LeRoy Stevens
Read his interview here
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Record of Incoming Calls to Personal Cell Phone
(Between 7am and 7pm, January 23 through February 22), 2007
31 unique chromogenic prints and phone bill
Installation 63 x 109 inches
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During the month long duration of the project, Stevens placed his
personal cell phone directly onto a sheet of unexposed color photo
paper daily between the hours of 7am and 7pm.
The phone was left on “vibrate” mode.
When calls were made to the cell phone, a light built into the phone
would illuminate and the phone would vibrate. While vibrating, the
light from the phone exposed the paper, forming trails of colored
marks. Each mark represents one telephone ring from a caller.
At 7pm each day, the photo paper was processed and dated. By 7am the
following morning the phone was placed on top of a new sheet of photo
paper.
The photographs are displayed in the form of a calendar grid based
upon the billing month. Each individual photograph is in order of the
date it was made. By referring to the phone bill attached nearby, the
viewer can directly correlate the caller on a specific day to the
corresponding photograph.
During the process of making the work, friends and family were unaware
of the project.
— Blank photographs indicate no calls were received that day
— The magenta and cyan colors in the photographs are based on built-in
features of the phone and in the negative color printing process. For
example, incoming calls produce a green light on the phone. Voice and
text messages produce a red light. The negative-color photography
process works in opposites- therefore the green light made by the
phone produced the color magenta in the photographs –and in the red,
cyan.
Watch the images here