On its surface, TELEPHONE is simple. Based on the children’s game, a message is “whispered” from art form to art form. Each artist receives a work and translates the message into their own art form. The original message could become poetry, and then music, then film, and so on, evolving as it passes from form to form. Artists are only aware of the work of art that directly preceded their own. When an artist returns their interpretive work, we then “whisper” it to two or three other artists. Instead of progressing in a straight line, this game of TELEPHONE branches out exponentially like a family tree. Halfway through the game, the method is reversed and several works are assigned to a single artist to synthesize. The game begins with a single message, is passed through approximately 1000 artists, and concludes with a single work of art. The entire collection of original, interconnected works will simultaneously published for free as an interactive, digital exhibition in Spring 2021.

Launched in late March 2020, TELEPHONE currently features over 900 artists from 457 cities in 67 countries. So far, the message has been passed, from artist to artist, 6,836,055 kilometers (4,248,635 miles), back and forth across the face of the Earth. The ten-member internal team are all volunteers the 900+ artists participate without compensation. TELEPHONE does not intend to generate profit or revenue of any sort. Launched at the first peak of the pandemic, TELEPHONE was a way to intimately connect isolated artists from cities and nations all over the globe. Aside from examining the neurological processes of ekphrasis and synthesis, one of main goals of TELEPHONE is to make these hundreds and hundreds of strangers real to one another, to use the Internet to foster an international community. This project is “... a radical expression of connectivity that stands defiantly in the face of social isolation,” said Martin Rosengaard, co-founder of Human Hotel, Copenhagen. The project has engaged a vast range of artists.

From Guggenheim Fellows, Pulitzer Prize, and Academy Award winners to emerging artists; from elderly contributors to the very young; from professors to students, from bedroom studios in Mexico and Iran to workshops in Rio de Janeiro and London and Hong Kong— TELEPHONE has become a supportive and illuminating consortium that has garnered praise and thanksgiving from participants. It’s an inspiring and encouraging arts and culture story, written over the course of a turbulent time. This is the second large-scale game of TELEPHONE. The first was played in 2015 and was featured in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, La Nacion, and numerous other publications around the world. The exhibition of that game featured 315 artists from 159 cities in 42 countries and this second game is expected to be three to four times larger. TELEPHONE, in its final form as a free online exhibition, will not only be a collection of 900+ individual works of art, but a single work of art created by hundreds of artists from all across the Earth.