Mixed Connections explores how people express longing within a digital landscape. It uses Craigslist, a classified ad service that offers regionally-specific sites within a universal template, to ask: How do anonymity and location shape the presentation of identity? This piece continually scrapes real Craigslist Missed Connections posts from all of the places that the artist has lived (Pittsburgh, PA; New York, NY; and Durham, NC) and recombines isolated posts into new, interwoven narratives.
Each location had a particular "flavor" a way that people talked about what they were looking for and who they were. In Pittsburgh, it was mostly closeted gay men trying to connect discreetly with other men they’d encountered in local public spaces: Giant Eagle’s and Sheetz. In New York, it was highly fetishized ads searching for people encountered on the Subway. Durham N.C had relatively short posts with an extraordinary number of men attempting to reconnect with women they’d met in parking lots.
The posts themselves tend to fall into similar categories: angry rants at exes, attempts to reconnect to people they lost touch with, open requests for sex from anyone of a certain race, sharing photos of genitalia, and personal confessions. Posters described themselves and their surroundings using the same archetypal language. “I saw you (tall white guy | petite hispanic woman) at the (grocery store | gas station) you were wearing a (red shirt | tight jeans | steelers jersey). (you had such a sexy smile | I loved worshipping your feet). I’d love to see you again, tell me (what I said to you | what I was wearing | what you bought).” The id of America, it turns out, is horny and racist.
The act of recombination produces content that is new, yet immediately identifiable as an example of its genre. As the user scrolls, clicks, and otherwise interacts with the piece, the page glitches and distorts. Any interaction with the page reshapes the posts displayed, while the work as a whole is always growing and changing as more Missed Connections are added to the site. The recombinant posts take on a dreamlike quality, where location, race, gender, age, everything is in flux. Discordant emotions pop up and quickly disappear, sometimes only a single line of dialogue lingers. The common thread is the raw need of the poster and the voyeuristic attempt of the viewer to corral it into something neater.
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