• Professor Lori Emerson looks at the history of of barbed wire fence telephone networks used in the US and Canada. • …the history of using barbed wire to communicate is surprisingly long and almost entirely undocumented, even though barbed wire fence phones in particular were an essential part of early- to mid-twentieth century rural life in many parts of the U.S. • While I was researching barbed wire fence phones and wondering whether any artists had been intrepid enough to experiment with this other network, I came across Phil Peters and David Rueter ’s work “Barbed Wire Fence Telephone” which they installed in a Chicago gallery in 2015. • libi striegl (Managing Director of the Media Archaeology Lab through which we run many of our Other Networks projects) and I decided we should see if we can get Peters and Rueter to re-install their barbed wire fence telephone on the CU Boulder campus…to our delight and surprise, they said yes. • Read this delightful history in the post here .
Article Summaries:
- Professor Lori Emerson looks at the history of of barbed wire fence telephone networks used in the US and Canada. …the history of using barbed wire to communicate is surprisingly long and almost entirely undocumented, even though barbed wire fence phones in particular were an essential part of early- to mid-twentieth century rural life in many parts of the U.S. and Canada! While I was researching barbed wire fence phones and wondering whether any artists had been intrepid enough to experiment with this other network, I came across Phil Peters and David Rueter ’s work “Barbed Wire Fence Telepho
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