One day we found an old Soviet payphone at a flea market and simply couldn’t leave it behind.

We dragged it into the studio, where it lay around for ages while we had no idea what to do with it.

And then the project finally clicked.

We turned it into a phonebooth bot — a telebot disguised as a vintage phone booth.

We rewired the insides, slipped in an Arduino, added our own sound system, and programmed it so that no matter what number you dialed on the old rotary wheel, you always reached our bot.

And the bot immediately began pumping your brain full of our erritexts — the same aphorisms and street-art messages we plaster around cities.

We also reworked the old Soviet service numbers — 01, 02, 03.

Back then they meant fire, police, ambulance.

We flipped the logic:
– Dial 02 (police) → you reached the garbage collection service, because “cop” and “trash” share a slang root in Russian.
– Dial 03 (ambulance) → you reached a helpline for people psychologically damaged by the regime.

We installed the whole contraption in the Flacon art cluster, mounting it onto a metal wall we covered with our own patterns — laser-cut from plywood, painted separately, and arranged into a dimensional street-art piece.

A Soviet payphone reborn as a sarcastic oracle.