Banana Phone: Art Installation on Mental Health and Connectedness Between Individuals

Oliver Shapton, Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design and School of Information

Collaborators: Lindsay Farb, Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design; Emily Lu, Ross School of Business; Lydia Tan, College of Engineering

The Banana Phone is a public art installation that aims to bring awareness to mental health and bring individuals closer together. Two “banana phones” will be placed in public, each with a prompt assigned to it. One banana, ripe and yellow, will focus on positive responses and feedback. The second phone, a rotten banana, will focus more on personal struggles and tougher subjects. After collecting audio recordings anonymously, the information will be relayed back onto the phones in the second phase of the project for individuals to listen to what people had to say. The final installation will offer the ability to not only listen to what others have said, but there will be hanging bananas with written statements that they can touch and interact with.