The Outcomes

TellBush.org is a Net Art Experiment in Telephonic Democracy. It is a networked digital commons allowing individuals to call into a toll-free number and leave a 60 second voice message for United States President George W. Bush. This message is posted to the Tellbush.org web site and, significantly, emailed to the President’s email address. As all emails to the President of the United States become a part of the United States National Archive, these messages, regardless of their content, intent, purpose, sensibility or language, become indelibly historicized.

Each call into TellBush.org is recorded and made publically available for visitors to the website. Each entry is flagged with the date and time, its number in the order it was recorded, and the last four digits of the individual’s telephone number so that it’s easy to find one’s recording.

TellBush.org is an experiment in telephonic democracy, exploring the intersections of telephony, the web, and political discourse. It is an exploration of the possibilities of voice as a medium for political expression, and the ways in which technology can facilitate new forms of civic engagement.

I don’t have too much extant archival material from the project. I used to have the audio files, and they may still be on an old hard drive somewhere, but I haven’t found them yet.

I do recall making a large banner, and somewhere there is a note about deploying it at the Conflux Festival in New York City in 2005.