Methaphone

A space in the hand. A weight in the pocket. Where the phone isn’t.

“Three things that will always get you through: Art, friendship, and nature.”
—Tilda Swinton on Fresh Air

Some time ago my friend Eric gifted me a lasting insight: making art can be an act of friendship. His advice was simple—“Make art for friends.” It’s an invitation to create for an audience of one or two … to label a package with a friend’s address long before the piece for them is finished.

Through more conversations with Eric, I learned that the phrase can also recombine—each version holding its own unique energy:

• Make art for friends

• Make art with friends

• Make friends with art

Thus I was all the more excited when Eric and I finally had the chance to make something together this month:

Methaphone

We carry our phones everywhere. It feels strange and unsettling when we can’t feel them. We twitch, worried we've lost something.

Methaphone looks like a simple acrylic slab—and it is. But it’s also a stand-in, a totem, and an alibi. It’s the first step on the road to freedom.

Take it instead of your phone. Let it ride along in you jacket or your jeans. If you’re anxious, rub the surface with your thumb. When you need to avert your gaze, it’s there for you to pull out and look through.

Opioid addicts have used methadone to help step down from dependency, and now you have this.

• Translucent by design
  Light and imagination pass through it uninterrupted

• Fully compatible with innate curiosity
  Optimized for your own agency and emerging ambition

• Do Not Disturb reimagined from the ground up
  Runs on the Eternally Unbothered OS

• Powered entirely by ambient light
  Display adjusts instantly. Dark mode is really dark.

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We will make 80 methaphones — plus a few limited edition neon versions (see below). If they are wildly successful, we may make more.

The Medium is …