Christian Marclay – Telephones

Christian Marclay’s ‘Telephones’ (1995) was a precursor to the video collages he would produce later, such as ‘Crossfire’ (2007), ‘The Clock’ (2010), and ‘Doors’ (2022). This publication takes the earlier moving image work – where scenes were sampled from movies in VHS format rented at video stores and edited into a seven-minute montage – and adapts it into book form. Based in our collective memory of cinema, the original video’s structure revealed a clash of technologies, behavioural patterns, sound effects, and cultural references associated with audio and visual communication. Almost 30 years later, its relevance seems to have grown rather than diminished.