news Artist hopes sidewalk telephone booth is ringing success with US audience

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Artist hopes sidewalk telephone booth is ringing success with US audience



Thu Oct 22, 1:56 PM

By The Associated Press


YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio - The once ever-present but now nearly extinct telephone booth has popped up on a street corner in the southwest Ohio village of Yellow Springs.

It's part of an unusual art project and a statement about private communications in the age of cellular phones.

It's not a working phone booth. It's a living interactive sculpture that will serve as a stage for poetry readings, light shows and dance performances over the next year.

The project is the brainchild of Tokyo-born artist Migiwa Orimo, who had to search high and low for a phone booth before finding one in Chicago.

Beginning Saturday, people will be able to walk into the phone booth, pick up the receiver and listen to a recorded rendition of the Spoon River Anthology, a collection of short poems.