An Artist’s Game of Telephone

multimedia artist and software engineer who had just moved from Portland, Oregon, to New York City, was lonely. He wanted to meet artists working in other genres and build a collaborative community but had no idea how to begin. Then it hit him: He could play a game of Telephone, the classic playground game in which a phrase gets whispered from person to person, inevitably changing along the way. The beauty of Telephone is that it’s simple and universal—for example, it’s known as in Spanish—and, in Langston’s version, gives just enough restriction to unleash creative freedom. Langston started with one fragment of poetry, gave it says Langston. He quickly realized that a physical switchboard of one wasn’t sustainable and transferred the process to the internet. By 2015, when he ended the first Telephone project, he’d gathered more than three hundred iterations from the initial launch.