In an effort to save money and meet budget cuts, the Department of Geography has had to curtail telephone services for all graduate students and many staff—and faculty phones might be next in line. Bernadette Weinberg, our Academic Personnel Analyst, is in charge of canceling phone services and collecting departmental phones. Her growing collection is impressive and, as departmental property, will be stored in the hope that they can be used at a later date.
But what if we recycled them as art? A French artist by the name of Jean-Luc Cornec did just that in the early 1990s, and his “telesheep” created an internet sensation when they were featured at an exhibition of the Frankfurt Museum for Communications in 2006. Cornec’s 12 “bleepsheep” were made from old rotary telephones and their PVC cords, draped over sheepish understructures, and, while your editor can’t track down a price tag, he’s willing to bet that the sale of just one of these clever creations would go a long way to alleviating the department’s budget woes.
It’s too late to cash in on the art from old phones idea, but what about the thousands of butterfly clips and an even larger quantity of hanging file folders salvaged from Professor Golledge’s old office—not to mention Dylan Parenti’s collection of old keyboards, computer cables, and mice? Necessity is the mother of invention, and we could sure use an extra source of income. Put those spatial skills to work and come up with artistic iron butterflies or Pendaflex pagodas or hickory dickory dock mice, whatever. Hey, I’m not kidding you (and forgive the puns)!
