“This was a moment when it seemed like the thread would spin off and become totally abstract,” Langston explained. For example, Johannesburg-based artist Sharleene Olivier’s ethereal, murky embroidery inspired a sound piece that circled back to the project’s original message. The quality of the art varies, but it’s fascinating how some of the original message endures even when transmitted through performance, installation, painting, prose, and any other of the diverse media. Imagery like the paper ship resurfaces in surprising ways, such as a video by Amsterdam-based Akmar Nijhof in which blue paint is smeared away from its folds, or a boat of photographs in a sculpture by Janet Van Fleet in Cabot, Vermont.

Viewers can browse by medium or location in addition to clicking through the different paths. Photograph by Thomas Patterson of Portland, Oregon “It’s enjoyable and surprising to see how the art forms talk to each other,” Langston added. Those photographs were transformed into a painting by Jakarta-based artist Charles Shuster, and then New York-based Todd Bryant turned the pipeline into a surround sound digital space in which nature sprawls around the industrial ruins. It inspired New York poet Bob Holman to write “ Naked Night,” which asks the reader to sing of “he poem that floats / Its message across / The land that recedes / To the stars themselves / The recipients.” In the hands of Salt Lake City-based musician David Williams, those words translated into a 10-minute composition in which an electric guitar picks a repeating theme against the tonal vastness of a single sustained chord. From that recording made in the Utah desert, Portland photographer Tom Patterson documented the trail of a pipeline from an abandoned pumping station all the way to a towering waterfall. The first painting, by New York-based artist Jana Weaver, shows a naked woman launching a folded paper boat into the sea beneath a canopy of stars. “There’s the water of the original message throughout almost all of the threads.” “Of all the parts of the message, the most sustaining element was water,” Nathan Langston, who directed and conceived of Telephone, told Hyperallergic.

Map of the ‘Telephone’ artists (screenshot by the author for Hyperallergic)

Online telephone game