"The act of confession and apology is itself a creative act: an attempt to find meaning in the restructuring of one’s experience into a moral tale. Only by finding a moral can one turn the page and move on."

  Allan Bridge

 

 

The Apology Line

 

This Web site is dedicated to the memory of Allan Bridge and the Apology Line, an art project he began in 1980 and ran until his untimely death in 1995. The rich legacy of this project consists of over 1,000 cassette tapes filled with confessions and people’s innermost thoughts and feelings, which were recorded over the telephone during this fifteen year period.

Over the course of the project, the Apology line received more than ten thousand confessions, for misdeeds ranging from pulling pigtails in grade school to a series of sadistic ritual murders. Click here to read a small selection of some of the messages recorded on the Apology Line. In a period prior to the emergence of the Web and online communities, Allan pioneered the use of telephone technology to permit confessions to be recorded, played back and commented on by an ever-expanding virtual community.

The Apology phenomenon has been the subject of more than 100 interviews and articles in North America, Europe and Asia. Initially exhibited in museums and galleries, the Apology tapes, most of them recorded on a simple Record-A-Call answering machine, now constitute a unique archive of the secret lives of Americans. During his lifetime, Allan also published 10 issues of The Apology Magazine, which included transcriptions of many of the more provocative calls.

Copies of Apology Magazine are still available as well as a CD which includes recordings of the most interesting calls to the line over the course of its history. Click here if you are interested in obtaining copies of the Apology CD or Magazine.

There are now several efforts underway to preserve the Apology archive and bring this unique material to a broader audience. First of all, Sugar Pictures, a documentary film company co-founded by Thom Powers, an Apology caller and friend of Allan's, is planning to produce a documentary film on Allan Bridge and the Apology Project. To bring this film to life, Thom is hoping to include interviews with some of the many callers who actively participated in Apology Line, either as confessors, commentators or listeners. If you were one of the callers and have any interest in participating in the documentary, please send us an email.

A book is also being developed about the Apology Line together with a CD-ROM that will include a fascinating assortment of the recorded confessions. Please register with our mailing list if you would like receive notification when this book and CD-ROM become available.