During 1 week in 1992, a computer telemarketing device made hourly calls to selected pay telephones. The device engaged whoever answered in conversations about life in the city, and then digitally stored the conversations. Later, at an installation, viewers interactively explored the city through both a database of these recorded calls and digital video recorded of life near the phones. Is Anyone There? appropriated the often intrusive computer-based telemarketing technology and used it in a new way, involving people who do not traditionally participate in the art world in an event that probed the diversity of life in the city and the relation of truth to fiction.

Several locations in San Francisco were chosen on the basis of socioeconomic diversity and their significance to the life of the city. A computer-based system with digitized voice capabilities systematically called pay phones at these spots every hour, 24 hours a day. The system used intelligent response programming to engage passersby who were curious enough to answer a ringing pay phone and participate in a short discussion; the system digitally recorded the conversations. Topics focused on the lives of those who answered and whatever they considered 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.

The interactive video installations (set up at SIGGRAPH '92 and at Ars Electronica '93) allowed viewers to explore life near these phones by using the bank of stored sound and digital Quicktime video to selectively call up recorded responses and images. An interactive hypermedia program encouraged viewers to devise strategies for exploring this information---for example, by using a spatial/temporal framework to choose to hear the recording of people who answered a financial district pay phone location during the midnight to 3:00 A.M. period. Typical digital video of the phone locales accompanied the sound recordings, and digitally manipulated images became metaphors for information about the recorded calls (Fig. 1). For example, dynamic colorizing was used to indicate the depth to which a particular answerer went in a conversation.

The installation challenged the safety of passive art viewership by shifting occasionally into real-time mode and automatically placing live calls to the pay phones, linking the viewer with a real person on the street at the location on the screen.