I wanted to say…

The Spence bakery and café is a busy local meeting spot where people come together to share a conversation over a cup of coffee. The words and rhythms of these encounters, over time, become soaked into the fabric of the café.

The cup-and-string telephones are a physical reminder that sound is a series of vibrations, a sense that can get lost with modern devices like mobile phones. The telephones are a stripped-back way of communicating: naïve, childish, playful.

Each cup captures and contains different fragments of thoughts, feelings and conversations, drawn from customers in the cafe and spoken by the staff who work there. By choosing to put the cup to their ear, listeners allow themselves to reconsider the nature of communication and our urge to interact, as well as the social importance of venues like the Spence.

'I wanted to say...' was made up of four hanging string-and-paper-cup "telephones". One cup was attached to the wall above the window and the other hung down in the window at ear level for someone sitting or standing at the bench. Each of the higher cups contained a digital audio player, an amplifier and a custom-made speaker coil that directly vibrated the string hanging down through the cup. This transmitted the audio to the hanging cup. A switch arrangement activated the device when the string was pulled taught by someone grabbing the hanging cup.

The audio was gathered by recording the staff of the Spence Café and Bakery reading scripts and then editing these pieces of audio to make four different tracks with different rhythms and structure. The scripts were developed by eavesdropping on conversations in the café and scribbling down interesting snippets of conversation. All pieces of conversation were chosen to be anonymous and deliberately incomplete - making them tantalising glimpses, just as one experiences in such a busy social setting.

In addition to the audio installation, some of the snippets from the original scripts were printed onto transparent sticky-backed plastic and stuck to the windows near where the cups hung.

Output Arts gratefully acknowledges the help of the owners and staff of The Spence.

January 8, 2010 – January 30, 2010

The Spence Bakery, 161 Stoke Newington Church Street, London, N16