In Liu Dao’s 2010 interactive video installation "Waiting for Godot", a well dressed character casually waits onscreen, peering both ways down a typical urban street, shuffling legs, looking at the sky. Like a character from Samuel Beckett’s play of the same name, the figure exists unendingly, although not necessarily unhappily, in a state of having no discernible purpose.
As a technological specimen, the character is unaware of being easily observed from viewers in an entirely different dimension. “Real world” people can physically call the waiting person on the number in the brick wall's graffiti in the background. After a few rings the person answers the phone, forming a connection between the real world observer and the video world. The figure disappears into his phone, which falls to the ground without him to hold it, and is transported to a new existence in the caller’s phone. After all the waiting, the character’s existence is like Beckett’s play: absurd. Having finished what could have been eternity, he speaks to the viewer from his new location. The next figure walks onto the screen to inherit the cellular porthole to our invisible dimension, and to wait. [Pete Bradt]