In Local 411, we use the public phone to invigorate the historical landscape of the city in search of contemporary public art. The phone is physical, it creates an intimate space that unites people over distance, even across time.

Local 411 is a project created to address the Yerba Buena Redevelopment Zone, in San Francisco.  Here, 4000 former residents of residential hotels have been displaced to make room for what has been called the ?jewel in the crown that is San Francisco.?   Groundskeepers continually clean the large grassy area, waste is quickly swept up before it can settle.  Surrounding the park are the Center for the Arts Galleries and Theater, the Museum of Modern Art, the George Moscone Convention Center and the Mariott Hotel.  More museums are planned for the area.  Many non-profit arts organizations have relocated to the area to take advantage of the consolidation of cultural institutions.  Gone are the Rock Hotel, the Rex and many others.  All traces of the former use of the area have been erased.  Escalating cost of housing have forced the mostly retired former inhabitants into adjoining counties of the Bay Area.  Replacement housing, although promised, was never built.

We use the public telephones located around the Yerba Buena Garden, inside the Museum of Modern Art, inside the Moscone Convention Center and inside the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. We develop three strategies in multiple languages to relocate memories into the Yerba Buena Redevelopment Zone:

1.  From research of the area and its former residents we generate short fictional vignettes.  These memories are recorded and added to a message pool in a custom voicemail system, which is accessed by telephone 24 hours a day and 7 days a week at the cost of a local telephone call.  The stories are recorded in English, Spanish, Mandarin and Tagalog.  The order of the messages in the system changeds every couple of days.  This way you might start by hearing a story in English and then be exposed to another language, much like how you come across different languages while walking down a busy street in San Francisco.  Users manipulate their touch tone keypad for simple navigation through the messages.

2.  The voicemail system solicits memories and impressions from the listener/participant.  When a response is recorded, it is placed in the message pool and becomes available to the next listener.  The message/story pool grows throughout the duration of the piece. 

3.  We collaborate with a group of performers  and supply them with historical research of the area.  Each performer develops one or more characters from this research.  The characters they create include people looking for friends or lovers, individuals who had misdialed-looking for buildings that were no longer there, or ghosts haunting the phones.  Throughout the duration of the piece we called public telephones located in the area, outside in the park as well as in the lobbies of SF MoMA, Yerba Buena Center and the Mariott Hotel. The performers engage with the passers-by in a one-on-one performance.

Date:  1997