The object on display last week at Manhattan's Howard Wise Gallery looked suspiciously like a telephone booth. In fact it was a telephone booth, but of a very special kind, designed by Argentine-born Marta Minujin, 25. The Minuphone is what she calls an "environment." The viewer is invited to step inside and dial a number. The phone really works (its number is 581-4570)—but it also sets off a sequence of experiences that suggest the giddying effect of a short trip on LSD.
During a conversation, the transparent walls of the booth may slowly turn green or black as panels of colored water rise inside them. A television screen set in the floor may go on, showing the viewer's face grinning nervously up at him. His voice may be recorded on a tape and played back to him. Sirens may blow and a wind blast up from a screen beneath the telephone; a ghostly echo of his words may resound in the booth, or a screen descend (the idea is to make shadow pictures on it with one's free hand). Finally, a Polaroid Land camera has been hooked into the circuit; when the occupant emerges from the booth, bemused, he may be presented by the gallery attendant with a memento of the occasion: a picture of himself in foggy black and white.
Marta, a fey, freckled blonde who built her Minuphone with the aid of a
Bell Laboratories engineer, explains that she conceived of it because "people are too alienated. In the booth they can get information about themselves." She would like to have the Minuphone mass-produced and installed in streets and parks. Neither former New York City Parks Commissioner Thomas P. F. Hoving nor his successor, August Heckscher, has so far shown any interest; considering the Parks Department's well-known fondness for hippy-go-lucky happenings, there's always hope.