Ariana Kelly is currently completing a memoir entitled BLACK BOX.
Phone Booth
The phone booth exists as a fond but distant memory for some people, and as a strange and dysfunctional waste of space for many more. Ariana Kelly approaches the phone booth as an entity that embodies diverse attitudes about privacy, freedom, power, sanctuary, and communication in its various forms all around the world. Through portrayals of phone booths in literature, film, personal narrative, philosophy, and religion, Phone Booth offers a definitive account of an object on the cusp of obsolescence.
What People Are Saying
“[Phone Booth] inclines us towards nostalgia, toward urgent questions of what remains when objects disappear, of re-use, and shelter. If phone booths today have receded into the interstices of our built worlds… then that freeing of the object from its use enables Arianna Kelly to tell a different story, a story about what these telephonic leftovers might become, what they now are and what they anchor.”
— Julian Yates, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Fascinated and attuned, I was cabled into Phone Booth. Ariana Kelly replenishes the work on speculative telephony in an altogether compelling way.”
— Avital Ronell, University Professor in the Humanities, NYU
“In this delightful set of mini-essays, Ariana Kelly has created a paen, rather than an elegy, in celebration of the many dimensions of the vanishing phone booth. Her text gleans images and sensations from our collective memory of the once (if briefly) ubiquitous structure.”
— Johanna Drucker, Professor of Information Studies, UCLA
“An entertaining and enlightening exploration of the cultural history of the phone booth and a lament for the loss of these spaces.”
— WPR: BETA