Marcus inquired:

Are you aware of anybody using touchtone [telephone] as an art medium?

Matt Locke replied:

I'm not aware of anyone using touch tone technology specifically as an
artform (although voice-mail systems are crying out to be used/abused by
artists), but there have been a few instances recently of British
artists using phones in their work.

Angus Fairhurst made a text/tape piece that involved patching together
the phone lines of london contemporary art galleries, so that two
galleries' phones rang together without either of them having dialled.
The resulting confused conversations were presented as a tape piece and
printed as a transcript in the pilot issue of Frieze magazine.

Douglas Gordon also made a piece for a gallery in milan involving
telephones. He instructed the director of the gallery to telephone a
local bar (which was aware of the project) and ask the barman to choose
someone at random from the punters at the bar. This person was told that
there was a phone call for them, and on answering the call were read a
short statement from a selection written by Gordon. The statements were
menacing/bizarre, and after the statement was read, the Director rang
off.

Juliet Martin wrote:

I did a web based art pice called "Please Stay on the Line" for
Razorfish's thEnvelope online gallery. It can be seen at

http://www.rsub.com/thenvelope

It deals with the technology of the telephone & our dependence on the
medium.

robbin murphy added:

John Chris Jones wrote a piece called "The Phone" that's on ellipsis:
http://www.ellipsis.com/softopia/index.html

Robert Adrian also replied:

Van Gogh TV's huge "Piazza Virtuale" project at Documenta 9 (1992)
included a remote camera controlled via the phone number block … they
also had a "paint" program that permitted several callers to interact by
moving a curser with the touch-tone dial. The callers could see what
they were doing on their TV screen, broadcast on cable/satellite TV
(3sat) in Europe.

Check the D9 catalog for details …