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. From the Publisher