Portable Tin Can Telephones made of Materials used in Road Construction
The second year of living in a global pandamic increasingly demonstrates the necessity to saturate ones interpersonal needs such as the desire for communicative exchange, random encounters and social closeness. Phone calls, Whatsapp dialogs and videoconferences obviously are not enough to meet those basic human needs - digital fatigue has set in.
The use of tin can telephones aims to recapture the public space in an analog manner and to successively fill it with people and their conversations again. Listening to and caring for each other is made possible without frustrating side effects such as latency and compression, but face to face in a safe distance.
The simple construction mainly consists of materiales from road construction. This allows the telephones to be set up flexibly and temporarily in public space without generating additional waste: A common beacon base plate with the dimensions of 400 X 800 mm enables both the necessary stability and the easy transportation from A to B. A conventional tin can, acting as a speaking tube, is attached to a circular hollow pipe using sleeve clamps. This ensures the uncomplicated height adjustability of the speaking funnel for big and small. The individual modules are connected to one another via a thin wire rope, so that they can be used at different distances.
Despite or maybe because of this absurd times, we have to show more compassion and pay attention to each other.
We carry the community and the community carries us.
(watch with sound!)
