Live, intimate phone chats: an art project for our times

We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.

Advertisement

This was published 3 years ago

Live, intimate phone chats: an art project for our times

By Cameron Woodhead

Even without the rigours of lockdown, these are isolating and stressful times. Human connection is at a premium, and artists are finding creative ways to provide it. With few options left for live art under Melbourne’s stage four restrictions, one project seems almost custom-made for this moment.

A participatory art experience devised by Ben Landau, Sarah Walker and Jalen Lyle-Holmes, Dark Talk Time connects pairs of strangers for hosted phone conversations. It is a chance to talk and to listen in-depth, with the lights out, from the comfort of your home.

Dark Talk Time on a phone "captures a nostalgia".

Dark Talk Time on a phone "captures a nostalgia".Credit: Sarah Walker

For Landau, the project had been incubating over two years.

“In 2018, I did a durational piece about humming – humming for 24 hours,” he says. “It had all of these people coming into a space and really connecting with each other without knowing who the other people were.

“I got obsessed by the idea of anonymity as a conduit of intimacy,” Landau continues. “[That] led to thinking about a conversation between two people who can’t see one another — a bit like those restaurants that serve you in complete darkness so you can’t see your food.”

Loading

A trial run was conducted at the Association of Visual Pedagogies Conference in 2019, with intimate conversations between blindfolded strangers. When the pandemic hit in March, it was easy to adapt the concept to a phone call format, and the artists received one of the City of Melbourne’s COVID-19 arts grants to make it happen.

Dark Talk Time works even better on the phone,” Sarah Walker says. “It captures a nostalgia for the kind of long, wide-ranging conversations common in our younger years.

"Now when I talk on the phone, it’s mostly for business or because I need to get something sorted quickly.”

Advertisement

The lost art of the deep and meaningful is one element in the mix, but the experience can also resemble the many incidental social interactions − random chats you might have while travelling abroad, on public transport or on the street − that add texture to daily life, especially in a city as friendly and communitarian as Melbourne.

Loading

Landau admits he misses those chance conversations, “especially intergenerational ones, or with people outside of my friendship group”.

So what can participants expect?

While hosts don’t typically intervene or eavesdrop on entire conversations, they do offer a framework, providing prompts to smooth out any initial awkwardness and gradually leading the interlocutors towards more reflective and abstract territory.

Designing the right script was key. Prompts had to start off more specific, to jump-start conversation, before opening out into bigger life questions. It was also important to encourage people not to “fall into a COVID hole”, as Walker puts it.

Loading

Trial conversations have lasted for an hour to 90 minutes, some even longer, and Landau says they’ve been “conducted in a spirit of generosity, inquisitiveness, patience and empathy”.

“Speaking to a stranger in a conversation with no future, no catch and no expectations, you can be totally honest,” Walker adds.

“People tend to reflect on big shifts in their lives, take the chance to celebrate and commiserate them, and connect over shared experiences, even when they come from very different backgrounds.”

Dark Talk Time starts August 13 in Melbourne, with two further seasons in Darebin and Whittlesea running until September. Book via www.darktalktime.com

Most Viewed in Culture

Loading