paul shortt

Paul Shortt’s Missed Connections project is ridiculously creative and simply awesome.

In this video, he returns to the locations at which these missed connections took place and has the posts read in different voices playing over the shots. Listening to the posts read aloud is a completely different experience than both reading them and rewriting them, as I’ve been doing on post-it notes for my own project. Hearing the words and these thoughts that the authors of the posts probably haven’t even said aloud themselves elevates the project to a whole new dimension of voyeurism and borderline creepiness. The video also emphasizes the loneliness inherent in the posts, as the shots are devoid of people and slightly dizzying, with the camera swaying around not-so-smoothly just as anyone would if they had just lost sight of that certain someone. It’s great.

Shortt also has a series of photographs of recreated missed connections that I really love. He returns to the site where the connections were missed and rewrites the text using the found materials there, his media of choice ranging from birthday cake icing to lipstick. These really transform the plain jane text on Craigslist to something so much more tangible and real, as if we are now a third party following the tracks of both the author of the original post and the person sought after. These interventions also play up the slightly funny undertones of each post. Perhaps I’m just insensitive but even the most heartfelt and sincerest of posts emote some degree of humor by virtue of being on the internet, especially considering the minuscule chance of that person ever finding the post, and the even more microscopic chance of that person reciprocating the feeling. Nevertheless, the posts are super sweet and so are Shortt’s recreations.

Price Chopper

Goodwill

Barnes and Noble

Loose Park

Jimmy John’s

Starbucks

I don’t want to be a copycat but adding some element of sound is really appealing to me right now, despite my lack of any technological ability whatsoever. Even if it’s just reading the times of the posts and not the whole thing, or having the sounds of a subway announcements or tracks, or something else dealing specifically with the limited setting of the subway system I’ve chosen, I think it would jazz up the entire project.

Returning to the site of a missed connection is also a great idea. My original idea for my project was to collect the same subset of missed connections I have been (on the NYC subway system) and to actually go on the subway and collect photographs of people who I think fit the descriptions. I wanted to use an instant camera (Fujifilm Instax) and then write the same serial number and quote that I am putting on my post-its. Several problems got in the way, the most notable being 1) I don’t live in NYC and can’t just skip my senior year of college and 2) I can’t afford a new camera, let alone the ridiculously expensive film that I would need to buy for 1000s of photos. I’m thinking maybe I can record some sound bites in the city over winter break maybe? And incorporate them somehow? Who knows. I have no idea.

Anyway, I’m so so happy I came across Shortt’s work as it’s given me inspiration to push my work further than what I’m doing now and to experiment more freely. I know that I have to majorly step up my game from this point forward.

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artist’s website: http://paulshortt.com/

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The Center for Missed Connections

This is an awesome website: http://centerformissedconnections.info/

Ingrid Burrington collects data from Craigslist and analyzes it extensively. In her own words: “Basically, I take posts from the Missed Connections section of New York’s Craigslist and use their contents as data about demographics and behavior patterns across New York City.”

My favorite part is the “research” link on the left. There are all sorts of graphs, maps, and color coded charts about missed connections that my naturally compulsive organizational self is of course drawn to. There’s also this little gem: Taxonomy of Missed Connections (PDF)

I deal with that one small branch on the left (on public transportation) and upon exploring the site more, found out I wasn’t the only one. Under research > Reports and Studies > Strangers on a Train: Missed Connections on the NYC Subway System, there are a few descriptions of subway missed connections specifically. I suppose my idea wasn’t so original after all, but this page describes some factors that contribute to the subway system’s loneliness index, many of which led to me choosing NYC in addition to my personal experience there. These factors include (quoted from the website):

1. Pretty much everyone rides the train.
2. It’s close quarters, and you can’t really just leave.
3. Weird shit happens on the train.
4. Fucking scary shit happens on the train.
5. Because people commute, they tend to see the same people frequently.
6. The liminal quality of transit in general lends itself to existential angst.

The full descriptions are just great so I’d definitely suggest checking them out on the site, but this list sums it up pretty well. I love the idea of the subway being described as lonely. It seems to contradict the population density of the city and all the hustle & bustle that it’s known for, but I definitely felt this underlying loneliness living there, and it’s been a personal pull for me to return. You feel both lonely and never alone at the same time, if that makes any sense. There are always people around so you’re never technically by yourself anywhere you go, but that also makes it really easy to be invisible and never really part of the sea of the people around you either.

The site also features a couple of graphs showing missed connections by train line, and apparently the L is the loneliest train of them all. This is just perfect considering the title of my first piece (love on the L – taken from the title of one post I came across) but I may or may not change it for my show in the spring. My work is a bit less scientific in nature, as I’ve now progressed to hand write and illustrate on post-its rather than use strict graphs and charts, but the same fascination with strangers, trains, and archiving that drives The Center for Missed Connections really resonates with me and is definitely almost like my own missed connection. Now two months into my work, I never knew this artist existed or that she dealt with the same pool of data that I am dipping into daily. I’m glad to know I’m not the only addicted creep obsessively reading Missed Connections every few hours, getting stressed out that I’ll miss a single post or forget someone or leave out a detail or subconsciously correct a typo by accident. Well, I guess my collection methods are a bit more rudimentary than Burrington’s since she uses a computer database to store her data and has these cute little workbooks, but at least I know I’m not the only one frequenting the site so often.

Finally, I’ll sign off this post with the site’s Suggestions for Increasing Your Chances of Having a Missed Connection (also under research > Reports and Studies):

1. Be out and about!
2. Maintain eye contact at almost all times.
3. Be attractive.
4. If you’re not sure how to be good-looking, at least have a distinct characteristic.
5. The moment a potential connection has been made, disappear.

So if you’re ever in NYC and on the train and have the urge to post a missed connection to find that special someone who catches your eye, you might just end up in my project! (Please make your post funny. Or super cute. But still genuine.)

ben roosevelt

Cover-up

2007, installation of vinyl decals, approximately 100 x 14 feet

Ben Roosevelt speaks to the way we perceive information.  He makes decals of familiar figures or objects – a park bench, a woman in a burka – and places each in one of the squares of the Contemporary’s gridded facade.  Shorn of context, isolated in a frame, the most banal object becomes a portent, and the images that are already loaded become more so, or fraught with ambiguity.

– Catherine Fox, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 6/24/07

Properties

2008-2009, various materials including steel and cardstock, dimensions variable

“Properties,” with its sweep of overlapping angular dwellings, dominates the room. Its flecks of red crawl up walls and around windows like an expanding colony, an abstracted urban sprawl that meanders, thickens and then disperses. Continents and scatter graphs seem to appear in a meditation on populations, on discrete units and aggregates, their “properties” and interpretations.

— Debra Wolf, in the Atlanta Journal Constitution

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I really enjoy Ben Roosevelt’s clean-cut organization of simple, familiar images. The stark black silhouettes of various objects and people in Cover-up and the different forms of buildings in Properties are simple shapes that are easily recognizable yet simultaneously ambiguous, and Roosevelt’s display of them as either gridded out or organically overlapping each other creates these seas of images that everyone can relate to but that each person will interpret and piece together in their own unique way. The two-tone color scheme of these projects further highlights the simplicity of the shapes and allows them to portray a message without any flowery embellishments or glitz and glam.

Since finishing my first project this semester, I plan to continue working with the data of the “Missed Connections” section of Craiglist New York City, but with a more homemade feel and on a more expansive scale, with an array of hundreds of smaller pieces lined up too span entire walls, much like Roosevelt’s pieces. Silhouettes are very appealing to me – I will likely use those of different people that portray, vaguely, different personalities through their posture and gestures – and so is a tight grid-like presentation, both also inspired by a combination of Roosevelt’s works. Though black-on-white is an effective aesthetic palette, I don’t think I can restrain my affinity for color (with my semi-forced justification that New York City is so busy and diverse that I can’t imagine a piece on it without color) so I will likely continue using a rainbow scheme, being careful to not make it too distracting.

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artist’s website: http://benroosevelt.com/

All images posted with permission of Ben Roosevelt.

sophie blackall

You With the Hat – February 14, 2011 – w4m – 28

I see you most mornings, and I think you’ve seen me too. I know how crazy this will sound, but I know exactly what our baby would look like.

Sophie Blackall illustrates select “missed connections” posts on Craiglist, turning sometimes tacky and rather impersonal postings into poignant and charming pieces of art. The hopeful undertone that runs through all missed connections posts are exemplified in Blackall’s whimsical and lighthearted paintings, turning short anonymous lines into developed personal stories. While my methodical and scientific aesthetic lies on the opposite end of the spectrum, I am hoping to incorporate more of this personal touch that Blackall brings to this vast archive of online data.

website: http://missedconnectionsny.blogspot.com