It appropriates the often intrusive computer-based telemarketing technology and uses it in a new way, involving people who don't traditionally participate in the art world in an event that probes the diversity of life in the city and the relation of truth to fiction. It used intelligent response programming to engage passersby 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. Typical digital video of the phone locales accompany the recordings and digitally manipulated images become metaphors for information about the recorded calls - for example, dynamic colorizing used to indicate the depth to which a particular answerer went in a conversation.
Telephones allow almost instantaneous linkage between people anywhere on earth.
They enable new kinds of communication including linkages between people who wouldn't ordinarily know each other and the creation of unprecedented kinds of social interchanges such as wrong numbers, answering machines, telemarketing, and the like. Is Anyone There explores both the concrete technological possibilities and the poetry of using pay phones to overcome anomie in contemporary mass society. The drama of their dialogue 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 the safety of spectator to the challenging position of full participant.