In Stephen Wilson's project "Is Anyone There?", computer-based systems are calling public telephones and involve curious passengers in short conversations about the events in their particular location.

The telephone system is an artistically unexplored feature of contemporary culture. Telephones allow almost instantaneous linkage between people anywhere on Earth. They enable new kinds of communication linkages including between people who wouldn't ordinarily know each other and the creation of unprecedented kinds of social interchanges such as wrong numbers, answering machines, telemarking, and the like. 'Is Anyone There?' explores both the concrete technological possibilities and the poetry of using pay phones to overcome anomie tn contemporary mass society.
Several locations in San Francisco were chosen on the basis of socioeconomic diversity and their significance to the life of the city. For a week a computer-based system with digitized voice capabilities systematically called pay phones in these spots, at a particular time every hour, 24 hours a day. It used intelligent response programming to engage passers by curious enough to answer a ringing pay phone in a short discussion and digitally recorded the conversations. The topics focused on the lives of those who answered and whatever they consider noteworthy at that particular location. At other times video was used to capture representative images of the locales of the phones and the people who typically spent time near them.
An interactive video installation set up months later allows viewers to explore life near these phones by using this bank of stored sound and digital Quicktime video to selectively and speech controlled call up recorded responses and Images. An interactive hypermedia program encourages viewers to devise strategies for exploring this information - for example, using a spatial / temporal framework to choose to hear the record of the people who answered a financial district payphone location during the midnight to 3 AM period. Typical digital videos of the phone locales accompany the recordings and digitally manipulated images become metaphors for information about the recorded calls - for example, dynamic colonizing used to indicate the depth to which a particular answerer went in a conversation.
This event challenges two common features of art viewing: the typically elite nature of high culture consumption and the passivity of much art appreciation. All those on the street who answer the ringing pay phones - many who would be unlikely to attend any conventional art institutions - become participants in this art event. The drama of their dialog with the computer system is an essential aesthetic focus. In addition, the event systematically questions the safety of passive art viewing by requiring viewers to generate strategies to search the images and sounds of the stored calls. More radically, the event periodically shifts the viewer in the gallery from safety of spectator to the challenging postition of full participant. It places live calls to the phone that the viewer had been vicariously experiencing, and demands that the viewer engage in a real conversation with a live stranger.


Technical Background

HW: Macintosh, Voice Navigator
SW: Hypercard

Stephen Wilson (USA), born 1944, is professor of conceptual design and computer art at San Francisco State University and co-editor of "Leonardo", an international journal of art and science. He holds a B.A. from Antiocb College, an MFA from the school of the Art Institute of Chicago in generative systems and performance art, and a Pb.D. from the University of Chicago in interdisciplinary social science. Numerous publications on interactive art, telecommunications and the artistic dimensions of research. In his artistic work he investigates the cultural effects of new technology on telecommunications, artificial intelligence, synthetic voices, robotics, and the information structures of hypermedia. Lives in San Francisco.