Imagine a game of telephone, except instead of a whisper, it’s art, and instead of a circle of children, there are thousands of artists whispering iterations of the same idea over and over, across every continent.
This supersized, globe-traversing version of a childhood pastime was conceived by Nathan Langston, a 43-year-old Seattle-based poet, composer, and software designer who has an insatiable appetite for art, ideas, and the intricacies of human connection.
The concept of the game is simple: It begins with a single work of art that is “whispered” (without additional context) to a handful of new artists. They, in turn, independently interpret the message passed down through the work, rendering a new iteration, usually in a completely different medium: A painting will be translated to a piece of music, which is then interpreted as a poem, which is then handed off to a painter, a choreographer, a photographer, and so on. Along the way, each artwork becomes its own parent to a new generation of multiple new works; thus the game balloons like a curious family tree, the original seed of an idea blooming and spreading across countless reimagined, beautifully twisted, sometimes uncannily consistent, muffled interpretations, and misinterpretations.
(But is there such a thing as a misinterpretation? At least in this game?)
The genius of it is that halfway through, the process is reversed and the family tree begins to shrink, as multiple works are assigned to a single artist whose job it is to tease the common thread that runs through them all and create a new work based on that. What begins as one message is multiplied and filtered through thousands of brains, then distilled back into a single artwork.
If your curiosity is piqued and you’re dying to know how it begins, middles, and ends, you’re in luck. The game currently being played is actually the third iteration of TELEPHONE, and the previous iteration, launched in 2020, is available to meander through online at www.phonebook.gallery. (Spoiler: The game begins with a piece of prose taken from Newsweek about the sacred banyan trees of India and ends with a sumptuous piece of piano music composed by an artist in Hong Kong. To follow its path is mesmerizing.)
The first version of Langston’s TELEPHONE is not so well-documented, apart from a write-up in the New York Times. It came about organically, a result of Langston and his wife at the time having relocated to Brooklyn for her job. Neither of them knew many people there, and he was searching for ways to meet new friends of an artistic ilk. His solution: a game that would connect him to a wide, weird web of people, through art.
The starting prompt was the Breton Fisherman’s Prayer (“Oh God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small”), which Langston jotted down and handed off to a friend, who created a painting from it. Langston trucked the painting across town to a poet, whose poem then continued on to a sculptor, and so forth. It continued for the next five years, resulting in 315 artworks by artists from 40 countries. (You can also explore those works at telephone.satellitecollective.org.)
“I really geek out on seeing how the mechanics of art actually works, how you can clearly see the way information and emotion is transmitted,” Langston says of the experience, now two and a half games deep. “Art clearly conveys far more information than we can explain, and when you watch it happen in TELEPHONE, it feels like telepathy. It makes all my hair stand on end.”
The first game only ballooned outward and never circled back, but it laid the groundwork for the second version, which came about during the COVID-19 pandemic, after Langston had relocated to Seattle. Though under extremely different circumstances, the game was once again spurred by a sense of isolation and Langston’s desire to connect with people. Much more organized, documented, and annotated—this time, Langston rallied a small team of ten designers and developers to build an intricate, browsable website—the 2.0 version ran for exactly one year, with some 900 artists from 72 countries.
You’d think that would be enough. Langston did too. But when he published the results of the game on its website (as well as publishing a book about it) in 2021, requests from artists wanting to play—hundreds of them—came pouring in.
Thus the third iteration of TELEPHONE was born, launched in September 2024 and running through September of this year. As of press time, there are over 1300 artists enrolled from 57 countries in 683 cities. Langston’s goal is to reach 100,000 players. Since the game has the potential to grow exponentially, that’s not a crazy number. (Want to play? See signup info below.)
Another added component to the current iteration of TELEPHONE is a physical exhibit that will be unrolled in October of this year, three weeks after the final player of the game has submitted their art. Held at Base Camp 2 and curated by Nick Ferderer and Jeremy Buben, the exhibit will open the exact moment the TELEPHONE 3 website goes live. Langston is scheming simultaneous parties and satellite exhibitions in cities such as Berlin and New York as well.
Whether there will be a fourth or fifth iteration of the game remains uncertain.
“I guess this third game started forming when we thought about the 2024 presidential election and got to thinking, ‘Oh dang, this is gonna be a tough year’—without yet having an inkling of what 2025 had in store,” Langston says. “I don’t know. Maybe TELEPHONE just happens when it’s needed.”
The sentiment runs throughout Langston’s rumination on the nature of the game: It’s about connection. As much as the results might reveal a trove of information about how ideas travel from human to human, at the end of the day, what the process reveals is something ineffable about human connections, something that can’t be quantified by data or learned by AI.
‘If there’s one thing I want to get out of it, I hope people feel less alone,” Langston says, “connected to something good and big with like-minded folk from all over the world, regardless if they’re making art in Iran or China or Ukraine or Israel or Lebanon or… Indianola, Washington. This is a global project and an implicitly hopeful one at a time that the world, and definitely here in the States, feels anything but hopeful.”
Want to play? TELEPHONE is actively seeking artists of all types. Sign up to apply at artists.telephonegame.art