Telephones

Telephones - Telephones, the latest artist book in the LiberArs series, was created in collaboration with Swiss artist Christian Marclay. \n \nThis book is an adaptation of Christian Marclay's film Telephones (1995), a precursor to his later video collages, such as Video Quartet (2002), Crossfire (2007), The Clock (2010), 48 War Movies (2019), Subtitled (2019), and Doors (2022). Scenes were sampled from VHS-format video store rentals and edited into a seven-minute montage. The video's structure is simple: the cut scenes follow the course of a telephone conversation from beginning to end. It revealed a clash of technologies, behaviors, sound effects, and cultural references associated with audio and visual communication, expressed through different dramatic genres that characterize our collective memory of cinema. \n \nNearly thirty years later, its relevance has grown, in large part because it appeared at the very moment that mobile phones were entering popular culture and digital technology was taking over from analog film. This publication shows how a moving work can be transposed into a book. The collage quality of the book allows readers to mix and match the images, much as the original film did. Telephones is part of the ongoing LiberArs series and brings together images from the visual track, a transcription of the soundtrack, and a conversation between Christian Marclay and Yuval Etgar during the 2020 lockdown—fittingly, by telephone.