TELEPHONE is a game played by artists. It works like the children’s game of the same name. A message is whispered from person to person and changes and evolves as it is passed from player to player. In our case, we pass a secret message from art form to art form, so a message could become poetry and then painting and then music and then film, throughout all possible forms of art. We also assign each finished work of art to two or three other artists, so the game branches outward exponentially like a family tree.

To learn more about this exhibition and how to explore it, click on the TUTORIAL button from the Home page.

This is the third game of TELEPHONE. The first game, developed in partnership with Satellite Collective, was published in 2015 and consisted of 315 artists and can be found HERE. That first game was featured in The New York Times and you can read that article HERE. The second game of TELEPHONE was played during the pandemic and published in 2021. It consisted of work by 795 artists and can be found HERE.

TELEPHONE is not a company or a legal entity of any sort. This exhibition was not provided institutional or government support of any kind. None of the people who worked on this two-year project were compensated. None of the artists paid to play and none of them made any money by participating. This digital exhibition is provided to the public for free in perpetuity. TELEPHONE is a labor of love.

This game exhibition consists of 1,395 individual, interconnected and original works by artists from 930 cities in 65 countries. Having spent only $200 or $300 on this entire project, that’s almost impossible on paper. And yet, here is TELEPHONE in its entirety.

It is certain that you will only experience 2-3% of the art in this exhibition upon your first viewing. Don’t stress out about it! It’s just a game and games are for fun. But we encourage you to return and to dig deeper and to look and listen more closely. There is a vast number of possible pathways throughout this game.

Keep this close to heart. Presented to you here are 1,395 individual works of art. Yet it may well be that, because they are directly based on one another, these 1,395 artists have together created a single work of art. We leave it to your own judgement, but it is possible that TELEPHONE is one work of art, created by artists from 65 countries.

Enjoy and enjoy again! We hope this freely given gift is well received. Sending you such gratitude and love from all of us,

Nathan Langston | Director | TELEPHONE

For media inquiries, please contact telephone.outreach@gmail.com