TELEPHONE

Description

TELEPHONE is an online exhibition presented in the form of a digital game played by artists. It consists of 1,395 individual, interconnected and original works by artists from 930 cities in 65 countries. 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 this case, a secret message is passed 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. Each finished work of art is passed to two or three other artists, so the game branches outward exponentially like a family tree.

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. The second game of TELEPHONE was played during the pandemic and published in 2021. It consisted of work by 795 artists.

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.

Presented in the online 'exhibition' 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.

Period	10 Oct 2025 → …
Degree of Recognition	International