Dial-a-Poem was a 1970’s art project by John Giorno. It delivered free poetry through a telephone hotline in New York City. Of course that’s long gone, so to bring the art piece back for presentation MoMA needed to convert mid 20th century rotary telephones into interactive audio players. They had to behave like the real thing, responding to the headset in the cradle and accepting input via the rotary dial.

Starting with old telephones, I removed the electronics and replaced them with a simple Arduino based system, adding an MP3 decoder and audio amp. Custom code allowed the rotary dial to input numbers into the micro and trigger a randomized audio recording of one of the original poems.