Andras Sly Szalai

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“Cross-connections” is a term that was commonly used when one call between two people from a landline phone was superimposed by another call making both the conversations heard by all four people involved. Often leading to the four speaking with each other. This is interesting because privacy, suddenly becomes a relative term. It has little to do with isolation but with the hope of not being discovered in a crowd.

The installation consists of two phone booths across the same street. The conversations that happen in the seemingly private space of one phone booth seeps out into the public and disseminates through many floating molecules in the street. The other phone booth allows for others to intervene and join the conversation happening in the first booth thus further distorting the dynamics within a private conversation.

Cross connect intends to explore:

1. The notion of privacy- the feeling of un-discoverability in a space. The more “connected” one is today, the more accessible is his/her identity. (related – surveillance, RFID tags, GPS, social networking sites…)

2. The presence of listeners, participants and ‘hackers’ in every communication model.

3. To also look at the nature of conversations that take place. What do people talk about?

Current state

We made the first prototype with a 70 cm helium balloon. We were successfully able to transmit both sides of a phone conversation by attaching a FM transmitter to an analogue phone. The balloon itself acts as a speaker with a small contact speaker from the FM receiver, attached to its
surface. We worked on creating an algorithm to effectively read the distance sensor to control the average height of the balloon then we will be able to put all the components together on the balloon.

links:

http://kitchenbudapest.hu/hu/node/572