Journal Article

Local 411: private conversations in public space

Silk, Janet, Pollock, Ian

1998

Overview

The American artists Ian Pollock and Janet Silk describe a project entitled Local 411 which they carried out in San Francisco using public telephone systems to address issues relating to the gentrification of the city's Yerba Buena Redevelopment Zone. The authors identify the power of the public telephone as a communications medium and explain the three strategies they employed in this project to alert the general public to the historical resonances of the area in which redevelopment is taking place: the first strategy used recordings of the memories of former residents of the area in a custom voicemail area, where they could be accessed at any time by telephone; the second strategy allowed former residents to record their own contributions to the voicemail system, thus expanding the testimony to the history of the area; and the third strategy involved the use of performance artists who placed calls to telephone booths in the development areas, whereby unsuspecting members of the general public who picked up the ringing telephones found themselves the recipients of an educational exposition on the area's history. The authors relate this project to their earlier Area Code project and assess its value in raising public awareness of the impact of urban planning on the erosion of shared memories.