It is a 1937 red telephone box known as kiosk no. 6 (K6) designed by Giles Gilbert Scott (Coltman, 2018) located in a quite North Yorkshire hamlet near the river Fleet. It was purchased from Ebay and restored by me. The telephone, model number 232 (Britishtelephones.com, 2018) looks and behaves like a normal telephone of the 1930’s, it can ring, it has a dial, it has a dialing tone etc.

The telephone box, let’s call it ‘Chris’, is part vocal cenotaph, part gramophone, part ventriloquist and part sound installation. Just occasionally it is a telephone and sometimes it pretends to be an oracle. It merges four ideas. The test devised by Alan Turing to validate whether a machine can successfully impersonate a human, known as the Turing Test (Turing, 1950). A method used in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research in

The technical solutions came about as solutions to problems that occurred in the build rather than as part of a plan. As no one, to my knowledge, has attempted anything similar some bodges and crude cutting and pasting of code has occurred. In my defence connecting a telephone from the 1930’s with an exchange from the 1950’s to digital devices from today is likely to require some original and, far

Interaction with the artwork has proved annoyingly problematic. I did not expect users to find a telephone dial difficult to use. I should have predicted this given the technology is now 30 years out of date. Many younger people have never ‘dialed’ in their lives.  I should have taken account of the fact that when it was invented the British Post Office precursor of General PO produced short information films

Users that I need to figure out how apply the theatrical adage of keeping ‘bums on seats.’ A surreal, alienating piece of audio experimentation stuck in a country lane in North Yorkshire does not keep people entertained long enough to justify the notion of a public theatre and while I have no unalterable desire to serve a public, I also don’t have a desire to bore them rigid, show them