Steven Krensky is obviously a man who loves stuff! Gallery owner, art collector and aficionado of old things that still look good without working any more, I guess The Temporary Art Repair Shop was perfect for him. What he brought in was two large boxes with the parts of at least three if not more old phones, all pulled apart and heaped together in a big jumble. What I really love about old technical gear, is that you can sort of see on it what it’s supposed to do and how it goes about. Only a few people would get the same wow experience from opening up a brand new phone and studying the circuit board in it, but even someone who is so not an electronics geek like myself (to my big shame!) can sort of get what the different parts of these old monsters are supposed to do to each other. Since there was so many tantalizing parts in the boxes Steven brought in, there also had to be a number of false starts of course. The beautiful wooden box was supposed to become a strong chest with a hidden lock that only opened when one “dialled” the right combination. The handset was supposed to become a LED torch that lit up when you blew into the mouthpiece (impossible since the old style Bakelite parts where cast almost solid for stability, with just a very narrow channel for the wires). And many more ideas. None of which had sprung from the real functioning of the phone but rather from what it looked able to do.

Only when I stopped high-flying my ideas and sat down and actually tried myself through all the different parts did I realize what had to be done. This was coming back to my original thought: that in old machines one could still see what every part performed. The part I first picked out was the ring tone generator of the oldest phone. This ring tone generator, was, yes, simply a generator. Five fat and heavy magnets around a hand cranked copper spool capable of transforming your hand power into low voltage electricity. Part one done! Mounted very visibly and with clear instructions on what to do, I imagine this part of the piece hanging outside a front door (but it could also be used to communicate between different interior parts of a house, like say for example the parlour and the kitchen).

With a cable visibly leading on to somewhere else, and then into the next part of the artwork, the door bell was complete. The only parts I had NOT torn out of this old telephone body, was the two round bells and the striker between them capable of generating a both loud and annoying signal, about as loud and annoying as one would crank at the other end as a matter of fact. Turning the handle one could both feel the resistance of the magnets holding back, and then as one forces it immediately hear the striking of the bell in some other part of the house. Simple, practical and instructive – a completely gridless door bell. I do hope it comes to use.

Mr Krensky with the Crank part of Gridless set up in Transformer before he got to take it with him.