If You Know Your Party’s Extension

Image from Space Ghost by Laurie Jo Reynolds, copyright of the artist, courtesy of Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Saturday, February 19th, 7pm
in person at Nightingale Cinema

Programmed by Drew Durepos and Caitlin Ryan

Proof of vaccination will be required to attend all Nightingale Cinema events, and masks will be worn at all times. No BYOB at this event. Please register on Eventbrite via the RSVP link above for contract tracing purposes.

Thanks for taking our call. There’s no easy way to put this: phones aren’t what they used to be. Before they presented themselves as the primary tool for shaping daily life, phones got really famous for doing one thing well: transmitting human voices and emotional baggage. Telephones served as a site for intense feeling and expression, a place where life events, both major and mundane, announced themselves with the same ring, sometimes fixing the color of a receiver or translucence of a rotary dial in one’s memory. All this, before we stuffed them full of algorithms and lithium. When this simpler technology faltered, a different sense of mystery would fold around the receiver. What changed on the way from “Who’s there?” to “Can you hear me know?” Anyway, nevermind, we know the phone is doing just fine: we bet the phone is probably very busy this time of year. Really, we just called to say we love you, and we hope you’re doing well. Please come visit soon. Okay bye.

If You Know Your Party’s Extension, a program of eight film and video works, considers the ubiquity of modern telephony and its ancestral anxieties, through a variety of representations of telephonic performance and the apparatus itself. In each work, we encounter the phone—then and now, incidental or full frontal—as a site of individuation and intrigue.