Ivan Marušić Klif (HR) Alo, alo

interactive installation, 2005

Although most of the people still think of the telephone as a great invention which makes communication a lot more easier, the project Allo, Allo points to certain possibilities of technological harassment - other than teleshopping. Klif's analog-digital installation randomly calls unfortunate phone owners in order to connect the acoustic environments of two spaces – exhibition space and private, anybody's space. When this communicational channel opens the dialed people are 'forced' to interact with the art space, while the visitors become someone to talk to. Thus, technology offers simultaneously a possibility of a pleasant chat with a lonely person or a possiblity to turn the person on the line into a harrasment victim.

Main premises:

  • using public database of the Croatian landline telephone network
  • invading the private space of unknown, randomly selected phone users
  • transposing the sound from the gallery into the private space of a telephone conversation
  • transposing the private space of a telephone conversation into the gallery via sound system
  • gallery visitors become collocutors in a phone conversation
  • phone line users become participants of the gallery installation

Ivan Marušić Klif (HR)

Ivan Marušić Klif was born in 1969 in Zagreb. He graduated from the School of Audio Engineering in Amsterdam in 1994. His field of interest includes fine arts (light installations and kinetic objects), music and sound for the theatre, set design (theatre, film and television) and performance art. From 1996 he started working with computers – mostly in the field of multimedia programming, interactive video and problems of interfacing computers with the "real" world. Exhibited and performed in Holland, Germany, Japan, USA, Austria, France, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Macedonia and Croatia.