Project Idea: Cell Phone Abuse

(Originally sent to the class mailing list)

I know it’s a little late to be adding more ideas, but I just had another one walking back from class. Kinda jumped out at me, in fact, for reasons that’ll be obvious once you read it.

Cell phones have ushered in all kinds of new inconsiderate behavior–erratic driving; loud, personal conversations in quiet public spaces; etc. But my personal favorite most hated behavior is when you pass someone on the sidewalk and they say, “HEY! HOW ARE YOU!,” and you look at them like who the heck are you, and then you see they have a freakin’ borg implant on the side of their head and they were talking on the darn phone.

Project idea: Make a display with a few heads that illustrate the worst cell phone abuses. They wait until people get close and then carry on conversations, they shout things but they’re really to someone on the other end of the phone, etc. I dunno, several heads clustered together apparently talking to each other but then the conversations diverge and you realize they were sitting together but talking to other people. You could have three in one part of the gallery and two in another and once in a while they’re talking to each other (which would take a fairly clever viewer to figure out).

If you made enough rude behaviors, it could take a long time (15-30 minutes) to cycle through them all. Most viewers probably wouldn’t stay for the whole thing, so everyone who saw it would witness a slightly different portion and get different things to talk about with their friends.

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