Crossed Lines online exhibition
 

Press release:

www.crossedlines.co.uk

‘Hallo, hallo, hallo… I’m afraid not, we have a crossed line, please hang up… Hallo… You have a wrong number… Oh! Hallo…’ – Jean Cocteau, The Human Voice (1930)

A crowd-sourced online exhibition of literary telephones has launched celebrating the history of the phone call in literature from the late 19th Century to the present day.

Selected from nominations received from around the world, the exhibition features more than eighty works spanning over 130 years, exploring the long history of creative calling in texts by authors from Virginia Woolf to J K Rowling.

To view the exhibition, please visit www.crossedlines.co.uk/online-exhibition.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Council in partnership with the Science Museum Group and BT Archives, Crossed Lines is a research project led by Dr Sarah Jackson at Nottingham Trent University.

www.crossedlines.co.uk

Re: Crossed Lines online exhibition
 

There was one guy on an amateur radio forum in the early nineties with the wonderful .sig signoff:

"The number you have reached is imaginary. Please hang-up, rotate your telephome through ninety degrees, and dial again. Thank you."

David

Re: Crossed Lines online exhibition
 

"i" don't think that's funny. :angry: ;)

Re: Crossed Lines online exhibition
 

I thought that was what a you often have to do with a 'smartphone' - the 90 degree bit! ;)

Re: Crossed Lines online exhibition
 

www.crossedlines.co.uk

Stop blinding me with art!

Re: Crossed Lines online exhibition
 

Ah, but the rotation quoted by David had to be at 90° to reality! ;D

Re: Crossed Lines online exhibition
 

As there was nothing much worth watching on the TV I scrolled through some of the entries and found this interesting extract from Arthur C Clarke's book "Imperial Earth".

" The ’Sec was the standard size of all such units, determined by what could fit comfortably in the normal human hand. At a quick glance, it did not differ greatly from one of the small electronic calculators that had started coming into general use in the late twentieth century; it was, however, infinitely more versatile […] There were fifty neat little studs; each, however, had a virtually unlimited number of functions, according to the mode of operation […] on ALPHA-NUMERIC, 26 of the studs bore the letters of the alphabet, while ten showed the digits zero to nine […] Another mode was DICTIONARY; the ’Sec stored over a hundred thousand words, whose three-line definitions could be displayed on the bright little screen … but for dealing with vast amounts of information it was desirable to link the ’Sec to the much larger screen of a standard comsole. This could be done through the unit’s optical interface […] As long as this lens was in visual range of the corresponding sensor on a comsole, the two units could happily exchange information at the rate of megabits per second.

Often regarded as one of the earliest literary predictions of today’s most ubiquitous accessory, Arthur C. Clarke’s 1975 novel Imperial Earth describes a device that resembles a smartphone. Password- protected and with a screen interface, the Minisec functions as a personal organizer, memo recorder, and data storage tool that becomes indispensable to those who use it to manage personal information and interpersonal communication. Set in the late twenty-third century, Imperial Earth imagines a future in which the modes and spaces of human interaction have shifted dramatically. The novel reflects on the history of the telephone, from the local exchanges that were possible in its early years to the ‘universal globe communication’ that arrived at the end of the twentieth century. For the novel, this history needs to be understood as an unfolding ‘abolition of space’ that brought the planet together as a communicative community. However, Imperial Earth thinks projectively about the departure from planetary place (specifically, the colonising of Saturn’s moon Titan), and for the expansion of humanity’s reach new networking devices—the Minisec and the Comsole—will be needed. If the Minisec does indeed anticipate the smartphone, then in Clarke’s novel it should be understood not only as an evolution of the telephone, and of the global universality that the Imperial Earth attaches to it. Instead, it is a tool for capturing new territories.

by Philip Leonard "

Re: Crossed Lines online exhibition
 

Featured in The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/artandde...-in-literature

BT Archives will acquire physical copies (and possibly also
e-books) of a small subset of the books that are included in the
exhibition as part of their ‘Historical Information Collection’, which
comprises secondary literature relevant to the original records held in
their collection. This will be linked to a new subfonds in their
catalogue, which is available to the public. This would clearly
explain that the origins of the collection lie with the Crossed Lines
project, with a link to our website. For individual volumes acquired,
the catalogue entry will fully credit the person who suggested its
inclusion in the exhibition.

Also, BT Archives will create a digital record within BT Archives of
the text of all the entries in the exhibition, together with the
description, crediting every person who nominated the text.