other networks

This September, with the generous support of the College of Media, Communication and Information, we’re hosting an artwork titled “Barbed Wire Fence Telephone II”, conceived by Phil Peters and David Rueter. The work will be installed on the CU Boulder campus in CASE W250 for the entire month, with open house hours as often as we can manage.

Throughout the month of September in conjunction with that installation we’ll be hosting talks about the work and about community media, obscure networks, and self-governance from the artists themselves and scholars from CU and elsewhere. We’ll also be hosting a Snail Mail party and a closing social event. The full schedule of events is listed on this Google calendar and on the official CU events calendar, and we’ll be posting about everything through our social media accounts & on our website.

The first official event will by an artist talk by Peters and Rueter on September 2 at 12pm (UTC-7) in CASE W250 and online. More details here.

About the work & the artists:

Artists David Rueter and Phil Peters have created an incongruous social space: a barbed wire fence that bisects a university classroom. Two telephones hang on posts at either end of the fence, their wires clipped to the strands of barbed wire. Lifting the receiver, one can hear crackling analog signals pass along the fence line, the voice on the opposite phone both near and far, creating an interface that is at once a connection and a separation.

The work takes inspiration from early communication networks of the turn of the twentieth century, when Bell Telephone Company began to connect cities across the United States. At this time, rural and western areas were mostly left out. Entrepreneurial ranchers discovered that ad-hoc, decentralized telephone networks could be built from simple materials at hand, transforming their pre-existing barbed wire fences into a network of transmission lines. 

The piece revisits Rueter and Peters’ collaborative installation ten years after its first installation in Chicago. The work continues themes of mediation, presence, connection, isolation, surveillance, decentralization, and private vs public. It takes on new meaning as an installation within a public university and – ten years on – as seen in the light of contemporary social/political discourse.

Phil Peters, born in 1981 (USA), lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Peters’ transdisciplinary art practice explores the evolving relationship between the built and natural world through audio, video, and sculptural installations. Speculative architectural histories, contemporary ecology, and slippages between the biologic and geologic all inform this work. He received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, and a BA from Carleton College in Northfield, MN. In 2014-15 he co-founded and curated an artist run project space LODGE (In Service of the Dark Arts), Chicago, IL. Exhibitions of his work include “Build Carry” at The Arts Club of Chicago’s Drawing Room, “Outside/In” at LAXART, Los Angeles, CA, “The Port of Long Beach Recordings” at The Canary Test, Los Angeles, CA, and “The Permian Recordings” at Co-Lab Projects, Austin, Tx.

David Rueter, born in 1978 (USA), lives and works between Amsterdam, Netherlands and the United States.

Rueter’s site-adapted videos, sculptures, and drawings often work with architectural or infrastructural elements hidden in plain sight. In circulation and serial production, each work accumulates and adjusts as it encounters institutional logics, frictional proximities, hearsay, and fragments of collective imagination. Rueter received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, USA, and a BFA from Oberlin College, OH, USA. He has exhibited works made with longtime collaborator Marissa Lee Benedict (USA/NL, 1985) in such venues as: 

The 34th Bienal de São Paulo, BR / the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, IT / The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL / Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR, USA / Jan Van Eyck Open Studios, Maastricht, NL / The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL, USA / EXPO Chicago, Chicago IL, USA / Contemporary Art Brussels, Brussels, BE.