A barbed wire fence. (Photo by James Frid)
Inside a prominent classroom in the University of Colorado Boulder’s CASE West sat a large barbed-wire fence that spanned the length of the room and bisected the space diagonally. Inside the window-lined area, the installation attracted attention – and confusion.
What most visitors missed upon their initial inspections of the fence were the two simple, corded wall telephones that hung from posts at opposite corners of the room. Each was connected to the barbed wire to create a functional, interactive party line prototype.
This head-turning showcase, an art exhibit created by artists Phil Peters and David Rueter, entitled, ‘Barbed Wire Fence Telephone II,’ ran from Aug. 30 to Sept. 30. It was the second iteration of the pair’s first such exhibit, which was showcased in a Chicago gallery in 2015. This year’s exhibit was installed at the request of Lori Emerson, the founding director of CU Boulder’s Media Archaeology Lab.
“Most people don’t know that that was a really important telecommunications network for farmers in the early 20th century,” said Emerson. “So, I thought it would be educational, and an extension of the kind of work that we do in the Media Archaeology Lab, which is a lot of public outreach work.”
Housing one of the largest collections in the world of still-functioning obsolete media, the lab is regularly visited by researchers, teachers and students looking to learn about, use and create content using outdated technologies. An exhibit featuring a working barbed-wire party line, which was invented by farmers and homesteaders whose lands were deemed too sparse to build expensive telephone lines across, was a perfect example of a bygone technology that the MAL was proud to exhibit.
The beauty of the piece’s brief stint in CASE lies not only in its basic purpose – to educate visitors about an example of rural communication technology – but also in the fact that it was used as a platform to highlight the MAL and showcase multiple different academics’ research on similar topics in the process. The curiosity that the context-less piece created in its visitors was a perfect hook with which to direct their attention towards these worthy academics, organizations and research topics.
“[The idea to host the exhibit] probably comes from my background in practice-based research,” said Emerson. “I have been directing a Ph.D. program here for a while that’s a practice-based research program, and that’s basically just where scholarly work and creative work are one and the same. So to me, they don’t work separately. They’re always together.”
Emerson said that the idea for bringing the installation to campus struck her while talking about the exhibit’s original Chicago showcase with the MAL’s manager, Libi Striegl.
“I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we could convince the dean to let us install it in a room in CASE?” said Emerson.
Emerson believed that the exhibit would generate buzz about the lab, and would be an excellent opportunity to showcase the kind of hands-on experience with historical technology that the organization provides.
Her whim would soon transform into a month-long exhibition of the piece inside one of CASE’s most public-facing classrooms, complete with lectures from the artists themselves, and from CU-affiliated academics whose research focuses on communication, crossing boundaries and historical technology.
“After many meetings over the summer with the Dean and staff and safety people – fire marshals, you name it – it all came together,” said Emerson. “And the artists were really excited to return to their initial project; to just explore what it would mean to reinstall it, but almost 10 years later.”
Oisín Sheerin, a first-year Ph.D. student at CU Boulder studying media research and practice, was one of several volunteers that watched over the piece and answered visitors’ questions during its daily open hours. He explained that the piece’s theme being rooted in communication was ultimately very fitting for the way it brought so many scholars and interested visitors together.
“I think what I love so much about this piece in particular is that it is a communication technology, it’s something that connects,” said Sheerin. “I think that that’s a very generative platform for connecting different academics from different backgrounds.”
“For me, personally, I think it provokes curiosity,” Sheerin continued. “It’s so out-of-context that it makes you think, and it makes you be like, ‘What is going on in there?’ Especially when we have the talks and stuff, people are walking by and staring in, because they’re like, ‘Why is there a group of people gathered around a barbed-wire fence right now?’”
One of the academics that benefited from the bizarre exhibit’s draw on visitors was Cheryl Higashida, an associate professor of English at CU Boulder. Her lecture, “Radiotelephony, Race, and Rights,” drew on the present theme of historical communication technology to detail how the civil rights and farmworkers movements of the 1960s developed their own telephone systems, enabling access to what was very privileged technology at the time.
Attendees to Higashida’s lecture were squeezed into narrow rows of folding chairs that ran right alongside the fence. The room, having been bisected, didn’t leave much space to fit an audience, and could have only been described as an uncomfortable fit. Nevertheless, the lecture was standing-room-only, and Higashida herself spoke energetically from in front of a projector screen at the far end of the triangular area.
“I think [the fence] does make me more performative,” said Higashida. “I feel like I kind of have to vibe off of the barbed-wire fence, in a good way, almost like a competitive way, like, ‘Hey, I don’t want you people to get too distracted by this really cool thing.’ The way I felt, it almost felt like a partner, and that was really cool.”
Higashida noted that, while the situation was certainly unique, the ability to present alongside an artistic embodiment of the focus of her research added an unanticipated layer of depth to her lecture.
“I really felt like even though I had written these words, [the fence] just helped me to embody and feel them,” said Higashida. “I didn’t quite realize it, but I am appreciating it, to have been able to present my research in this space.”
“You think of barbed wire as a hostile technology, it’s something that’s meant to separate, it’s something that’s meant to keep people out, and keep things in,” said Sheerin. “But in this context, it’s used to connect people.”
Contact CU Independent Arts and Entertainment Editor Grace Ptak at Grace.Ptak@colorado.edu.
