Did we create 1,000+ artworks or one collective worldwide masterpiece
When you were a kid, did you ever play the telephone game? A friend whispered something in your ear, then you turned to the person next to you and whispered it in theirs. They, in turn, passed on the message. And on and on and on. Until the last person in the circle or line says aloud what they’ve heard. Typically, the word or phrase is nothing like the original.
Several years ago, nearly 1,400 artists played a game of telephone around the world. No, this is not a made up story or a pie in the sky dream. This has actually happened not once but three times!
How does it work? Here’s how Nathan Langston, Director of the TELEPHONE project, explains it:
“TELEPHONE is a game played by artists. It works like the children’s game of the same name. A message is whispered from person to person and changes and evolves as it is passed from player to player. In our case, we pass a secret message from art form to art form, so a message could become poetry and then painting and then music and then film, throughout all possible forms of art. We also assign each finished work of art to two or three other artists, so the game branches outward exponentially like a family tree.”
It took two years for Langston and his crew to produce the latest TELEPHONE, asking for artists worldwide to submit work, sharing artwork with other artists for them to respond, and continuing the process several times, until what was produced may not have looked like the original submission at all.
The 2025 TELEPHONE exhibition includes 1,395 individual, interconnected original works by artists from 930 cities in 65 countries. Find all the artists here: telephonegame.art/search.
One of those 1,000+ pieces of art is a little poem by little old me. I’m honored to be included in this incredibly cool project. I responded to a photograph by Ed Douglas in London. Once I submitted my poem to TELEPHONE, it was passed on to another artist, Samson Oseidu in Nigeria, who created an incredibly detailed drawing inspired by it.
Read my full poem here:
Circling myself
I held a tiny secret deep inside,
like a shimmering marble
in the sunlight, it became clearer —
I don’t want to be with him.
Those seven words shifted
my axis to the right alignment,
no longer revolving around
your idea of who I’ll be.
Years spent going in circles,
such tight rotations
my inner ears rung,
constant headaches.
Now I know who I want
and it’s a woman
as complicated, emotional,
beautiful as me.
Receiving an anonymous piece of art and being tasked with writing a poem about/inspired by it was daunting, but fun. I studied the image, took notes on what I saw and felt, imagined what the man and woman figurines in the piece thought, desired, dreamed. While writing the poem, I drew inspiration from the multitude of circles in the artwork — the six multi-colored rings in the background, the circles surrounding the figures, the four marbles, the tiny marble the woman is holding close to her, the circles of the notebook spine. It made me think about a planet rotating on its axis, revolving in its orbit, the circles we go around when we’re trying to become the truest versions of ourselves.
The first game of TELEPHONE, published in 2015, showcased 315 artists. The second game, published in 2021, featured work by 795 artists. Whenever the TELEPHONE project takes place again, I hope you’ll submit your own work. I wonder if the creators plan to exponentially grow the project each time it’s organized.
A HUGE thank you to all of the people involved in pulling together such an enormous, wild, and fun endeavor. Now, there’s a strange, beautiful connecting thread flowing through us all.
