For some of us, just letting go of our smartphones for two minutes is a scary proposition. But one must find the courage if they want to vicariously experience the charming frights in artist Jane Tardo’s “Haunted Hearse Phone Roller Coaster Ride.”
Participants set their Apples and Androids to video mode, an attendant secures the precious devices into tiny roller coaster cars like nervous children, and off they go onto a winding track that disappears into the rear of a 1992 Cadillac hearse.
Artist Jane Tardo stands in front of the Haunted Hearse Phone Rollercoaster Ride in New Orleans, Friday, October 20, 2023. (Photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune)
During the circuitous 120-second ride, the phones pass through 13 rooms, where they are beset by phantoms, fierce dinosaurs and other frights, all of which are captured via video for future viewing and sharing on social media. There’s a spot along the route where the terrified telephones pass by their owners, who look like giant monsters on the resultant video. Imagine Godzilla clowning for a selfie.
Selfies were part of the inspiration for the miniature attraction in the first place.
Tardo, a New Orleans native and University of New Orleans grad, said she was inspired by Meow Wolf, the Museum of Ice Cream, Jam NOLA and other attractions that present art as immersive selfie opportunities. Asking herself “what would be the next step,” Tardo hit on the idea of “removing the phone from the person, and sending it off to experience the art on its own.”
Her first experiment in immersive cellphone sculpture was a miniature racetrack titled “Snake Tube Adventure Racing,” in which the phones rode in transparent tubes through a dystopian landscape. Tardo said it was a hilariously chaotic artwork that might have been a hit when she first showed it at a St. Claude Avenue art gallery in 2020, but the timing was all wrong.
COVID-19 shut down the show and the promising “Snake Tube Adventure Racing” installation never reached its full potential.
Benjamin Harlow, center, sets up the spooky scene with Phoebe Ferguson, left, for the Haunted Hearse Phone Rollercoaster Ride in New Orleans, Friday, October 20, 2023. (Photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune)
After the pandemic ebbed, Tardo and her life partner, Benjamen Harlow, bought the hearse and set to work on a new cellphone adventure. They strung together 10,000 pieces of toy monorail track into a 45-foot course that twisted its way through the back of hearse where the coffins used to lie.
At first, Tardo said, there was a 50/50 chance of a phone making it all the way through. But now, the bugs have been worked out.
The Haunted Hearse Phone Rollercoaster Ride is seen in New Orleans, Friday, October 20, 2023. (Photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune)
Tardo, who is known for her artistic tapestries, stitched together the ghostly scenes and blood-spattered backgrounds that surround the track, from various fabrics and fake fur. The effect is both forbidding and comforting, like the face of Freddy Krueger knitted on a sweater.
“I get scared pretty easily,” Tardo said. So the tone of the haunted roller coaster is “in the spirit of Halloween, but not really scary.”
Tardo and Harlow exhibited the “Haunted Hearse Phone Roller Coaster Ride” at the Good Children art gallery in New Orleans this spring, and also took the attraction to Long Beach, California, for the “Midsummer Scream,” an enormous Halloween fan convention.
Phoebe Ferguson makes spooky gestures as a cellphone rides on the Haunted Hearse Phone Rollercoaster Ride in New Orleans, Friday, October 20, 2023. (Photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune)
“It was very well received” by so-called “pumpkin heads,” the sort of people for whom every day is Halloween, Tardo said. “It’s unlike anything anyone’s seen,” she said.
The “Haunted Hearse Phone Roller Coaster Ride” will appear at the Frenchmen Art Bazaar, 619 Frenchmen St., from 7:30 p.m. to midnight on Oct. 23, 26, 30. The cost to ride is a mere $1 per phone.