The Phone Whisperer

By Idil Abshir

Rob Pettit is probably the only person in the world who owns five thousand dead cell phones, and for him, they work just fine.

Pettit, a Ditmas Park resident, is an artist who has been making art installations out of dead cell phones since 2006. In his Park Slope studio, dead phones arranged in a circular design dominate the center of the floor; drawings with cell phone towers or many small cell phones in different designs are on the walls, or rolled up and leaning against the wall; dead phones are arranged artfully on a desk, some from as long ago as 1983; and the outer covers of phones fill up a glass and wooden frame, giving you an odd sense that you should be looking at a painting only to find the casings of obsolete property.

It all started when he was a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) in Boston, brainstorming what his thesis, an exhibition show at the conclusion of the program, should be. “I was always losing my phone, and the idea came out of that,” Pettit says sheepishly. “But I was also thinking about how people collect coins, and stamps, and stuff. I wanted something free, and people have cell phones lying around.”

He started close to home, and turned to anybody who could help, especially recycling companies. “I started asking around and 10 became 20 became 100 became 1000 became 5000,” Pettit says.

“There’s 3000 in this studio, and another 2000 at my dad’s place in Albany. Moving them is a pain. I used big shovels, snow shovels, to get them into boxes,” he says.

With the exception of those laid out on the floor, the 3000 in his studio are tightly packed into plastic storage boxes. Pettit has a day job: he’s a carpenter. His studio is a modest space at the back of Beagle & Potts Woodworking, where Pettit builds cabinets among other things. After his 13 hours workdays he often comes here to make patterns and relax.

“It’s meditation, setting them up, kind of like Buddhist monks making their sand designs and then dumping them in the river.” Carpentry, he says, “is very mathematical, there’s thousands of details. The repetitive patterns over a course of hours put my mind to rest. It is a way to unwind my mind.”

We are sitting at one of the workbenches where Pettit and his coworkers build during the day. He is wearing a brown hoodie, brown jeans, and with his brown hair he seems to fit into the wood-filled environment just right.

Carpentry came to Pettit as part disappointment and part new fun skill. Only later did it become his livelihood. In 2008, the thesis project at SMFA offered one student in the program a dreamy opportunity, a $100,000 traveling scholars award for the artist selected by a jury. “I thought I had it, I thought I had won, but art is subjective. They didn’t get it,” Pettit said. So instead he spent the summer doing carpentry with a friend.

Pettit says he is not afraid of change. As a child “I was probably a little wild,” he said. He spent most of his younger years on Ritalin, and he said that it was when stopped taking it, and he moved from private school, which he attended up until the eighth grade, to a public high school that he really began to come into himself.

“I opened up,” he says. “I realized you can’t be contained in the world.”

From there, the changes kept on coming. When his mother died, Pettit turned to art classes, and it was here that his habit of making geometrical and repetitive patterns emerged.

“My mom died, and I started taking art classes, it helped with my emotions,” Pettit says. “I started focusing on ways to direct my attention- I had a lot of scattered thoughts and whatnot.”

In 2000 he began attending Elmira College in Upstate New York, and after two years of studying history, Pettit transferred to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

“It was going from your typical liberal arts school- classes upon classes, shit I didn’t really want to learn, to a place where I could explore anything,” Pettit says. “I found out I could explore who I am.” The next six years at SMFA were spent doing a dual degree program, that culminated in a month long show, and a lifelong passion for cell phones.

Pettit’s deep-seated fascination with the cellular world is in part because he hasn’t quite gotten over how in just 15 years cell phones arrived in people’s lives, and then completely took them over. “It’s a technology that wasn’t here when I was growing up, a few people in High School had them,” Pettit says. “And then everyone on the planet had one.”

In fact, he is so amazed by people’s dependence that he did a project in which he would go out and count how many people he saw using their phones. The result: a graph, illustrated with miniature cell phones, elaborately showing how many people he encountered that were using their cell phones on a given day. In New York City, that’s a lot.

But this is not the extent of his interest; Pettit is also making social statements. He is examining the paradigm shift, and the change in peoples’ values since cell phones arrived on the scene, and he is also critical of the way these phones are disposed. He says he likes old phones because people can connect to them, but also because by collecting them he keeps them out of landfills.

“For sure all the recycling companies have the green image, “ he says, “but it’s all for profit. It is all about making money.”

Pettit says his installations strike a chord with cell phone users. “A lot of times people point out, ‘oh I had that one,’” he says.

To Pettit, this speaks loudly to the ever-changing landscape, and that fact that people can on the one hand have fully fledged relationships with their phones, and on the other move on and through phones incredibly quickly.

“It’s a statement on wanting new stuff; they’re constantly outdated,” he says. “It’s a reflection on not having something personal- abundance of technology and the disposal of it.” But don’t mistake this for a scathing social critique; instead Pettit is just making an observation.

“I can’t live without mine,” he admits, smiling.