Squeezing 10cm-Thick Washing Machine Into Bus Shelter Panel Made Trickier By “One of the Wettest Days on Record”

An estimated 13 million broken and unused mobile phones sit in drawers across Australia, because people just don't know what to do with them. So Enigma tasked artist James Dive with installing a moving mechanical washing machine, dancing boot, and bed of clams within the confines of three bus shelters to change that. 

The series of ‘Phone Death’ art installations for the phone recycling program, MobileMuster, are activated with the push of a button. They fit within standard oOh!media out-of-home panels, bringing to life scenes in which phones meet their untimely end.

“Everyone's got a ridiculous anecdote, or a second or third party story of someone who dropped their phone down the toilet, or dropped it on the dance floor, or thought they were throwing a fish back and threw the phone in instead,” Enigma’s CCO Simon Lee told LBB. 

“There's endless ridiculous stories, which led us to this idea of dramatising the crazy, weird, wonderful ways that phones die.

“We had a fairly modest media budget, so this wasn't something where we were going to be making a big TV ad, but we really wanted to make a big creative splash with this, and make something that's truly unignorable. That got us thinking about out-of-home.”

Laughing, “I was in straight away” when he first got the brief, artist James is founder and creative director of Studio Dive, and works closely with production company Scoundrel. He told LBB when a user interacted with the installations, it “needed to reward that interactivity. The theatre needed to be really heightened.”

The most obvious hurdle was “working out the limitations of the medium – you only have about 20 centimetres to play with for the whole thing.”

“We had to ask ourselves how to make it mechanically reliable and interesting at the push of a button, and then how to destroy phones live in front of a viewer.

“Our washing machine is genuinely 10 centimetres wide, and it can be seen on both sides – all the executions can be seen on two sides. It became quite a mechanical process. There's a lot of servos, there's a lot of electrics, there's a lot of buttons. But for me, that's the magic of it.”

Whilst those constraints might seem daunting, Simon said the team embraced them. 

“We were really adamant from the outset that these wouldn’t be 'special builds', in the sense that a special build extends outside of the parameters of a standard panel.

“We actually really wanted to embrace the restriction of it being created within a standard panel.

“That led to a whole bunch of challenges, but many creative people have said that that restriction is one of the things that brings out the greatest creativity. That was certainly the case here.”

​The magic comes in the minutiae of the artworks, especially with first-person experiences.

“It's always about the detail – effort is what resonates,” said James. 

“The coffee cup [on the washing machine] shakes, there are disco lights that spray out the pavement in the disco execution, when the clam shells all shut, they open up at different intervals. So all of these things, while difficult, were really important.” 

He added people being able to see how each piece works was part of the point. 

“You could see how the boot mechanic works, you could hear the washing machine shaking, there was a real theatre to that approach as well, in not trying to hide how we did it.”

For Simon, in what is an “increasingly synthetic, perfect, digital world,” this project brought to the forefront “the realisation of the incredible power of actual physical, dimensional, mechanical experiences, where the actual mechanics are on display, where there is some imperfection.”

Installing the artworks was not helped by the fact that “the day of the actual installation was one of the wettest days on record in the history of Australia,” Simon said.

“It made for an interesting day of trying to make these extraordinary pieces of art fit inside standard bus shelter panels whilst it's tipping with rain, and also warding off the many passers by who were incredibly intrigued and excited by what we were making.”

In a piece of near-instant feedback, once the boot piece was installed, he said, “We were walking away and we saw a bunch of teenagers – who didn't know that we were the installers – flock towards the bus shelter.

“One of our team sidled along subtly behind them, and the teenagers pressed the button and watched the boot start to do his thing. One of them was heard to say, ‘This is actually cool.’”