Cinder Peak Phone Booth Replica (Bluejacking), 2008
Resin, aluminium, wood, plexiglas, volcanic stones, PC and bluetooth dongle
210 x 100 x 100 cm

 

This sculpture is a replica of the bullet-riddled Cinder Peak Phone Booth, standing in the middle of the Mojave Desert in California since the 1950s and at one time the focus of an exponentially expanding cult on the Internet: hundreds of people would call up just to make it ring in the middle of nowhere and others even made the trip to answer calls. Faced with the quasi-irrationality of a virtual community paradoxically driven to set up exchanges with the unknown, the authorities finally shut the booth down in 2000. A kind of archaeological monument holding out against the ubiquitousness of contemporary technology, Bettina Samson’s sculpture nonetheless seems to want to stay active, invoking the memory of the Cinder Peak Phone Booth by sending anonymous, unsolicited BLUEJACKING messages to exhibition visitors’ cell phones. An avalanche of volcanic stones and a sheet of yellow Plexiglas leaning against the sculpture serve as metonymic evocations of the Mojave Desert. The work as a whole represents a tangle of technologies functioning at different speeds and reflecting the way today’s world generates fulltime circulation of information between unsynchronised systems of transfer, formatting and translation.

Text by Pedro Morais in Bettina Samson, Laps & Strats, edition Adera, Lyon, 2009.

Photography: André Morin

 

 

© NETTIE HORN