists in the UK and our dazzling artists in the European Union, to our illuminated collaborators in the United States and China... allow me to reiterate why our little children’s game is not “political.”

Sure, I have my own strongly held political beliefs, spiritual ones too, but a stronger belief is that politics, biology, economics, philosophy, and countless other disciplines all boil down to the experience of living this temporary life as breathing, dreaming, seeing, hearing, touching, peeing, sighing, eating, laughing, crying, lusting, despairing, hoping and finite mortal humans. By my way of figuring, what counts most – the starting place for any meaningful exchange or dialogue or communion – is to believe to the marrow of our bones that other people are just as real as ourselves. It’s a tall order! Expression and translation are fantastically complicated. But among all our disciplines, art waltzes in with comical swagger, confident and up to the task.

Whenever this project starts to feel a little abstract, when we start throwing around numbers like 479 cities and 4,460,971 miles, what makes it real for me is looking through our vast warehouse of artist files and finding a photo of your face. Obviously, profile pictures are unfair because the ones from actual photographers make those artists look like otherworldly beautiful and mysterious and alluring creatures, while my own (currently) is just a cellphone selfie in a bad shirt and with shitty lighting. But let me walk you through how your very real face ends up in our final TELEPHONE exhibition.

First, you applied to play and sent in sample works. I looked through these and so did Katelyn and we added you to the queue to play. Then, when another TELEPHONE artist finished a work and sent it in, Katelyn and myself looked through all the potential artists ready to play and picked you and sent it to you to translate. We guessed that you were perfect for it. Katelyn started this game in Austin, Texas but then moved to Barbados with her partner.

You looked and listened and felt what was sent to you and translated it into your own art. You sent us that art, along with a bio and a description of what it was like to participate and a photograph of your location and a photograph of your face. There you are! This is the first time we’ve seen you. Kelly, in North Carolina, and who just really, really loves manatees for some reason (haha) processes your files. She makes sure that your numbers and information are correctly labeled in our spreadsheet and then uploads all your files to our Google Drive, marks your status and notes any missing files.

From these files, Nancy over in Italy might find you and your face might end up on Instagram. I used to put profile pics up on Facebook but I’ve been rubbish at it of late. Plus she does proper, museum-grade posts, rich with information and permissions, while I just lazily copied and pasted them to our Facebook group.

Then Ben, our engineer in Baltimore, built a system that ingests all your files into our staging area. He’s smart as hell but apparently tried to ride a block of styrofoam out into the Hudson River? I still don't get that but the video was priceless. The architecture he built for TELEPHONE uses our file labeling system as well as our spreadsheet to grab artist files, including your very own face, and make them available to our front end.

After that, Matt, our splendid developer creates the actual user interface that will house the file of your face. This is the actual webpage that will belong to you. Matt used to do a lot of SEO work so if you want to prank him, just use the term “link juice,” a truly nasty-sounding term in the search optimization space. Matt is currently coding exactly how the interface of the TELEPHONE exhibition will work. He's actually constructing the museum.

And Matt is basing that code on mockups by our designers. Jenn sometimes calls into our group calls from the woods, where she’s hiking and I keep bugging her to start a company so that she can be my boss. I've been teasing her about that for years but she'd be such an amazing boss. Ramon has been my dear friend for more than four years and I plan our TELEPHONE team calls around Seattle Seahawks games so he’s not distracted. Weirdly, Jenn and Ramon are the only two people on our team that I have actually met in person. And Sergio is just getting starting with UX Design but his skills have quickly gotten amazing and you’ll get to see some of his badass work very soon. These designers decide how your face is placed on your very own exhibition page – the size and how it fits in the context of your work and your bio and your message and your location photo and the geographic map and the game map.

But there you are! It's you! It took about two months for your face to find its way into the exhibition. All told, over the course of a year, our staff will have put in something between 6,000 and 10,000+ hours of free labor, totally unpaid, to create TELEPHONE but there you are! You’re a real person. You aren’t a statistic or a political affiliation or a demographic. You cannot be reduced by algorithms or analytics. You are yourself. There’s your face and I’m looking right at you and wondering about who you are and so excited to get to meet you and just TALK. I want to know you so bad. It’s going to happen. We know how it'll happen. We just have to make it happen.

Sending you a deep breath for difficult times, your pal,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: Of all the hundreds and hundreds of artists in the United States, we only have one in the state of Georgia. This one goes out to her. But not for political reasons. Our project is not political. We aren’t political. We’re not!

Dear pals, strangers, artists, collaborators,

In the last ten days, I’ve been cycling through exhaustion, despair, depression, loneliness and all manner of psychological malady. Oh, I’ve still managed all my assignments at work, have answered emails and checked off to-do lists, have cleaned my apartment and taken out the trash. But all this against a low thrumb of sadness and dread.

I was chatting with one of our designers, Jenn, in one of our internal channels and she put it very well – “I don’t think we’re alone in having just extremely low morale right now. I keep thinking back to the beginning of the pandemic where this didn’t feel like such a slog. But now it really does.”

That’s a fact. I’ve been starting to write my introductory curatorial essay for TELEPHONE (it’s coming along Madeline!) and thinking about the same thing – the beginning of this game. Certainly the beginning of lockdown last March, when things began to get bad, was a disconcerting time, but I couldn’t fathom how the next year would unfold, with 2,000,000 dead, with 400,000 lost here in the States. Nor did I imagine how long we would be in isolation. Nor could I foresee the largest social protests in world history, the vast political unrest, or the lasting economic consequences of this global calamity. And yet, all the while, our little game has proceeded along, stitching itself together, growing and evolving toward its conclusion.

Over the course of it all, I’ve been sustained by my boys. They can be goddamned rascals, for certain, but one of the great evolutionary advantages of humans is how adaptable children are to every age of the Earth. At times it feels that the world is coming apart but, to them, it’s just Wednesday. Here's Anders explaining to me his newest invention, a "trap" that turns villains into good people. Haha!



Recently, I’ve been thinking of myself when I was their age. Of the many cool games I invented back then, one was called “Threads,” though I can’t exactly remember if it had an actual name. Maybe it was called “Strings?” The point was to take a toy or something from my room and climb my favorite tree and leave the toy in its branches. Then there was a “thread” tying my bedroom to the top of my favorite tree.

When I was touring the States playing music, I picked up this practice again. I would find up a bird feather in Salt Lake City and leave it in Denver. I’d discover a beautiful stone in Phoenix, Arizona and place it on a rooftop in New York City. I got a beeswax candle in San Francisco and left it next to a train yard in Wichita, Kansas. I brought a penny I found in Chicago down to New Orleans. It was a comfort, thinking that somehow all these places and the people we met out there were secretly tethered together, that they were all connected by invisible threads, that we were helping to weave a tangled tapestry across a continent. I don’t know what to call the fabric that came of it.

I hadn’t thought about that game for so many years until recently when I started playing with the geographical mapping tool (still under construction) for our exhibition interface. Each point uses latitude and longitude to find the location of an artist and a work of art. The line represents how a sequence of translations was passed from person to person.

There. That's a direct sequence of 8 works traveling 35,931 miles or 57,828 kilometers. Here's another tangle. Here's another that went 41,765 miles or 67,213 kilometers:

Here's different one that ran 43,101 miles or 69,366 kilometers:

And you can zoom in on the maps to get details:

Of course, that's only three sequences. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of similar pathways through the exhibition, pathways across the planet, from artwork to directly connected artwork, from person to person over the curvature of the earth. If we were to lay all the pathways on a map at once, it would be an indecipherable tangle, a scribble on a map of artists connected one to another. When we say the message has been passed 7,177,703 kilometers... it is not an exaggeration.

I can't remember why I enjoyed playing the thread/string game as a child. But if my adult self and my child self still share anything in common, I suppose it would be the idea that, if the world is coming apart, there is a pleasure and reassurance in stitching it back together, place by place, person by person.

Pals, this is the hard season. Right now. And what we do now will stick with us for a long, long time. This is the hour we will get to be proud about in retrospect.

Hang tough you splendid souls. We are going to finish this.

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: We're in the thick of it now, at least for two months. Every last person working on TELEPHONE is at maximum capacity with our intense to-do list. SO! If you see less Facebook or Instagram posts, or if it takes a long time for us to write you back, please know that we're just grinding it out as hard as we are able behind the scenes. This difficulty will not last forever. Love you all.

January 16^th, 2021




Beautiful collaborators, artists, friends,

There are 79 days until TELEPHONE is launched online for free to the public (78 if you’re reading this on Friday). Today is the one year anniversary of the first case of coronavirus in the United States, found here in my state of Washington, only a few miles away from where I live. One year and 17 days after we started this project, the full exhibition of approximately 950 original, directly interconnected works by artists from 70 countries will be published on April 10^th, 2021.

It will be a much different world from the one in which we began. We will have endured so very much and we will certainly deserve all of the relief and laughter and camaraderie and jubilation that comes our way. And though it’s still very much winter here in Seattle in the Northern Hemisphere of our planet, I looked up at a bird in a tree outside my apartment and... what are those little nubs growing at the end of thos leafless branches?

The next few months will still be tough as hell but there’s just the slightest smile breaking like a new day at the corners of the mouth.

Other miracles: A hummingbird landed on the edge of my coffee cup on Sunday. I fixed my own washing machine on Tuesday. I wept with relief on Wednesday. A handmade card also came in the mail from one of our artists in Brazil. That was a thrill! I’ve never got anything from Brazil before and I got out the world map and my boys and I traced our fingers all the way down the West Coast, through Central America, curving down and to the right until we landed on the origination of the envelope they turned over and over in their hands.

Side note: If you enjoy the thrill of physical mail, you should check out the 1969 Viaggi Postali project by the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti. He used the real post office to send postcards and letters to imaginary places!

Another piece of beauty came in an unexpected way. There have been so many artists in TELEPHONE that we have sent assignments that just never got back to us or had to withdraw. Including the folks who exited, I’m guessing (looking at our records) that we’ve actually been in touch with some 1,200 or 1,300 artists. Of course, there’s NEVER any hard feelings in the least. It’s not like we pay anything! Plus, these are busy people. Plus... 2020. Plus... EVERYTHING.

When someone has to drop from the game, usually we don’t end up hearing back from them and just send the assignment to another artist waiting in the queue and that’s that. But writing those letters is always so hard (for both me and Katelyn). Imagine (and we do) if someone didn’t finish an artwork because they had a spouse or a child fall sick and here we are writing to inform them that their work could no longer be included in TELEPHONE. I always expect a wholehearted FUCK YOU as a reply.

Instead, after recently informing an artist that we could no longer accept her finished work because it had been a few months, we got this. When I asked her if she would be okay with me sharing the letter, she didn’t think it said anything particularly polished or profound but jeez! It just really, really hit home with me...

Hi Nathan,

Of course I'm disappointed that you cannot include the work. But I know it took me a long time to complete. I suppose it would be too awkward to include it as some kind of terminal offshoot... I know from your updates, that you, too, have been struggling in many ways through this pandemic. That really was the culprit--everything this fall just took much longer (and and and...I'm sure the list of competing commitments and impediments is implied.) But I finally just used what I had, dispensed of the fragments I'd been producing slowly, and cleared the time and space to focus on it exclusively...

Even though you can't include it, I'm glad that I waited to complete it until I was able to clear the headspace and devote the time to the project. I suppose I could have phoned it in and produced something earlier that probably would have been fine, but the thing that makes me most interested in this piece is that it is unlike anything I've ever made--or would make on my own. Merging the two artworks and really asking them to define the creative process pushed me in new aesthetic directions. My work is fundamentally and always collaborative. So working alone, in isolation from my collaborators was itself an unusual hurdle. I'm not an experienced video editor, so it took a lot of time to make all that fragmentation work, but without it, the quilt would basically have informed the color palette and that's it. I also didn't want the fragmentation to be gimmicky (and I hope it's not!) I learned a lot about the mechanics of video editing in a brand new software, but also about letting aesthetic information swim around and generating experiments from that. One of the reasons that collaboration is a fundamental value for me is because of the ideas that emerge in liminal spaces between collaborators and their ideas. Dialogue and discussion are central to my creative processes. But this process created those interstices of ideas between the two--and eventually three--works that itself became an interesting perspective on collaboration for me. I don't know how familiar with William James you are, but the process brought to mind the essay "How two minds can know one thing," which I'm attaching. Forgive me if you already know this work, but I know you are writing about the project, and I thought these ideas might be useful if you do not know it yet.

I'm going to design a new assignment for my choreography class this spring based on this experience. I always have students use other works to inspire/translate into choreography, but the confluence of two works, in different media, that independently I "read" very differently from one another, was a completely different experience!

Might you be willing to share with me the contact info for the two artists whose work inspired mine. At the very least, I'd be interested in sharing it with them and asking them a bit about their processes. I'd also be interested in comparing my work to the other work you used in the game. Are you able to pass that along?

Finally, I know you said there are future "games" planned. I wonder if you might consider using this work to kick off the next game--or maybe you are using the final products of this one. I'd love to make something--I was very interested in this project, but I tend not to work quickly (I often spend multiple years developing a new work). That said, I would want to plan something in, to make sure to share space with collaborators and to know that I can put everything else aside to focus on it in a devoted residency in order to turn something around in a quick timeline. I'd love to hear more about the next iteration(s)!

Best,
Annie

Associate Professor and Chair
Dept. of Theater & Dance, Colby College

Such deep love to everyone! Keep going!

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: Annie, hell yeah we’ll introduce you to your predecessors! We’ll try to figure out some way to show your work to everyone because it rules. As for the other work in this game, every single work will be revealed simultaneously on April 10^th. As for subsequent games of TELEPHONE... oy! Can’t even think that far yet! There is so much left to do.

PPS: A link to the William James’ essay Annie included – How Two Minds Can Know One Thing, published in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, March. 30, 1905.

PPPS: The Rebirth Brass Band forever!!

January 21^st, 2021

Dear buddies and illuminated colleagues,

Things are BUSY.

At this moment (at least on this part of the planet) there are 72 days until TELEPHONE launches. The design and exhibition interface are really coming together and we just launched our second wave of PR, including some splendid help from a publicist whose time has been donated by our partners at Satellite Collective. The critical essays for the exhibition are coming in from professors and doctors and artists in numerous countries and we’re sooo excited. Our operations team is currently grooming all the artist files (6,000 – 10,000 of them) to look for missing items – you may be hearing from us! We’re also setting up our artist portal, our private social platform for artists. And I just cooked my boys some Indian food – bedtime is in an hour.

SO! Not much time to write this week. But Madeline, the Editor of our critical essays asked a good question this week and I figure it’s an easy topic, one that might be interesting to you, and one I’m thinking about a lot right now. She asked – what’s the process for assigning works to artists?

I did this for the first half of the game and then our Operations Director, Katelyn Watkins (who works harder than anyone alive), took over for a spell. When she took that responsibility, I WAS BURNED OUT. I just took assignments back over because they same thing happened to her (she’s now taking on Publicity). The reason we both burned out is because it is SUPER HARD and complicated and takes so much thinking. It’s just a really complex and exhausting task. Let me explain a little bit about why.

We try to follow certain guidelines when making assignments. They are not rules because there are too many to perfectly satisfy but they are as follows.

- We try to assign art forms to different art forms. So in the first half - a poem should go to a filmmaker, a painter, a musician. If it went to three photographers, that'd be a fail. Same goes in reverse in the second half, though it's harder. That’s because in the second half, there are always many threads weaving together and there are too many works to keep track of every single thread. So today I made an assignment that was two works of music to one artist, as well as two works of film to another artist. That’s a bit of a fail but we do the best we can (which is why it’s a guideline rather than a rule).

- We try to keep threads from becoming homogenous. So a thread that was photo-poem-photo-poem-photo-poem... that'd be a bit of a fail. Threads should be like poem-photo-dance-sculpture-music... But again, it's too time-consuming to manually audit every single pathway as they are created.

- We try to assign as far away as possible. So sending a poem from Brooklyn, NYC to a dancer in Manhattan, NYC... that'd be a bit of a fail. Brooklyn to Johannesburg? Cool!

- We try to alternate between "Abstract / non-narrative / non-figurative" to "Representational / narrative / figurative." This is SUPER hard because most works are somewhere on the spectrum and not at one end of the poles. Plus, it's hard to predict. You could look at an artist's application examples and they seem figurative but what they create for the game turns out to be very abstract.

That said, we do have a spectacularly subjective scale and when an artist is accepted to play, we rate them 1-10, 1 being the most figurative and concrete thing you've ever seen and 10 being the most out-there stuff that seems to be related to nothing recognizable. It's stupid and highly inaccurate but it's a cheat that does make the assignment process a tiny bit quicker.

Beyond that, we’ve always got to balance the artists who are in the queue, who have been accepted to play with the assignments we’re making. Think about it. If we weren’t careful, we’d wind up in a situation where we only had painters left to play and no poets. Or a situation where everyone was abstract. Or we could wind up in a situation where we had accepted too many people into the game and didn’t have enough spots left in the game structure to fit everyone in. Or we could wind up in a situation where we didn’t accept enough artists and ran short and didn’t have the right artists in order to follow our guidelines. This has actually happened a few times over the last nine months and we refer to it as “the tank running empty” and the game stalls out until more artists apply.

All the while, we don’t know if an artist will finish their work in the time we’ve allotted. As I’ve said before, there’s no hard feelings if they don’t because it’s a short window of time, unpredictable as to when it will come, and it’s not like we’re paying money to play. That said, it means that we’re never entirely sure the exact number of artists that we’ll need to fill out the structure of the game.

When I’m doing assignments, as I will again when my boys go to sleep, I have three Gmail tabs open, two tabs of our TELEPHONE Directory (our name for spreadsheet of all artists and info), one tab of our Game Map, two tabs of our back end service created by our engineer, two tabs of our Google Drive (with all the artist files and art works in it), one tab of our Google Drive for example works of artists waiting to play, and our sheet of all the submissions from artists who are still hoping to be accepted. Then I have a notebook in which I’m keeping track of... currently 17 assignments ready to go.

And all the while, we know that all artworks have to be finished and returned well before April 10^th.

Some assignments are super easy. Maybe it’s a painting from LA and a song from Colombia and I just immediately know it’s supposed to go to a certain photographer in Berlin. Those assignments that don’t take much thinking probably take 20 minutes to finish. Other assignments take FOREVER! It could be two very difficult works to synthesize and it’s so hard to find the “right” artist according to all our guidelines and you have to look through all the submission files of everyone waiting in the queue. I’ve definitely spent an hour and a half on one assignment (and we’ve currently done more than 900 of them).

But, at a certain point, we’ve just got to let go. We follow the guidelines as best as we can and then make the assignment and just see what happens. After all, it’s both a game and an experiment. And it also, making all these assignments feels more like an art more than a science – sometimes we develop a rhythm and an assignment just feels right.

Of course, we could automate all of this. It would require developing a fairly extensive stack of algorithmic if/then statements. At that point, we would be using rules rather than guidelines. One cool thing about doing it that way is that it’d be so much less manual work and, rather than doing a game with 1,000 artists, we could do one with 100,000 if we wanted to. It would also help us remove an enormous number of human variables, making the dataset of artworks "cleaner" for those who wanted to study it as basically a laboratory experiment. But even if we did all that (and we might some day), algorithms don’t get rid of subjective bias because any biases (like, how “abstract” 1-10 is this painting?) is either built into the rules or built into the subjectivity of evaluations either by us or by the artists themselves.

Whoa! I really veered into left field. But it’s bedtime for the boys now. We need to brush teeth and put on jammies. Then we will read two books and sing our goodnight songs.

Then it’s time to get down to fucking work. This to-do list ain’t gonna cross itself out.

As always, so deeply thankful for all of you,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

January 28^th, 2021




Dear TELEPHONE compatriots,

This week I’d like to emphasize a grand sense of urgency. There are 64 days left for this project and every single one of them matters now. After that, I won't send any more emails. You'll have some quiet at last.

If I was a prudent, savvy, and careful Director, what would be best is to lower anticipation, decrease stress, and temper expectations. Of course, I’m none of those things and “Director” is just a made up title for a "company" that doesn’t actually exist. So I’ll do the exact opposite.

When it debuts on April 10^th, TELEPHONE will be unlike any art exhibition in history. That’s not marketing hyperbole. That’s just a straight statement of fact. During a year of global pandemic, social upheaval, political chaos, economic devastation, almost 1,000 artists from all over the planet, mostly strangers to one another, are creating the largest compendium of ekphrastic exchanges ever assembled.

Certainly it’s splendid to view it as a collection of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of individual, original, interconnected works. But it’s just as easy to comprehend TELEPHONE as a single work of art, which has no single author.

Recklessness aside, my trying to increase expectations isn’t without intent. Aside from our internal staff, not one of you has seen the game in its entirety or understands (in your bones) the magnitude of this endeavor to which you have so generously contributed. Everyone will find out at the same time. And if each one of us promotes this exhibition to our own communities when it launches, even out of pure self-interest, knowing that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other artists are doing the same in 71 countries... something a little bit massive might transpire.

Here’s what’s happening right now.

Our designers Jenn and Ramon and Sergio and our front-end developer Matt presented what they had been working on and it’s otherworldly, way more beautiful and clever than anything I would have thought up. Meanwhile, the rough drafts of the curatorial essays have come in from professors and scholars and artists and these exquisite texts are being edited by Madeline, with assistance from Caroline at Crosstown Press. Meanwhile, Ben is building a new landing page, finishing the artist portal so you can make your own edits on your work page, and developing the social platform we’ll all use together before, during and after the launch of the exhibition. Meanwhile, Katelyn is managing our press outreach, which is international in scope, and Kelly is grooming our artist files to make sure everything imports seamlessly.

For my part, I’m back to assigning artworks. We’ve quickly become draconian when it comes to artist due dates. If you played back in May or August 2020 and wrote in that you just needed a couple more weeks to finish, we probably responded “Cool, cool, no problem, knock our socks off and good luck!” Now when an artist is even a day or two late we have to cut that work out and assign it to another artist. This is because any drop-out or delayed work of art now pushes the completion of the entire game back by days or weeks, time we can’t afford.

Last week, I drew out the whole remaining structure of TELEPHONE, from round 8 to the end, by hand so I could more carefully track artworks in a tactile manner. Writing very small, the chart stands about a meter tall (3.5 feet). Round 7 would have been 3 meters tall (10ft) written out by hand and round 6 would have been 9 meters or about 29.5 feet in height, drawn in very small handwriting. I taped it to my wall and, at night when the boys have gone to bed, I stare at it, and pace around, and then stare at it, and pace around. I create different configurations of mediums, trying to shave off a day here or two days there. A couple of times, I have literally prayed (to my own thing, in my own weird way).

Whatever is unknown to me, whatever is mysterious and beyond my control, please illuminate these artists on Earth. Help them hear and see what they need to hear and see. Help them channel their medicine. Help them destroy what is worth destroying and save what is worth saving. Help their work give them the light they need right now. Help them create with fervor and sensitivity and urgency. Help them in their moment to find the gift worth giving. It’s all with in them now and I believe that they will be beautiful.

And when I’ve finished my clumsy prayer and finished marking up the chart and checking in on our Slack channels and have read and written the last email of the night, I turn out the lights, I take a big breath and shake out my hands, and then just laugh a bit. “After all, it’s just a game. It’s just a game that little kids play. What a strange, funny game this is.” And then I fall peacefully asleep and dream in Debussy.

Holding my breath for 64 more days,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

February 5^th, 2021




Dear beloved friends and strangers,

It’s snowing outside. The field across the street below my windows is white, as are the branches, and the parked cars, and the leafless branches of the trees. The boys are sleeping in warm blankets in their bunks and school has been canceled for them tomorrow but they don’t know it yet. All of the work for the day is done and out the windows, the snow is falling softly and all is quiet.

While writing these TELEPHONE updates, this being my 47^th letter since last March, I’ve looked out these windows at the moon (the same one you look at), a landscape of clouds, vast plumes of wildfire smoke, massive rainstorms, sunsets, and now snow. And, after this message, I will only have eight more to write before the end. But that mortality, knowing that this will become something else in 57 days, comes not just with stress but with a gorgeous pang because I’ve discovered how precious it has been to me to write these letters each week.

At the house my grandpa built in Newberg, Oregon, I recall my grandma Betty running the gnarled claws of her seriously arthritic hands over the elegant handwriting of voluminous letters from her sister in Oklahoma. Now, great-Aunt Winnie, she could write a spectacular letter! Wow! Just hilarious tales and I saw grandma laugh so hard she almost cried – sort of a witch’s cackle but you could fully imagine what her laughter sounded like when she was a little girl. As she traced her ancient fingers from line to line, it was almost like she was touching her sister’s hand, some 1,945 miles away.

Those letters compared to emails and texts? It looks like I have some 17,000+ old emails in my “read” section (and texts and random photos), probably on some cloud server farm facility way out in the desert, that not a soul will ever remember or read again, just sucking up electricity and natural resources to store. A crypt of valueless transactional communication more temporary than flakes of snow.

Oh I don’t really have anything against emails or texts. It’s more that proper letters can be such deeply human connection between two distant people. I have a pal and she writes these long, beautiful, eloquent letters to celebrities. These are spectacular letters to Presidents, Popes, movie stars, authors, whoever, with the thinking that the idea of these people exist in her mind and she ought to address them. Though she never expects a legitimate response, these serve as such wonderfully framed journaling exercises for pouring out her innermost thoughts and feelings. Currently, she is writing a letter to Tom Hanks. Haha!

And, you never know! In 1973, a random guy named Mr. Nadeau wrote a letter to E.B. White, one of the most famous essayists of the time. White had written The Elements of Style as well as some classic children’s books like Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. Mr. Nadeau was in a dark place, writing to White about his loss of faith in humanity, and here is the letter he received in response.

North Brooklin, Maine

30 March 1973

Dear Mr. Nadeau:

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society—things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Sincerely,

E. B. White

TELEPHONE is, among many other fine things, an attempt to encourage and engender strange, intimate, fascinating, authentic connections among strangers all over the world. There shall be MANY such opportunities for us in the weeks to come but, for now, just pick someone – a compelling person, a person you haven’t talked to in forever, the person you care about the most, a person to whom you’ve long owed an apology, a person you have a crush on, a person that inspires you, a person you suspect needs encouragement... Just write them a letter. Take 30 minutes or an hour and write out everything you want to say. It feels really, really good and you won’t be able to do it forever.

It’s very late here now and time for bed. But Papa gets to sleep in tomorrow! Hell yeah!! It’s a snow day!

So honored to be allowed to write you a letter and with such love from this particular chair, your pal,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

PS: I once drove through a snowstorm with my sister and we had this song loud on the stereo. One of my happiest memories and forever my snow song (and also serendipitously about sleeping).

February 12^th, 2021




Dear beloved collaborators,

For most of you reading this now, there are 50 days to go until TELEPHONE goes live. It’s far too early to be experiencing elevated heart rates but I feel it in my bones when I step down the stairs. Every night, I go to sleep with it, dream about it, and then think about it first thing when I wake. What helps is that the art works that have been returned in the last few days have been so good as to humble me and quiet my frantic mind. It’s now clear (and has been true for months) that I’m being lofted through my days by the artistic content of this magnificent game. When I worry, I just look at what you’ve done and a peace comes upon me.

I find myself with no time to write to you, though it’s my favorite thing every week. Between new and finished assignments and changing diapers, between cooking dinner and writing a curatorial essay for Madeline Hoak and our friends at Crosstown Press (it’s coming y’all), between completing all the software designs for my day job and answering the press release emails, I find myself working every day from 7am until 2 or 3am. I’m not complaining! It’s such a good drug, knowing in your marrow that something important is about to happen. But I have no time to think up what to say.

So this! Katelyn Watkins, our Director of Operations, and myself are giving a lecture with three of our TELEPHONE artists at Smith College next Monday. It’s for a lecture series called The Art Of Translation and I know in my heart that it will be super pleasant and fun as hell. But I simply have too much that I want to say and don’t trust myself to get everything in if I ramble off the cuff. So I prepared some remarks. It may not be possible to get everyone a recording because they’re (rightly) protective of the privacy of their students. But these are my words so I’ll share them with you.

What follows is the longest email I’ll ever write you (promise), though I did time it. 30 minutes, read out loud, on a dime. You prolly got things to do and you go and do them. There will be typos (I’m sure) because it’s not going to be published and because I’ll probably still mess with it before Monday. But for those 2 or 3 of you who have a second, this is what I’ll say to the students in that imaginary lecture hall.

xoxo Nathan | TELEPHONE

*

When a lecture series is entitled the Art of Translation, it’s expected that a goodly amount of time will be spent discussing the translation of one language to another language – from Russian to English, from Italian to Persian, from Japanese to French. And rightly so! A perfect translation may not exist but it’s important that we try. It is of vital and obvious importance that we understand each other. In the context of translators at the United Nations and working in international diplomacy, to scientists and economists sharing findings from across the world, translation is of paramount importance. Translation is the conduit by which one entire culture, historical or contemporary, shares its vast intelligence and wisdom with another.

But our little game of TELEPHONE is concerned with a broader sort of translation. Our project is founded upon the concept of Ekphrasis. From the Greek “Ek,” meaning “Out” and “Phrasis” meaning “Speak,” ekphrasis literally means “Out-Speak” or to “Speak-Out” or “To-Give-Voice.” Traditionally, ekphrasis refers to the translation of visual works of art into linguistic descriptions. In ancient Greece, it was used as a teaching device for students of rhetoric.

Here’s how it worked.

Your professor (who was like... Socrates or Plato or Epicurus or somebody) would sit you down in a garden before a vase or a sculpture or a fresco and ask you to so perfectly describe that visual work with your words that someone who had never seen that visual work would feel as though they were looking right at it. Your job was to see and understand that object so perfectly that you could give it a voice of its own. In western art the two most famous examples are probably Homer’s description of the shield of Achelleus and Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn.

There were at least a few reasons for being skilled at ekphrasis.

The first was that if you could become adept at this practice, it meant that you were an expert at using words. You could argue that this was one of the first instances of the formal analysis now used by art historians. Ekphrasis was one of the roots of our contemporary practice of art history and criticism. Another reason was that, prior to printing or photography, if you were living way out by Hadron’s Wall, you were never going to see these masterpieces. Reading or being told about these splendors was the closest you were ever going to get.

Of course, you don’t need any of that formal analysis anymore. You can just go on the internet and look up a photo of the vase or sculpture or fresco. You don’t need a music critic at Pitchfork to describe a song to you. You can just listen to it for yourself on YouTube. And yet, there are still very tangible uses for the traditional skill of ekphrasis.

The preparatory text I sent you was a poem called the Curator by Miller Williams, which was sent to me by a TELEPHONE artist. It describes all the artworks in the Heritage Museum in St. Petersburg, for a time known as Leningrad, being smuggled away before the German invasion in the second World War, leaving only empty, ornate frames on the walls. Even with no actual paintings, soldiers and citizens lined up to take tours and the curators described to them the art that would have been in those frames during normal times. Those folks found value in those tours of “the Unseen Collection.” And then blind people began to come. People with no vision began to arrive to take a tour of visual masterpieces.

This is not hypothetical. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York there is a program called “Art inSight.” Folks who are without vision or who are visually impaired have a deep yearning to interact with Picasso and Monet and Kahlo and Van Gogh and O’Keefe and Johns and the whole host of modern masters. They want to experience these visual works we consider so important even though they can’t see. They want to be in the museum space, like people without the sensation of taste wanting to attend a dinner at the finest restaurant with friends.

I went on a few of these tours, asking the attendees for their permission to come along even though I was able to see and I always got a warm welcome and some fascinating questions after the tour. The fabulous docents who conduct these tours are specially trained. They have learned to describe things in tactile terms. A painting isn’t a certain number of inches wide or meters tall, it’s about the size of a refrigerator turned on its side. Sometimes light falling on the face of a figure is described like the water from a shower and where the water hits is illuminated and where the water doesn’t touch is shadow.

One thing that I found staggering was how unafraid these tour guides were to use color in their descriptions to people who could not see color. Slow as I am, it was explained to me, by both the docents and the visually impaired people taking the tour, that blind people live in a world of color. Red means stop and blood and passion and heat and sexy high heels and emergency. Green means go and life and plants and money and nature. Blue means ocean and jeans and water and sky and expanse and peace and sadness. Blind people are not stupid. These social associations with color are not lost on them and they, in fact, may be more attuned to the meaning of purple or orange than anyone who can see those colors. They think about it when they decide what clothes they’re going to wear to the museum.

In these tours, there are a number of works in MoMA’s collection that have been approved for touch. Everybody puts on gloves and has the opportunity to run their palms and fingertips all over the surfaces and contours of sculptures. That’s one of the more beautiful things I have ever seen – a bunch of blind people experiencing a sculpture the way that the sculptor felt it, with the hands. And when I put my gloves on and closed my eyes and touched this masterpiece of sculpture, there was not one hair on my arms or neck that wasn’t standing on end.

What we’ve been discussing with the traditional definition of Ekphrasis is one form of expression and comprehension (visual information) into another form of expression and comprehension (words). There is a subset of our population that experience these translations naturally, biologically, and neurologically. This is called synesthesia (or more recently, ideasthesia) and here is the definition of this condition by Psychology Today:

Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway (for example, hearing) leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway (such as vision). Simply put, when one sense is activated, another unrelated sense is activated at the same time. This may, for instance, take the form of hearing music and simultaneously sensing the sound as swirls or patterns of color.

There are currently 80 individual forms of clinically documented synesthesia. Many people have either projective or associative synesthesia but they might never know. The condition is not included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders because automatically associating the flavor of vanilla to the sound of church bells is not going to ruin a person’s life. You could live to be 70 years old before realizing that not everyone thinks that the number three is always blue.

There are some very funny historical arguments between synesthetic artists fighting about whether a particular chord is blue or purple or how a certain timbre tastes. Documented synesthetic artists include the likes of Duke Ellington, Tori Amos, Pharrell Williams, Franz Liszt, Lorde, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stevie Wonder, Billie Eillish, Itzak Perlman, Wagner, Kandinsky, Van Gogh... the list is staggering because this testable and clinically provable trait is not widely discussed. Currently, neurologists believe that about 4% of the population has a documented form of synesthesia, though that estimate could be way off.

But even for those without this neurological condition, the associative properties of synesthesia is common to humans. If I were to say that you are “wearing a loud shirt,” I doubt you’d think that I was hearing an intense volume from the cloth. If I were to say that a color was “warm” or “cool,” I doubt you would think that I was physically feeling the temperature of a hue. In fact, the whole premise of metaphor,
“a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable,” a tool so useful and beloved by all writers, is in fact synesthetic in nature.

So! While ekphrasis traditionally has meant a translation of a visual object into language, our project of TELEPHONE defines ekphrasis as the translation of any art form, any sensory or cognitive pathway, into another. Just as words can “speak out” on behalf of visual works, music can also translate prose. The content of poetry can be translated by sculpture. The information conveyed by a photograph can be translated by dance. All this is totally commonsense to anyone who has seen a screen adaptation of a book.

But the mechanics of that translation remain opaque. There are such a multitude of tangled variables in our process that the TELEPHONE project could not be considered a clinical study of how emotions and ideas and sensations are passed from one cognitive pathway to another, from one person to another. But it’s a start. At the very least, this project is the largest dataset of contemporary ekphrastic translations ever produced and gives us an opportunity to interrogate how art history actually functions. Furthermore, every finished artwork in our exhibition is accompanied by a subjective description by the artist about what it was like to do the interdisciplinary translation. This qualitative data is almost as fascinating as the artworks themselves.

At issue with translation from one art form to another is the expressive vocabularies of each of those languages. An easy example is rhythm. Obviously, music and dance have rhythm as a division of notes or gestures within a frame of time. Rhythm is also very important to filmmakers when editing together shots, cutting from clip to clip to create pace for the viewer. Actors and comedians obviously establish rhythms and occasionally break those rhythms for effect. But rhythm can very much be employed by non-time-based art forms. For example, a poem on a page uses elements of meter and cadence and line breaks to establish rhythm. And art critics often speak of rhythm in static works like paintings and photographs, as though the visual elements are meted out to the eye almost as if to a beat.

So rhythm is a part of speech that these many art forms share. That’s one solid avenue for translating from one form to another. But there are plenty of similar mechanics. Off the top of my head – color, shape, volume, pattern, contrast, timbre, dimension, repetition, size, direction, harmony, velocity... so many others. What emerges is basically a laundry list of neurological abilities that are being achieved in the brain of a baby as they meet all their developmental milestones in the first year of life.

When my first son was born, I had this book that described what was happening in his brain each week. “This week, baby is now beginning to understand sequence, that one event happens in order after another.” Whenever I read about one of these milestones, I practically spit my coffee out. What!? How on earth could you be experiencing life without understanding that one thing can follow another!? What even are you, baby?

I experience similar wonder and amazement when I think about numerous robust and eloquent native languages that have no “to be” verb. For example, I couldn’t say “I am Nathan and I am good at playing the violin.” In a language with no “to be” verb, I would have to say, “People call me Nathan and the violin comes easily to me.” Me and my name are suddenly not identical and now the violin has much more agency than it did with the “to be” verb of “I AM.” One little mechanical difference changes my entire posture and perspective on the world around me. That’s amazing!

Here’s another amazing thing. Though neither the first game of TELEPHONE in 2015 as well as this one being published in April 2021 could pass muster as a repeatable and objective scientific experiment, there were certainly findings and conclusions, some of them weird and startling. An example of this is the underestimation of the accuracy of abstract works.

My hypothesis going into the first game was that more figurative and literal art forms would do a far better job of translating information. I thought something like prose or photography or a highly figurative form of visual art would convey information much more specifically than a super abstract form like a Jackson Pollock painting or a totally atonal, arrhythmic piece of “music,” or even something totally gestural like dance. I was wrong. Let me explain.

I thought that a sequence like a very literal, concrete, figurative work of prose that was then translated into a super abstract and somewhat non-comprehensible abstract painting, and then translated back into prose would be a situation in which the content would shoot off into left field. Sometimes translations in TELEPHONE actually DO shoot off into left field and, because we’re not a scientific study but just a children’s game, we love it because it’s fun and funny!

But! More often than not, the figurative translation of the information in that abstract work would be shockingly (quote unquote) accurate. When this would happen, it would freak me out and I would stand up at my kitchen table and accidentally knock over the chair and scare my dog. I would either laugh or shout HOW or I would do both. If this happened once or twice or ten times or thirty times, I would rack it up as coincidence or chance or perhaps me subjectively imposing an interpretation. But it happened over and over and over in the first game and it has happened over and over and over in this new game as well.

What does that mean? In my estimation, it means that a painting that you see that looks like a weird goop that was finger painted by a toddler or a work of music that is sounds like such a freaky mush that you’d barely even consider it music... it’s highly possible that an abstract art work is conveying information and content at a much higher fidelity and with much more acute accuracy than the most meticulously structured academic and objective prose.

This isn’t to rag on the important work of being formally precise when describing art with language. But this is to say that all of our tools for describing the mechanics of what is happening in art – like rhythm, meter, shape, color, harmony, volume, and so on – are currently insufficient for cataloguing the sheer quantity of information that is being conveyed by works of art. A simple example is that we have an exclamation mark for exclamations! And we have our very useful question mark? And of course our trusty and resolute period. But where is the punctuation mark that denotes that a statement is sarcastic and how many uncomfortably mistranslated text messages have been caused by the lack of that mechanic?

As art historians and critics, when it comes to understand how art conveys information, we’re just fooling around in the dark, using an abacus to calculate quantum entanglement. This is a really exciting problem. This mystery is a happy trouble. This is very, very good news for curious people!

I have also given short shrift to perhaps the most interesting thing we are studying in the second game, which we did not study in the first and that is the practice of synthesis. In the second half of TELEPHONE, we are assigning multiple works to a single artist simultaneously and asking that artist to both find what those works have in common and to translate that commonality into their own art form. Essentially, we’re testing to see whether the process works similarly in reverse.

This is important because art history is not a straight line. It isn’t Manet to Van Gogh to Max Beckmann. It isn’t A to B to C. When an artist is translating and repurposing the great works that came before her, she isn’t just inspired by a single artist at a time. She simultaneously has three artists, from very different time periods, on her brain and, while she works, she’s listening to some Wu Tang Clan and she’s watching the political news coming out of Myanmar. The actual process of art history is far, far more complicated than our little illustration in TELEPHONE and far, far more complex than any telling of that history that has supplied so far.

For example, Spotify uses implicit matrix factorization to measure relationships between songs that utilizes an (at least) 50-dimensional graph to plot congruencies among musical works. Even though TELEPHONE is a spectacularly rich and intricate data set of interpersonal and interdisciplinary exchanges, it’s still just a children’s game, just a stick figure drawing of how art history actually passes the same stories and archetypes, over and over (with variations), from one generation to the next. I can say with certainty that the practice of art among humans is far more complex than whatever the algorithms on the servers at Spotify are cooking up.

TELEPHONE will not pierce this veil. We have no budget or support and, though we’ve created something important during a pandemic, we’re just messing around for fun when we’re not working our day jobs or attending to our families and lives. To tackle it properly, you’d need a spectacular team of a neurologist, an art historian, a philologist, a sociologist, and a world-class clinician, at least. No, we’re mostly just having fun (kind of the point of games) and yet, without exaggeration, I know that this casual foray into interdisciplinary translation is going to have a powerful effect on both our participants and our visitors.

And why is studying and exploring this subject important? Why would it be worth all the time and energy we have put into understanding how it works? Well, because aside from the need for food and safety and sex and sleep, being understood by another person is of the highest primacy to humans. It is a biological imperative for mortals and we’re lucky that such a beautiful and hopeful compulsion is coded into the brains and bodies to which we are born. I need you to get me. I need you to know that this thing that I feel or taste or think or see or endure or hear is something that can be accurately understood by you. I just don’t want to be alone. I need to get what is in my head into your head and I need to know how that’s possible.

While a “perfect” translation may never be possible, it is worth spending an entire lifetime figuring out how close we can come.

*

And here's what I'm listening to while I write. Moses Sumney. Sooo good. Try to count how many different feelings you have while watching this video.

February 18^th, 2021




Dear friends,

By the time you read this, there will be 43 days left in our game of TELEPHONE. Six weeks remain, six more emails, but tonight I feel strangely calm. A deep breath before the last push. A slow stretch before the final sprint. I know in my heart how intense the burden of the last weeks will be for everyone on our little team. It’ll hurt like the last mile of a marathon. But at this very moment, there’s a weightless hum of quiet, slightly electrified breathing.

To get you ready, here are three things coming your way in March.

You’ll be receiving an invitation and a password to join the Artist Portal, which our engineer Ben built from scratch. It will allow you to edit the text and links of your bio and the message you wrote about your process. If you’re missing a profile picture of yourself or forgot to send us a photo of your location, you’ll be able to upload one. Very importantly, especially for the literary works (but for all of them) there will be a way to add a title of your work, which we will need.

We’re trying to do as much of this “file grooming” by hand, writing emails to everyone with missing items, but it’s a crazy amount of work and we won’t get everything perfect. By giving you the ability to edit your own stuff, we’ll hopefully cut down on what would assuredly be hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of emails. It will help us get things right before we launch.

Though Ben will supply a simple how-to video, many of you will certainly have questions. That’s why, at the same time (mid-March), we’ll be launching our Discord channel. Discord is very similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams or Facebook. Primarily, Discord is used by gamers (by which we mean video game streamers) but, aside from live chat and file sharing, it has some very good video and audio services so that we can actually talk to each other. It's free and is really easy to join, even for our less tech-savvy artists.

At first, this platform will be used for asking us questions and addressing concerns about your work and how to use the Artist Portal. But it will also be our primary way to connect with our larger community of TELEPHONE artists. Every artist will be assigned a smaller, more intimate home room to start, because trying to meet many hundreds of people all at once doesn’t seem inviting in the least. We’ll also be setting up some topic rooms for poets or musicians or people that want to nerd-out about theory, and all sorts of other cool stuff.

There will also be lecture halls, where we’ll conduct interviews and events and presentations. Madeline Hoak, who has been absolutely crushing the cultivation of scholarly essays for the TELEPHONE exhibition will be coordinating many of these events, both before we launch and after. It’s going to be so fun. Plus Ben, our brilliant engineer, suggested that the utility of this Discord group may well outlast the exhibition itself! If he’s right, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Also in mid-March, we’ll begin asking for all TELEPHONE artists to begin sharing and promoting the launch in earnest. We’ll be hooking everyone up with a bunch of cool stuff they can spread around and share with friends, family, social networks, fans, and media outlets. Obviously, no one is required to do so. The only thing you “owe” to this project is the exquisite work you’ve already done and the files we asked for to play. But even if everyone promotes the exhibition out of sheer self-interest to highlight their own work (which is fine by the way), hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of artists in 72 countries doing the same thing would give our us a shot at a million or more visitors for an exhibition that was essentially built in a basement without a budget.

The truth is... it doesn’t actually matter if we break a million visitors. The truth is... all of our crazy numbers like 492 cities in 72 countries and 7,661,426 kilometers or 4,761,607 miles are mostly of abstract value. The truth is... if only 20 people come to see TELEPHONE but have a profound experience, that would be a sublime success. The truth is... if zero people come to look at what we had created together, who cares? No one is going to lose money and no one will get fired. It’s a game and those of us who have played will always know the magnitude of the impossible thing we’ve made together.

But. It would be pretty cool if it blew up. Ha! And there’s some cause to believe that there’s a chance. For example, as the first press trickles in, our lecture at Smith College was a little supernatural. Our Operations Director, Katelyn Watkins, just completely owned her presentation. I read the thing I had written (which I sent last week) in my typically cartoonish and buffoonish way, utterly brain-dead after my hardest day at work in months. But what was truly remarkable was hearing from three TELEPHONE artists who attended Smith – Pamela Petro, Sara Eddy, and Sophie Willard Van Sistine.

While administering this game, we sometimes kinda abstract everyone – hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of artists and thousands of files – just to get through the work. But hearing three actual, brilliant humans speak from the heart as to what it was like to get an assignment out of the blue and struggle through the process and to present their own artwork translation... it was staggering. Both Katelyn and I were practically in tears by the end of the lecture and the moderator, Professor Carolyn Shread, admitted she was almost crying too.

After the lecture, Carolyn sent the video of it to a number of scholars around the world who might be interested. One letter I got back was from a very kind professor in the Department of Linguistics and Language practice at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. He has published books like “A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation: The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality” and another called “Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complexity Theory Approach.”

He began what turned into a very long, beautiful correspondence with:"I cannot remember when last I was so excited about something."

That seems like a pretty good sign, yeah?

A long, deep breath,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

February 26^th, 2021




Dear beloved artist compatriots,

Something really good happened today. In fact, a number of truly astonishing things happened over the last week. These are jump-up-in-the-air, shout-triumphantly-into-a-pillow, break-into-spontaneous-laughter-while-holding-back-tears, go-outside-and-sit-on-a-bench-and-stare-off-into-space-for-a-long-time sorts of good things. And I can’t tell you about any of it. The secrecy of TELEPHONE is both one of my favorite and least favorite aspects of this project. This is the 50^th week that I’ve written a letter like this and I’m full to bursting. I can feel the excruciatingly aglow pressure of it expanding inside my bones and my hands barely know what to do with themselves.

35 days to go. Some 840 hours.

I can assure you that our staff, our little gang of heroic volunteers, is now working at maximum capacity. When not working day jobs, these people are going to sleep with the game and waking up with the game. This is particularly true for Katelyn Watkins, our Operations Director, who is going through every single artist file (maybe 10,000 of them), looking for missing and mislabeled elements. This is particularly true for Ben Sarsgard, our Engineer, who is making sure we have the back-end architectural capacity to pull of this impossibility. This is particularly true for Matt Diehl, our Developer, who is coding all the remaining features and fixing all the functional bugs we come across.

As for me? Focus. Finish the last work email. Cook dinner for the boys. Find errors with the user interface. Sing them to sleep. Write this email. Assign one of the last three works of art in the game. Answer email from the publicist. Respond to artist emails. Set up Discord rooms.

Oh! That last one has been fun! We’re in the midst of preparing a Discord space for all TELEPHONE artists where we can gather together. This space, which will be exclusively available to us and participating scholars, will be where we host presentations, panels, and will be providing rooms for you to chat, by voice or by video or by text, with your hundreds and hundreds of collaborators. We envision it as the sort of fantastical museum space where we’ll most likely never all be able to meet up in person. So there’s the Fireplace Room, the Rooftop Garden, the Scholars’ Library and a whole bunch of others. Because it’s so fun, I’ve been wasting time that I should be spending finding interface bugs writing descriptions of these rooms (which probably only a few of you will glance at, ha!). For example, the main channel is called the Great Hall.

“The Great Hall has been the majestic main entry of the TELEPHONE artist space for several centuries. It is a fitting entrance to this palace of art. The monumental limestone façade's principal motif—an arch with flanking pairs of freestanding columns—is repeated three times across the central front. Many hallways and stairways lead away from here to distant rooms. The museum is always being renovated and deconstructed. All artists are welcome in this general space and the the din of the crowd's chatter sounds like the ocean as it echoes off the vaulted ceilings.”

Maybe a little silly but, other than writing these emails, it’s one of my only creative outlets and it’s a relief. Most of this game, for me, is administration. It’s often like being a Product Owner at my corporate day job. There’s not time for poetry right now and my original idea for 2020 was to start a band again. C’est la vie.

The other thing on my plate is that I’m supposed to prepare for a keynote address for a fundraiser benefiting an organization that works with the victims of child sexual abuse, a topic with which I’m intimately acquainted. They invited me to speak because, a number of months before the pandemic, I published a book about it online called I NEED YOU TO TELL ME EVERYTHING.

If you’re not in a stable place, don’t read it. It is as dark and brutal as TELEPHONE is light and hopeful. There are very disturbing depictions in this book. But I do feel a connection between these two projects.

It is wrong for me to define “what art is” for anyone else just as it’s wrong for anyone to define “gender” for anyone else. Art is many, many things. But for me, personally, the highest purpose of art has always been as medicine. In my mind, all of the intellectual games and criticism and debates about how art works should be in the service of making the efficacy of this medicine more potent. I know that art is a medicine as vital as a vaccine and that both making it and experiencing it actually saves lives. I know this because art actually saved my own life and literally kept me from committing suicide when I was young. I’m certain many of you have had similar experiences.

We still understand too little about how the medicine of art actually functions in the mind and brain. Currently, artists just do their good work and blast it out, like a message in a bottle, in a way that will hopefully reach the most people and have the largest accidental benefits, often on total strangers we will never meet.

That’s part of what we’re doing here with TELEPHONE. Touch as many people as possible. Create an environment that might be conducive to as many vibrant person-to-person interactions as possible. Try to get the artwork to a million people or more. Hold our breaths and hope that one of these works finds the one person who needs it most.

For those of you who share this sentiment, you have my whole heart and I consider you doctors of the soul in this most intensely difficult time. To those of you for whom this seems overly utopian or idealistic or doesn’t match up with your own practice, don’t even sweat it. Your way is good to me so long as it makes life more alive. Take comfort that TELEPHONE really is just a game played by kids.

Sending you love and fortitude, your pal,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

March 5^th, 2021




Dear Beautiful Compatriots,

There are now 28 days until TELEPHONE goes live on April 10th. In some respects, I think the magnitude and significance of this project / exhibition / game is only now becoming fully clear to our internal staff, myself included. It’s... I don’t know... it’s hard to talk about because it encompasses so many people and artworks and places and ideas and theories. It feels difficult to hold the entirety of it in the mind at the same time. This is not hyperbole. What we have all created together, we’ve almost completed together is gorgeous and vast.

Two things today.

FIRSTLY, some big news! Pre-sale orders for the TELEPHONE catalogues (by Crosstown Press) are now available! Both sets (the visual book and the literary book) are available to artists for $70 US, or you can buy just the visual book for $40 or just the text book for $30. I’ve seen some of it and it looks staggeringly cool.

In order to do so, you would need to use the code GAMEPLAYERSET for both books or GAMEPLAYER for the individual books. You would also need to use the same name and email as you used when you applied to play TELEPHONE.

You can get the set of both books here: https://www.crosstownpress.co/collection/p/telephone-visual-art-writings-book-set

You can get individual volumes here:
https://www.crosstownpress.co/collection/p/telephone-writing-book

To preempt what I’m certain will be a flood of emails, here are some things to keep in mind.

1. This project by Crosstown Press is related to but autonomous from the TELEPHONE project. They're their own thing. It in no way affects your important role in our big exhibition.

2. No, I don’t know if you are in it. TELEPHONE staff members were not involved in selecting artists for this. I believe the editors are still finishing the final list. If you’re in it, cool, and hopefully a few more folks will find your work in bookstores. If you’re not in it, I wouldn’t give it much thought – seeing what you’ve created in our exhibition (as intended) is going to be the fullest experience (in my non-biased opinion, ha!).

3. For artists, they’re printing these at cost with no profit and not charging for the intense editorial work of making them. TELEPHONE remains a zero-profit project and TELEPHONE staff receive no money. By my math, they’ll be lucky to break even but they love this project and hopefully it’ll do some good for individual artists and all of us as whole.

So there you go. Buy it, don’t buy it, entirely up to you. For me at least, it will be beautiful to have something tactile to hold and touch about this internet project during a time when we’ve been able to hold and touch. Regardless, this new two-woman company is just the best and they have fully embodied the spirit of this benevolent little game.

SECOND THING!

Next Friday, we’ll be releasing the TELEPHONE Artist Portal. This is SO important to the success of our project. There are a whole bunch of issues with the content of this exhibition that we cannot fix. The Artist Portal will give you a way to edit your bio and the message you wrote about playing TELEPHONE. There are many works that are still missing a location picture and profile picture and you can upload them using this tool. This will make sure that your entry into the exhibition looks fabulous (it will probably be public for a decade or two) and it will cut down on the insane amount of work our staff will have behind the scenes.

On the topic of insane quantities of work, what the internal staff of TELEPHONE did this week was truly astonishing. Our list of issues to solve, from larger coding issues to tiny formatting issues for each artist, some of which only you can ultimately fix using the Portal, is currently 516 items long. Rather than despairing or being intimidated, our peeps (after working day jobs and tending to families) just started grinding the problems at a pace that was nigh on impossible, working into the early morning hours to make it happen. It’s one of the most impressive displays I’ve ever seen from a team this small.

Here are a few excerpts of our high-minded art philosophy dialogue taking place right now:

Ben: rtf is a proprietary format so it's difficult to parse. Unless there's a lot of them it's probably much easier to handle them manually.

Matt: running a manual s3 sync. should be done soon. This project is absolutely massive... I'm at 7gb synced of the built project and not done yet

Ben: Unless it's an issue with the xml, but that doesn't seem as likely and it's kind of a pain to debug that since it's so massive.

Jen: now the challenge is to get it into a format that is useful to matt lol. the gif is 33.5 MB

Katelyn: A ton of .mov, .mp4, .wav. A handful of weird ones like .tif, .HEIC, .MTS, .gif
Many docx files just not formatting properly. Some PDFs that are coming in wonky

Ben: I just added a new sheet to the bug tracker spreadsheet called "Blank Content Audit.” It's the results of a query for all pieces that are bio or message and don't have any html content.

Matt: I'll look at ulvang. sounds familiar, might have fixed that one. alpha ordering will be fixed in the next push. sullivan's location image is blank in drive... actually was able to open that one in gimp, so might be able to resolve that one.

The fact is, you will never fully know how hard these people are working on your behalf. No one except these ten people will ever entirely understand what we’ve accomplished together, without pay and because we believe in this impossibly beautiful gift, this little kids’ game. But we need your help. Please read about and use the Artist Portal next Friday.

Sunlight is pouring through the windows here. The buds on the trees are doing the hard work of beginning to blossom. We’re so close.

Your buddy in Seattle,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

March 13^th, 2021





NEED TO GET 52 from BEN



Dear Pals and Colleagues,

Two weeks to go. Two weeks and then more than a year’s worth of work together will come to fruition. Without exaggeration, TELEPHONE is staggering. Our little game is a historic achievement worthy of the historic moment in we created it. I’m so excited that I have difficulty sleeping and, when I do, I dream about the game. If this sounds a little over-romantic, well, just wait.

There is SO MUCH to talk about right now!

Firstly, all of the curatorial and critical essays by scholars about TELEPHONE are finished. These will help give visitors and thinkers additional lenses by which to view and explore and understand this vast exhibition and they are soooooo good. As is often the case for me, when I see or read or hear something astonishing, I just start laughing and I’ve been laughing all week.

These shining works of criticism and theory are by such extraordinary minds. There’s one by Dr. Dean Rader, a poet and professor at the University of San Francisco, who received the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry. There’s one about ideasthesia by Dr. Julia Prendergast at Swinburne University in Melbourne. We got one about metaphor and science that I read three times in a row by Dr. Michael Salcman, a poet and historian who was the chairman of neurosurgery at University of Maryland.

We have a splendid work by Ash Rexford and Nadine Johnson, a circus artist and a yoga teacher. There’s the marvelous Leah Poller, a reputed artist who currently serves as Guest Editor and Board Member of the art and cultural magazine New Observations. We have the insightful work of Stacey Carlson, a puppeteer and dancer from New York. There’s an entry by Calvin Olsen, a Pushcart Nominee who studied under Robert Pinsky, Louise Glück, and David Ferry and who’s whose essay I love to death. There’s the incredible Sara Eddy who serves as the Assistant Director of the Jacobson Center for Writing, Teaching, and Learning at Smith College.

There’s one by me about the original, secret message of our game. And then there’s our beloved Madeline Hoak, Adjunct Professor at Pace University, who played TELEPHONE and edited this entire collection. Without her tireless efforts, this body of work would not exist.

How’s that for a lineup?

Each of these essays is fascinating and riveting and these luminaries, along with numerous other thinkers and artists, as well as our TELEPHONE staff, will be joining us in conversation both before the launch on April 10^th, as well as after, once we’ve spilled all of our secrets. You won’t want to miss these panels and presentations (though we’ll record them if you’re asleep on your side of the planet). We’ll be announcing these live events through all of our various channels.

One of those channels is our new Discord space!

In the last number of days, we have had 251 of our artists join up. Myself and other TELEPHONE staff have been bouncing around from room to room like hosts at a party that only started 15 minutes ago, doing all those funny things that party hosts do. “Oh hi! I love you! Thank you SO MUCH for coming! Have you met this person? You’re a painter from Berlin and you’re a poet from Brooklyn and here’s some things you have in common.” And then the host rushes off to greet another newcomer and the guests all sort of hang around and chitchat while waiting for things to really get going.

The party’s off to a lovely start (though I imagine it will be incredibly busy around April 10^th)! Already, there have been some splendid conversations and, to those of us on the internal staff, it’s like seeing celebrities meeting each other for the first time. I do hope many more of our colleagues will join up as we draw closer and, if you didn’t receive an invitation, please let me know.

A couple things. For one, I’d encourage many of you to change your names to your first and last name, otherwise when your fellow artists see your work in the exhibition, they will not know how to find you, to praise your work and ask questions about it. Of course, if you want to stay anonymous, that's up to you. For two, aside from our specialty rooms, we have six voice channels where you can connect by voice or through video. If you’re having a nice dialogue, just ask someone to join you in one of those rooms and talk to an actual human being. Otherwise it’s not all that different from facebook, though our members are sooo cool). BE BRAVE! TALK TO A STRANGER! It’s a far more powerful experience. Here’s an example.

I was up late a couple nights ago, fixing some works and little formatting errors, and I just decided to go into The Director’s Study and just leave it open in case anyone came by. Then I got an alert that someone had joined. It was Julie Upmeyer! This person is totally famous to me. She played the first game of TELEPHONE in 2015 from Istanbul but now she lives on Isle of Anglesey in Wales with her family on this absurdly beautiful property named Plas Bodfa, which they’ve turned into basically a huge arts installation. Anyhow, this lady is next-level brilliant and we’ve exchanged a handful of emails and messages over the years but here she was! It was her on video and her actual voice!

The first thing she said was, “Oh I look like shit!” Haha! I did too actually, as I had been staring at a screen and working on detailed fixes deep into the night. She was just waking up on the other side of night and couldn’t talk too long as she needed to get breakfast going for her girls (my boys were deep asleep). I felt like I was meeting Agnes Martin or something. Then she turned her computer to look out her window over the gorgeous landscape of her island toward the sea and I could see the sun rising on the other side of the world. And Julie said, “Yes, that’s your sun too, the same one.” I had a deeply emotional reaction to that sight and, after she hung up, I stood up at my windows, with my hands on my hips and stared up at the bright moon in the black sky for a long spell.

The whole planet, the whole world. Spring for some of us and Autumn for others. Always, always both day and night and every city and town and country cabin all at once.

What else? The TELEPHONE catalogues are for sale through Crosstown Press and you should have your discount codes (they say they’re getting robust orders).

We just got some very good publicity news but can’t talk about it yet because we’re soooo secretive! At this point, there are no more rounds of press releases but you can certainly write personal letters to reporters you know (that’s what I’m doing and it worked!). If you need cool stuff to share, please let me know. Beyond that, we’re all just going to share this with EVERYONE, though you can do that once we launch if you like so you can just share the full exhibition.

The team, those of us in Operations and Design and Engineering, are all working absurd hours to publish a work that is as perfect as possible. Two weeks. Two weeks left. A whole year, 52 weeks behind us. We're so close now. This secret is almost unbearable to keep but it won't be kept much longer.

Oh and the last artist of TELEPHONE is almost finished with her work in Hong Kong.

My heart is absolutely bursting with excitement,

Nathan | TELEPHONE

March 26^th, 2021