If Your Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’s Me

If Your Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’s Me is an installation, research initiative, and performance by Research Service, developed for the exhibition Itself Not So, curated by Rachel Valinsky at Lisa Cooley Gallery. The project investigates aphasia as a social phenomenon triangulated by politics, aesthetics, and technology. We understand aphasia not simply as a neurological condition, but also as something that occurs through the effects of power and processes of socialization and automization. We propose that aesthetic activities, social engagement, and new technologies might assist aphasic subjects to recover lost voices or invent new ones.

Research Service will be conducting daily interviews throughout the duration of this exhibit. They are short oral questionnaires (lasting approximately 10 minutes each) about these topics, executed by robotic avatars. To participate, visitors fill out one of the cards provided with their name, phone number, and an approximate time they would like to be called. New interviews are broadcast daily in the gallery at 4pm, and compiled in a database on our website: http://researchservice.info.

On August 28th at 7PM, Research Service will present a lecture-performance to report the findings of If Your Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’s Me.