Untitled [Eavesdrop], vintage surveillance


A 1950s-style Bakelite telephone is the core of the installation by Stephanie Cormier and Dave Dyment for Untitled [Eavesdrop]. However, the strong retro aesthetic of the work conceals a conceptual technological short-circuit. Inside the device there is a smartphone that continuously reproduces about 90 minutes of telephone dialogues in which the speaker is obviously aware of being spied on or listened to by a person who is not directly involved in the conversation. The artists place the viewer in a dual position, supervisor and voyeur, which does not however seem to be a reminiscence of the typical espionage films. On one hand, there is a reflection on immobility of the media: even if it has no cornet and the mechanical ring for the composition of numbers, the smartphone can be intercepted in a conceptually similar way to a telephone. The assiduous use that we make in everyday life is often accompanied by the suspicion that someone intercepts us, collects data from our steps in space, listens to our vocal messages. And so the link between aesthetics and vintage content, related to the contemporary everyday life, could be interpreted as a universal declaration of our powerlessness in achieving a concrete freedom of global communication. Chiara Ciociola