The "Tachyonic Antitelephone" is a Dadaist sculpture, built by Gary Nickard, UB assistant professor of visual arts and media study.

Nickard says the sculpture pays homage to a thought experiment devised by astrophysicist Gregory Benford, who described an "anti-telephone" made out of theoretical subatomic particles with no mass -- tachyons -- which travel faster than the speed of light and, by definition, travel backward in time.

Nickard explains: "If you made a call on this phone, Benford said, your message would travel backward so fast as to precede the call itself, thus violating causality and proving the principle of special relativity false. Your message would only 'get through' so to speak, if you didn't make the call, an apparent incongruity that recalls the 'logic' of the Dadaist artists, whose art touted convention by being discordant and unseemly."