"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."
*— Leonard Cohen*
Our project, "Just The Ash", gives life to some of the greatest poets of various American traditions and hopes to connect listeners to the powerful experiences they share with us.
Through the phone, listeners can connect with the work of these masters by choosing a feeling they want to connect with. Feeling rebellious? Listen to the work of Sylvia Plath. Feeling a grand ego? Connect with Nikki Giovanni's.
We're extremely lucky that recordings of the poets reciting the work themselves exist.
***This audio is a sample of what a listener would hear after lifting the receiver.***
*The poem heard is Maya Angelou reading "Still I Rise".*
Audio sample of "Just the Ash"
Audio sample of "Just the Ash"
Video 1
Image 2 — After our first play test confirmed it worked.
In considering its obsolescence, we realized that the telephone is like poetry — a precursor, nearly forgotten today. From that exploration birthed our project, "Just The Ash", a speculative manifestation of what place both a nearly obsolete medium and nearly obsolete transmitter could play in our current context.
From the first string telephone in the 17th century, phones have connected us, shrinking physical and emotional distances to help us maintain and build relationships. With Facebook, Whatsapp and Zoom etc and ad nauseam, the small handheld computers we now call phones have made the simple telephone all but useless. With our iPhones we have access to our entire social lives. We’re always, continuously connected. And yet, communities have never felt so disparate and individuals so isolated. To feel fill that gap we use our phones to connect to culture, too.
And poetry? Can you name me your top 5 poems like you can your most listened to songs on Spotify? It is no secret that the instant gratification most people enjoy from their personalized media today is in part to blame for making poetry, and any reading for that matter, so unpopular and seemingly inaccessible.
We were inspired by a number of exiting media including the Wind Phone in Otsuchi Japan, Omar Bakshi's Portal Containers, the Dr. Manhattan phone-booth in HBO's Watchmen and the politics phone booth at the Standard Hotel.
Our selection of poems is as follows —
If one was to move through the whole menu from start to finish, it would take a minimum 2 and a half minutes. An anxious user could hang up immediately, too. One of the technical highlight of our project is the ability to interrupt and skip through poems while they are playing. This gives the anxious listener a semblance of control — or the ability to find a shorter poem — or a chance to hit the right button again should they accidentally dial incorrectly, without having to hang up and move through the intro menu again.
***Iteration 1***
The housing of this project, the physical phone itself, was purchased on eBay. Our decision to not spend time fabricating allowed us to focus on form and function — software’s understanding and discoverability. It also gave us quite strong bounds to work within. We had committed to a phone, and specifically to this phone. Using a real phone meant our users would more likely intuit the interaction, physical understanding and discoverability were covered: lifting the receiver and dialing a number when hearing a dial tone. If they had never done it themselves, they would have seen it in a movie, we were confident. This allowed us to keep a clean build. No flashing lights, no explaining or enticing. The phone itself is already attractive and interesting as it is so far outside any modern context — except a jail, of course, where it lived its first life.