April Archive Highlight - “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Desk”

******************** NOTE: TELELIBRARY SPOILERS AHEAD! **********************

This month marks 4 years of operating the Telelibrary - in celebration, and as I pour through photos of myself in general preparation for revamping my project “From This Day Fourth” and in specific bio picture preparation for an exciting announcement (more details on both next month), I thought it would be fun to take a quick look at a very small detail of the Telelibrary that has grown gradually over the years.

Since 2020, at the end of a User’s call, I’ve sent a photo of the physical set-up of the piece as a quick “goodbye” message. Here’s what that looked like at first:

 
March, 2020

At the time, in early beta-tests with friends, this mostly felt like a fun nod to the scrappiness of the piece, and the silliness of the set up. After the first few weeks of operating, as it became increasingly clear that my initial estimates for running this piece “for like a week until we reopen” were off base, I decided to upgrade the set-up—mostly in order to spare my bed from pulling day shifts, but also because the callers were rapidly made up of an unexpected demographic; strangers.

April, 2020

So now I was no longer sending photos of my bed to people I’d never met personally, which felt like a plus. But this “easter egg” came to serve a double-function, as it provided an answer to a question that
Began to pop up in more and more calls: “wait, are you real? Or are you a machine?”

In 1780 calls and counting, I’ve never “broken character,” and on this now frequently-asked-question, I feel I’ve gotten pretty good at using clarifying questions to have the User assume or provide their own answer, and thus keep the reality of the System playful (I think about the way Bill Watterson kept the question of Hobbes’ “reality” in Calvin & Hobbes” a playful, whimsical Shrodinger’s box). Still, I find it’s important to eventually disclose fully that The Telelibrary is in fact just an auditory puppet. In my mind the gesture felt like a nice nod to those who have done their best not to be distracted by wondering “how is this working?” (a thought I as a creator am plagued by in other shows). Over time, however, as I met more Users in person and witnessed their surprise to learn the show isn’t automated at all, I felt both a moral obligation to not mislead callers and a financial imperative to make sure people understood live human labor was involved.

November, 2020

As the piece grew, I wondered if I couldn’t answer more questions definitively - putting the typewriter from the logbook, the musical instruments for lyrical holds and the mp3 player for User voices on more prominent display. I also started accumulating “fan art” lovely letters, postcards, and even eventually paintings and plaques created and sent by Users, and inspired by an old favorite relic of the early internet, Brett Erlich’s “Viral Video Film School”,  I decided to start putting them on the wall.

March 2021

May 2021

Keeping the photo relatively current felt like a nice touch, so I did my best to update when new art arrived, or when we reached annual milestones.  When I eventually left the apartment where I’d started the Telelibrary, this little tradition of “post-credit” photos felt like a nice place to have a small tribute.

December 2022

January 2022; the new home

In the top right corner of the desk, you may also notice a tribute to the original set up from a User - “User Miniature #1,” by User #711, who created a tiny functional diorama using the post-show photo they received as reference.

Like many of the small rituals and tiny details of The Telelibrary, the “Real Estate” of this post-show detail has proven to be good opportunity to leave little “unlockables” for returning Users, and to reflect some aspect or discussion from their call by leaving custom captions for archival photos (“childhood,” “the past,” “beginnings,” and more are pretty evergreen topics), and over time, it’s become a visible testament to the steady growth of the piece—bit by bit, and book by book, the Library Collection expands.

March 2023