I was looking at some telephony related art projects, online, such as:

Tanalum Memorial - Graham Harwood

Mystic Truth (Calling Bruce) - Barbara Visser - 2007

Broodthaers' phone number taken over by Jan Mot gallery - Mario Garcia Torres

Emily Jacir - Inbox (2004-2005) (has to do with e-mails, not phone, but was still relevant)

one of Moholy Nagy's 1921 Telephone Paintings, dictated by phone using graphing paper, and executed in a factory

And a film called dust by Bard alum Eric Saks, which there are no images of online.  And I was looking for this project I might have seen in Mute Magazine, can’t remember, where all the world’s telephone books were put into a room in London, creating a monumental, but explicitly incomplete and futile taxonomical record of everyone in the world’s phone numbers.  I couldn’t locate the piece, but I did come across this nice quote on dense critical language from the very Derrida inspired Avital Ronell:

From

The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, by Avital Ronell

Q: Are you concerned that your style might make you difficult to understand?

A: … understanding as such — thinking one has understood — is a disaster. It places closural moves on a problem. Right now I’m not on the side of understanding in that simple sense of “Yes, I understand,” and that’s it. To make things “perfectly clear” is reactionary, stupifying. The real is not perfectly clear.

- Avital Ronell being interviewed in Mondo 2000, #4

Why didn’t I go to NYU again?