If telecommunications is the defining project of the 20th century, then you can make a case for the phone booth as its paradigmatic architectural form.  Equal parts confessional and pulpit, foxhole and podium, these glass pockets of privacy in the midst of public life came to embody the contradictions of a world newly made over by radio waves and telephone wires.  As telecommunications crept beyond the public square and into the home via landlines and tv sets, the phone booth began to fall into obsolescence.  By the new millennium the project to redistrict human life had turned inward, spurning the old world in favor of a new one constructed inside the telephone itself, and the phone booth had become, like the catapult and the cowboy hat, an object of fiction.  Clark Kent steps into a phone booth as a mild-mannered reporter and steps out as Superman.  In Harry Potter, a phone booth serves as a portal from the human world to the ministry of magic.  In 1989 Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter use a phone booth to slip through time in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and 10 years later Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss use a phone booth to slip in and out of the matrix.  

Today, when an empty phone booth rings on a deserted street it is as if a white rabbit appears, announcing a hole in the ordinary we can crawl through to make our escape. 

Which brings us to the hole at hand: TELBOW.  How did it arrive, and where does it lead?  Is it a friendly place?  Who are these characters on the other end of the phone, and what is the purpose of their bits?  Why is this Brian guy so crude?  Who is Shannon and is she qualified to give me advice?  Is this conceptual?  Is anyone in charge?  Was that a Tommy Tutone cover?

From September through December 2025, Elbow Room met weekly as the artists in residence at the Lewis & Clark College Hoffman Gallery. We used this time, and the gallery space to generate ideas about a mysterious, ephemeral, idiosyncratic phone system which could host audio based media of all kinds. We then built, decorated, and presented an accessible art phone booth, through which visitors could pick up the phone and experience the resulting lo-fi experimental audio project, Dialtones. To listen to the Dialtones archive today, you can still call (724)-TEL-BOWS or purchase the Dialtones tape.