Draper also designed the “blue box”, a multifrequency tone generator that replicated Joybubbles’ whistling. Eventually, a common button-telephone could be used for phreaking, just like the one Otavio Schipper now positions into the middle of the main hall at Kunsthalle Winterthur. Schipper combines it with two telephone switchboards from the 1930s and a four-channel sound installation, composed from various telephone tones and automated responses, in cooperation with the mathematician and pandeiro-player Sergio Krakowski (b.1979, lives and works in Rio de Janeiro).

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In the small hall, the moving image is centre-stage: The Skeleton Dance is a black and white animation by Walt Disney and marks the beginning of the so-called Silly Symphony, a series of animated short musicals created between 1929 and 1939, and in colour from 1932. The five-and-a-half-minute long cartoon features four skeletons that rise out of their graves and begin to dance, at first individually, then in groups, and finally in unexpected and comedic recombinations of singular bones. Otavio Schipper rearranges the original material into four new edits and shows them on tube-televisions.

The exhibition was curated by Oliver Kielmayer and supported by the Museum of Communication, Berne. Kunsthalle Winterthur is supported by the Canton of Zurich Fachstelle Kultur, the City of Winterthur, Friends of Kunsthalle Winterthur, Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation, and Migros Culture Percentage.



Antique Telephone switchboards, vintage telephone, software, videos, and sound.
​Installation / Variable dimensions
Photos by Christian Schwager


Making-of Litany for Bubbles