- Cellibacy?
Could you survive 60 days without a cell phone? Amy Borkowsky gives it a try by relying on payphones, landlines, and voicemail. Oh, and wrist watches! Lots of 'em!
- The Museum of Lost Interactions
This online museum documents forgotten communications and entertainment media, including the Richophone, a turn of the century multi-player game which employed Richophone booths. Don't miss the entertaining video showing a Richophone game contestant.
- Jenny L Chowdhury: The Cell Atlantic CellBooth
"Talking on the phone is no longer a private exchange. What if you could carry a phone booth with you and set it up when you needed to converse in private?"
Also, check out Jenny Chowdhury's Popularity Dialer, a free service which promises to make you "look extra important or popular on that hot date."
- "I'm a lonely computer and I need to talk to someone."
"For one week a computer telemarketing device makes hourly calls to selected pay telephones, engages whoever answers in conversations about life in the city, and digitally stores the conversations."
Read about Stephen Wilson's 1992 installation "Is Anyone There? A Voice Activated Tour of San Francisco Via its Pay Telephones, and watch a Quicktime Video (5.5mb) of the work's documentation.
- MacAllister Stone: You must remember this...
"My personal experiences with payphones over the years tend toward the middle-of-the-night, damn-I'm-in-a-fix variety. You know the kind I mean, right? Your car broke down and you've just hiked along the shoulder of some lonely two-lane highway, in the dark. You find a roadhouse with a payphone in the back, through the smoke and past the pooltables."
- Telephone Art Piece (2000) by William Wires
"Doodling is an acceptable activity while on the telephone, as opposed to during person to person communication. The messages scratched into the plexiglass reveal awakened wishes and frustrations when the telephone remains the only immediate source of communication. Are the inhibited communicative aspects of telephone use compensated through creative doodling?"
- UK Kiosks, Payphones, and Phone Boxes
A large collection of photos of British phone booths, kiosks, payphone and coin-boxes.
- Robert Lazzarini's "payphone," 2002
"payphone is the largest work to date in Robert Lazzarini's sculptures of compound distortions. Expanding to a height of 9 feet, the object engages the viewer on a figural scale. The increase in size projects an increased spatial tension."
- Some Santa Fe Phone Booths
An interesting photo set, maintained by Evan Werkema.
"Santa Fe has used several different types of phone booths over the years. Wooden phone booths virtually disappeared along the Santa Fe in the west in the 1980's. The photos show a few of the booths that existed in New Mexico near the end." - "Project Payphone," a California State Science Fair project by Ryan Nowicki
"Project Payphone is a social science experiment to determine if and why people answer ringing payphones in busy, public areas. The objective is to determine if and why people answer ringing public payphones. I believe that people will only answer if they are attempting to use the phone and find it ringing."
Read the results of Project Payphone (.pdf file) - PhoneyVents: There is no telephone art
Jim Pallas' PhoneyVents were "...grounded in the premise that the ringing of a telephone bell elicits a state of focused attention in most Americans. The called person is ready for a communication whose content may be anything. The person has no reasonable expectations: the situation is out of their control."
This site also includes an amusing page of transcripts from interesting answering machine messages. I wrote a story about answering machine messages many years ago.
- American Public Communications Council
The APCC is the nation's primary representative for public communications providers.
- History of Pay Phones and Phone Booths in Japan
- Phoneco Inc. (Buy refurbished payphones)
- Antique Telephone Booth Company
- Public telephony in Poland
- Sally Minker's Payphone Project and her Indoor Sculpture section explore payphones and the telephone in general.
- The Edison - Casket Phone Booth, from Casketfurniture.com
- Search Alltheweb.com for pictures of Payphones and Phone Booths
- Bakersfield, CA, Visual Payphone Directory
- Dirty Needles and Pay Phones
- Buy Payphones - Search the major web auction sites for payphones and payphone-related things.
- British Payphones - BT.com's history of public telephones in Britain.
- FCC Payphone documents from the Telecommunications Act of 1996
I don't know why I keep this online. I have nothing to do with the payphone industry. The American Public Communications Council summarizes some of what is contained in this FCC documentation, and how some of its legislation is now moot.
The Payphone Project is a division of Sorabji.com. Here are links to some other things I do.
