Sam Kidel

"I dial a number into the phone. Someone picks up, and I follow the script. In between words, saliva rolls around my mouth folding around air pockets that pop quietly. The person on the other end of the line breathes more heavily than I expect, occasionally blowing directly into the phone handset, rattling the microphone and sending the sound of a strong gale down the wires of their telephone line. The sound travels through the microphone, into the grid, across vast networks of wires, into the call centre, through the telephone speaker cone and into my ear. I almost feel the warmth of their breath on the back of my neck."

Since working in call centres for a decade, I have been making art that explores this setting through sound.

Call centres are places of constant eavesdropping: the workers listen to the callers, the team leaders listen to the workers, the managers listen to all. While centres collect and transmit certain types of ‘signal’, I’m interested in ‘noise’: the intimacy of words and sounds off-script, disintegrating hold music played through imprecise telephone lines, and disruption.

Beyond the precarity of typical call centre contracts, an additional spectre haunts the call centre’s future: automation through voice recognition and voice synthesis. Voice recognition systems seek to isolate signal from noise, but they are vulnerable to noisy speech, and speech-like noise. These vulnerabilities are possibilities.

I see the call centre worker (or, customer service agent) as a figure of our time: precarious, entrapped, alienated, pending-automation.

Documentation