The Call of Nature
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Ned Shannon
Year: 2019
Pages: 3
Dimensions: 28 x 21 cm.
Binding: loose leaves
Edition Size: 100
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The Call of Nature is a service providing New Yorkers with the unique opportunity to escape the stress and anxiety of their everyday lives by simply answering (calling) the call of nature. The service will have a range of hotline numbers that each respond to a mobile phone placed in the natural environment surrounding New York and set to auto-answer. The hotline is available 24/7 and allows anyone to check in and out as they please. Rather than a traditional reciprocal conversation between two parties attempting to obtain various information from each other, this phone call exists purely as a listening experience - you listening in on the plants and animals and vice versa. Not only do people seldom get a chance to simply sit and listen to the natural environment in a city like New York, but rarely if ever do they hold nature up to their ears as if it were human and simply listen in silence without needing to respond. Interestingly, many people refer to what they hear or don’t hear in the natural environment as silence. This however, is not a new phenomenon and for people like Luigi Rossolo, silence was simply what people experienced before the industrial revolution. This malleability of silence as a concept has seen it become an increasingly hot commodity. It seems that we crave silence for its curing properties and its ability to allow us to think clearly and relieve any built up stress. To talk about silence, we must also consider the noise that has caused the need for it. The ubiquitous nature of the mobile phone means it not only creates an ample amount of noise for yourself but also everyone around you through its audible and inaudible noise. Audible noise being what we can hear such as the phone beeping, music playing and conversations overheard, and inaudible noise such as stress, anxiety and insecurities. It comes as no surprise as these largely unmindful devices often house the typically separate entities, work and play. A natural step to clear our minds is to remove ourselves from this distraction, but as explained earlier, this can be rather ineffective as most of us would struggle to function without them. It is with this awareness of the permanence of the mobile phone in our daily lives that are more sustainable approach to the technology can manifest.
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