Thinking about ideas of performance during a workshop, I began to think of ways that would take the simplistic things we do in life that could show some form of intimacy. I had thought of the idea of having a phone call and how communication could become engaging and intimate. I left a piece of paper on the floor and on that piece of paper said:
I seem to have lost my way, can you ring me please and guide back to the LPAC Studio 2? (with a phone number underneath).
I calmly waited outside, waiting for someone to ring my mobile phone, and suddenly it did. I answered to find Gina Radford, a peer, asking me where I was, I began to describe my surroundings as if I hardly knew where I was. Once Gina started directing me back to the LPAC, it felt to me, like she was becoming more and more involved with the devised piece. The longer we were on the phone, the more calm and responsive Gina became.
“Mobile communication has putatively affected our time-space relationship and the co-ordination of social action by weaving co-present interactions and mediated distant exchanges into a single, seamless web.” (Arminem, 2009)
This suggests how integrated a telephone call is in our modern lifestyles. You can phone up a love one to tell them how much you love them, or even to phone your mum to find out what she is cooking for tea. Just listening to one’s voice on a phone can make you feel intimate with that person.
This relates in a way to how we perceive to sound, and it could be argued that hearing voices of friends or family through a phone can result in a differing response dependent on what the content is.
Films such as Scream (1996) use telephone calls as a device to intimidate the person on the other end. Rather than to create an intimate moment with.
Whereas, the phone call in this clip in the film Stepmom (1998) expresses the intimacy of a phone call. The scene below shows a phone call between a mother and son, the mother is ringing her son, as she does every night when she is not with him, however this time the mother is in hospital having treatment for cancer and her life is in jeopardy, a fact her young son is not aware of.
This highlights the intimacy a phone call can have on a person, especially when this is someone we love. Just by hearing a certain voice on the phone we can immediately feel connected to that person, even though we can not see them physically.
Where I think that telephones can be used to create intimacy with another person as shown in the second clip, it is also evident from the first clip that a telephone has multiple uses in creating an effect on the listener.
Written by Jordan Tallis, Edited by Demi Morrison and Leanne McKettrick
Work Cited
Arminen, Ikka (2009) Mobile Presence and Intimacy. Online: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378216608002269 (Accessed on 10th November 12.)