I recently began putting silly posters up on telephone poles, inviting people to text or call me.

I turned a bunch of the voicemails that I've received over the past few months into a kind of interactive VM artwork, which you can check out -- and contribute to? -- by dialling 778-825-0778.

How it works: I'm using voip.ms, who offer a "digital receptionist" or "interactive voice response" (IVR) feature -- i.e., a phone tree.

I periodically vet the voicemail recordings that are left, then upload them to voip.ms's servers, to be used as the outgoing messages of the phone tree. Twice a day on average I re-randomize the database; i.e., I run a script that, through the API, updates the IVR files' pointers to create a new random order.

What I've learned: 1) A bit about programming a phone tree. 2) That my neighbors are beautifully fascinating.