Welcome Home 欢迎回家
By Eric Cai

    Welcome Home (欢迎回家) is an interactive installation that puts the viewer in a classic American home living room setting with a sofa, a carpet, a lamp, a side table and a rotary telephone. The telephone is loaded with 10 audio logs, each one is a personal story about my home in China, when the audience dials from number zero to nine, a coresponding recording will be played through the handset.

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ABOUT




Early sketch
Titled 欢迎回家 (Huān Yíng Huí Jiā ) means ‘welcome home’ in mandarin, working as a hint for the audience to look beyond the visual element of my installation and pay attention to the audio. The setup aims to create a place that looks like home to many people here in the US, while the recordings heavily related to a culture that greatly differs from the setup, aiming to pull the audience out of the physical world to another side through the telephones. I hope the installation can bring comfort to the ones in the Chinese international community while providing a home-like feeling, and give the other audience a feeling of strangeness and displacement.


Rotary telephone dissembled and wiring
I want to use this installation to reflect the feeling of displacement being an international student here in the US, the feeling of being in a place like looks like home, but nothing around me truly feels like it, and only way to make that connection is through a phone call or video call back with families or a friend back home. The installation will consist of a classic single-cushion cottage sofa, a round carpet, a floor lamp, a wooden side table, and a rotary telephone. The settings will be lit by the warm yellow light of the lamp to create the cozy feeling of a typical American home. The telephone itself will be circuit bent, powered by an Arduino Nano and a DFplayer that allows me to store audio with a microSD card. When the telephone is picked up by the audience and dial a number from 1-10, a prerecorded audio corresponding to that number will be played through the handset, after the audio has been played, the audience needs to reset the handset and redial for another recording. The audio itself will be in forms of stories, poems and interviews, some of them will be my personal experience and stories and some will be coming from my friends, themed from minor details of living a different culture to feeling disconnected from family.


Telephone setup

Furniture  setup
Phone number cards labeled with audio log titles are provided as a part of the exhibition as visual elements