KRISTA CONNERLY

Weather-Call Service offered a mobile weather activation service provided through cell phone text messaging. The system gives up to date instructions to users on how to interact with and create weather systems. Responses from participants, including text messages and cell-phone photos, can be sent directly from their phone to our weather map. This service was provided for three weeks through the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. The feedback of participants over the course of three weeks is turned into a dynamic weather map.

KRISTA CONNERLY

Urban Parlour Games offers an updated set of Victorian parlour games that users can play on the street. These games borrow the logic (and sometimes name) of their Victorian counterparts in order to provoke absurd and intimate encounters among strangers and friends. Materials are available online at www.urbanintimacy.org. This project was exhited at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan and at Delta Axis @ Marshal Arts, Memphis, TN. In the permanent collection of the New Museum's Rhizome.

KRISTA CONNERLY

Solfataras: areas of high temperature activity, is a collaborative play, using photos, a printed manual, and a website. Participants may go online to view instructions and meeting times and places left by myself or other participants. Likewise, there is an on-line forum for individuals to create their own scenes. These can be acted out independently or be extended as invitations to myself and others. Photos and the printed instruction manual associated with this play were presented at Regina Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA.

KRISTA CONNERLY AND THOMAS FEULMER

One fall, Thomas Feulmer and Krista Connerly visited a local bar where a piano player played old show tunes and the patrons sang along. Noting the community and comraderie that was created by this environment Feulmer and Connerly decided to become regulars. Below are some of their notes.

Project Parameters:  
We will visit a local Pittsburgh bar every Friday evening for the next three and a half months.  On Friday nights a man plays music and sings, and visitors can sing along and make requests.  The clientele is primarily around age 50. 

Before becoming regulars we tried to come up with some basic characteristics of a regular.  We decided that, at its most elemental level, a regular is a person who:

1. visits the same place
2. for the same service, event, and/or product
3. frequently, or with some degree of regularity – repeated with respect to nature of service, event, or product; a regularity to the quantity of time (intervals) between visits

Or with respect to the action, the repeated factors could be one or all of the following:

1. place
2. event, product, or service
3. interval of time between services
4. with same person, to see same people

Furthermore, we contemplated the feelings that arise from repeating an activity.  Some possibilities were:
           
1. sense of place established – home feeling outside of immediate home
2. sense of community strengthened, common experience with others
3. activity – common source of enjoyment, feeling that you have same goals, values, or expectations from life
4. pattern of activity – implies you have a common rhythm of life with others
5. reaffirmation of above – absence of change, comfort in steadfastness/strength of values

Of course, it’s not that simple.  Our thoughts were based on one type of experience.  Why repeat something?  Why repeat it with a group?  Can you be a regular with one person?  Or with one person amongst a group?  Or even alone?

Significant Actions  

We became regulars in 2 ways: as individuals who are at the bar, and as a group of 2 who go there together.  Our relationship with the people in the bar was under the terms of a common place and moment each week.  Our relationship together, as two people, was under the terms of a common action and a common intent every week at the same time…within/amongst that group.  We became each other’s audience.  Yet, as outsiders, as a self-contained group or couple, we became performers for them, and at the same time, we were audience for their activity.

What does it mean for someone to think they know you or know something about you? How much are things assumed about us? How much do we assume about others? How much do we imply relations among others? When do you feel comfortable to make assumptions about people? When do you feel comfortable enough to misinterpret someone?

After visiting the bar for three Fridays, a certain degree of familiarity developed.  We felt recognized.  When we arrived, some of the regulars nodded and smiled as we walked to our table.  When we left, some would say, “Have a nice night,” or, “See you next time.”  After visiting the bar for three months, we were welcomed and greeted with warm comments, but we still felt aware of being younger than them and relatively new to a shared experience that is so much a part of their week, how they understand themselves, and where they go to be with people like them.

At what point do actions become significant? Are they significant only when there is a desired outcome? Can mundane actions be significant in their own right? Is something significant if it happens only once? Does it need to be repeated? Are communities made up of action or people? If significance is immeasurable, why? What are its qualities?

Where does this desire come from?  People repeat actions and activities all the time, alone and in groups...or alone within a group.  It’s a desire to be recognized, to be similar.  Or it’s a desire to be completely alone, a need for any singular identity to disintegrate into the feeling of being (part of) a group.  As a group, one assumes certain values are shared among members; there is an affinity with others.  How does one become a somebody in a group?  And, consequently, how does one become a nobody?  Or an anybody?  Can one disintegrate into a unique identity by repeating an action with people? 

What is important? Personal Interactions? Connections between people? Belonging? Longing?

KRISTA CONNERLY

Ten love letters written to Pittsburgh area strangers and put into circulation at the Carnegie Public Library, Pittsburgh, PA. The letters were written over the course of two months - during which Connerly attempted to fall in love with a different stranger every few days. Two words were pulled from each letter and these keywords were given along with the letters to the librarian. The librarian then catalogued them according to their subject and nestled them among the stacks. The placement of the letters could be acessed via card-catalogue.