When Théo Z V Champion visited a vintage market in London, he noticed that shoppers were rather intrigued by a rotary phone — the type that needed callers to choose a number by inserting their fingers into the relevant holes of a dial before turning the wheel in order to initiate a telephone call. It was disconnected, but that didn’t prevent many people — acting out of curiosity or feeling pangs of nostalgia — from lifting the handset and placing it against one of their ears.

In each case, they were met with silence. They’d place the handset back onto the base, inevitably smile, and turn their attention to another retro device. But what if they had been able to listen to a voice? Would they have engaged with the phone for longer and potentially gained something more from the experience? With that thought in mind, Théo acquired an old landline phone of his own — albeit a push-button type — and he got to work on retrofitting it with a speaker.

The concept was that, upon lifting the handset, the user would hear a voice reading out a poem and this, he explains, would indulge a burning passion to mix technology with art. “I believe technology and engineering are underrepresented in art, so I create pieces that use technology as both the medium and the message to reveal the invisible world of engineering around us — be they algorithms, communications/surveillance tech, artificial intelligence, the internet and so on.”

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