Written by Joas Nebe
Telephone, the old children’s game which perhaps exists all over the world. One child whispers a sentence to another child. The second child whispers what they think they understood into the ear of the third child. And so it continues until the last child loudly states what they think the first child whispered to the second. Then comes huge laughter, because in 99% of cases the last child in the telephone chain has understood something completely different from what the first child said to the second.
That is Telephone, and is exactly how the art game, developed by poet and musician Nathan Langston from the old children’s game, works. Only such, of course, not children (or adults), but artists interpret a sentence chosen by Langston (and his team) in their respective medium. The participants come from all artistic disciplines—painting, film, literature, poetry, music, etc.
Langston now lines up as many artists as possible from different disciplines and different countries, continents, etc., and has each artist, step by step, interpret the work communicating an interpretation of the starting sentence in the form of the previous artist’s artwork.
The central theme of this hyper-work of art conveys the interpretation of the interpretation of the interpretation. Linguistics applied to the field of art. The sender–receiver model tested across the various arts.
The starting sentence of the second Telephone game, in which I participated as a photographer for the first time, is as follows:
“Alexander’s men were certainly the first Europeans known to have seen a banyan tree. They were amazed. The vivid descriptions they wrote would inform Theophrastus, the father of modern botany, back home in Greece. More than a thousand years earlier, the people of the Indus Valley Civilization adopted a stylized banyan as a symbol in their script.”
The text originates from an article published in Newsweek in 2016 and titled “The Majesty and Mystery of India’s Sacred Banyan Tree” by Dr. Mike Shanahan.
Ebba Jahn, a Berlin filmmaker, made from it a film about 2 minutes long, drawing on the following text, a quote from David Huddle’s “Banyan”:
“At my age what difference does it make to anyone but myself what image I have needled into my skin? What girl do I want to kiss before I check out of this life?”
https://phonebook.gallery/artists/ebba-jahn
With Cate Wnek (Harpswell, USA) the Banyan Tree has completely disappeared. She has only understood the sacred momentum that she translates into flying birds over a reflecting water surface.
https://phonebook.gallery/artists/cate-wnek
But Telephone, unlike the old children’s game, has no straightforward structure. Telephone branches out like the limbs of a tree. Each artwork is interpreted by at least three more artists in their respective disciplines. Each of these artworks is again interpreted by three artists from different disciplines.
A colossal, brilliant project that pushes the boundaries of what is possible to say and show, and that demonstrates how a message evolves in communication—especially between people of different languages (the artists of the various disciplines, of course)—toward misunderstanding.
Telephone has something of the Tower of Babel and its language confounding, which God sends as punishment to the people who formerly spoke one and the same language and thus could conceive the idea of the Tower. Telephone tells the story of Babel in its own way by showing how language confusion arises, just as the children’s game Telephone did. Only that the comic component, which robs the miscommunication of the closed communication between two people without the participation of third parties and thus the possibility to align interpretations, here frighteningly demonstrates what is developing before everyone’s eyes today: the absolute language confusion through the interpretation of the interpretation of the interpretation.
The third version of the artistic mammoth project Telephone goes online on October 10, 2025. You are invited to explore the art project Telephone yourself at