_{^{Play It By Ear by Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett, 2023
Telephone components, metal, electronics, acrylic, vinyl, sidewalk paint}}

Play It By Ear is an interactive sound sculpture inviting a neighbourhood to talk to itself. 13 brightly coloured telephone pillars are placed throughout Butler Memorial Park in Edmonton/Treaty 6. Each pair of colour-coded telephones is connected by looping ‘landlines’ curling underfoot.

^{This blog features photographs by Caitlind Brown, as well as drone images and photos by Karl Domning}

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Park visitors can pick up any telephone and a matching phone will ring elsewhere in the park – like a hard-wired walkie-talkie system. If nobody picks up, you’ll be connected to a voicemail where you can leave a message for your neighbours – and listen to the messages they’ve left for you!

_{Above: photo by Caitlind Brown. Below: photos by Karl Domning}

You can read more about the ideas, fabrication, and installation of Play It By Ear in our previous post. You can find an entire blog dedicated to this project here.

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Conceived during the COVID pandemic, the installation proposes a whimsical way to shorten the distance between people, creating shared experiences, conversation, and empathy. Designed with with play for all ages in mind, the installation connects people of all generations and backgrounds for a fun and novel encounter in the public park.

_{Photos by Caitlind Brown, Karl Domning, and Rachael Brown}

As a way of grounding the phones in the community, the public was invited to submit photos of “a place that feels like home,” and these images were used to create the layered dioramas for the circular telephone windows ornamenting the face of each phone.

At night, the windows glow like portals into another world.

The final phone is black. This phone is an “Easter Egg” – a discoverable surprise. Instead of calling a phone of a matching colour, the black phone calls all the phones in the park at once.

The image in the circular telephone window is an aerial view of the park, rendered in layers of vinyl and dichroic.

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Play It By Ear invites you to participate! Visit Butler Memorial Park to try the installation, meet a stranger, or leave us a voicemail after the tone.

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This project was commissioned by Edmonton Arts Council & The City of Edmonton.

For a full list of credits, see here.

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