EAVESDROPPING

Dial 646-594-1921 Pick up the phone. Keep quiet to stay on the line. The operator is waiting to take your call, 24/7. EAVESDROPPING is an interactive telephone installation by composer and artist Whitney George that places the audience inside a private world they were never meant to hear. At the center of the installation is a single rotary telephone. Pick it up and you may enter in the middle of an argument, a confession, a flirtation, a threat, an ordinary conversation, or something far more difficult to explain. The voices continue whether or not anyone is listening. You cannot speak to them. You cannot warn them. You cannot change what happens. You can only listen. The telephone carries an evolving cycle of interconnected fictional conversations unfolding across different hours, relationships, and emotional realities. Some exchanges appear mundane. Others feel intimate, unsettling, tender, absurd, or strangely familiar. Characters recur. Details accumulate. Contradictions emerge. A listener who returns at another time may discover a completely different part of the story—or recognize a voice they have heard before. There is no prescribed beginning, no designated ending, and no guarantee that two visitors will hear the same thing. Each encounter is shaped by timing, attention, memory, and the decision to remain on the line. EAVESDROPPING explores the unstable boundary between curiosity and intrusion. What happens when listening becomes participation? Does a conversation remain private when it has been created to be overheard? Is the silent listener merely a witness—or have they already become part of the event? Blending sound installation, immersive storytelling, theatre, and durational performance, EAVESDROPPING transforms the ordinary act of answering a telephone into an intimate encounter with secrecy, surveillance, desire, and the ethics—and erotics—of listening. Visitors are welcome to stay for a few seconds or lose themselves inside the line.