The Arts Meet Technology

Sound Art From a Low-Tech Source




UMBC music department chair Linda Dusman has listened to hundreds and hundreds of answering machine messages--the "sonic residues" we leave, as she calls them--and from them, she has fashioned a performance of anonymous individuals who become characters that meet and interact with one another. It is found art--none of the messages was recorded for performance--and for Dusman, the piece represents a blurring line between public and private space.

The genesis of this work, she says, came from the experience of a friend, who found a violent, disturbing message left on his answering machine--clearly a wrong number. Hearing that message left him with a sense of having his personal space violated, as if a burglar had broken into his home. Dusman's work "Sorry, Your Call Did Not Go Through" includes the message, along with another from a friend who was dying, as examples from two extremes of intimate conversation.

For most of us, the answering machine is "disposable technology," as commonplace a tool as a can opener. But for Dusman, who incorporates the spoken word in many of her pieces, the phone messages speak volumes about people's needs to connect--to say "I'm thinking about you," to put a piece of themselves in the other's space. "As a composer, sound means more to me than pictures," says Dusman. "I have saved answering machine messages of my grandmother, now that she is gone."

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