Calling Card Stories • 12/13/07

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FINAL PRESENTATION

Phone Numbers

Links

SUMMARY

Calling Card Stories uses the functionality of a calling card system to tell stories. You start by getting a calling card with set minutes. Upon dialing an access number you are prompted to enter a pin. You use your available minutes to hear chapters of a story. The stories you will be hearing for this version of the project come from a series of recorded conversations between my family members living in both California and Mexico. Though the conversations jump from cousin to aunt to uncle, common storylines emerge: a death, an upcoming wedding, and God. At the end of the story you learn that the people in my family, as with any family, have very strong opinions regarding these things.

You may hang up at any time during the story, the calling card system will remember your most recent chapter location when you call back. If you reach the end of the story before your minutes run out, you are invited to record a response which will get posted to the Calling Card Stories (callingcardstories.org) web site.

Please note that there is a connection charge applied to your first minute of every call. Surcharges apply to calls made from payphones. A maintenance fee will be charged for every week you keep a balance on your card. You have 90 days to use your minutes before they expire. Other terms and conditions apply.

OBJECTIVE

My goal with this project is to turn the calling card system in on itself. That is, connect the caller to the stories of people who normally rely on calling cards to keep in touch.

I want to do this for three reasons: First, I have an interest in exploring new narrative forms. Second, I want to create a project that deals with the immigrant experience, particularly with regards to the issue of keeping in touch with loved ones abroad. And third, because I love to talk on the phone!

BACKGROUND

My mother is an immigrant from Guadalajara, Mexico, migrating to the U.S. when she was 18 years old. My mother’s family in Mexico is very large. She is the youngest of 10 children, three of whom have also migrated to California. Throughout my life calling Mexico has been as constant as trying to find cheaper ways to do so. Most recently my mother has signed up for an international dialing plan that provides one low flat rate to Mexico instead of dealing with the hassle of calling cards. However, most of my other family members still rely heavily on calling cards for their international dialing.

In addition, it is much cheaper to call Mexico from the U.S. than the other way around. What ends up happening is that family in Mexico will “flash” or make a quick call to the U.S. to indicate conversation availability. The person stateside will return the call. This way the cost of the call is shifted to where the minutes are cheaper.

PROCESS

This project has three components: The calling card system, the gathering of content, and the callingcardstories.org web site.

1. The Calling Card System

2. Gathering Content

I wanted to automatically record a series of phone conversations in a chain I would initiate with my mother. The instructions were simple:

I purchased a virtual Guadalajara phone number. I mapped the number to our Asterisk server. When someone in Mexico called the Guadalajara number they were greeted with a message about my project. This message informed the caller that s/he will get to make an international call at a local rate, and that as a part of participating the call will be recorded. At the end of the message the caller would dial the U.S. number after a beep to get connected.

For family in the U.S. to call Mexico, they would dial the ITP Asterisk number, enter my extension, and receive a U.S. to Mexico version of this same recorded greeting.

3. The Web Site and Caller Feedback

At the end of the story in the calling card system callers are invited to record a response to what they just heard. Their response gets automatically posted to the callingcardstories.org web site.

The web site is a very simple Wordpress blog. The recorded responses are sent via email. I am using Shawn Van Every’s ParseMailScript to parse these emails and post the audio content to the blog. I also used his QuickTime Audio/Video Posting Plugin for Wordpress.

PROJECT LAUNCH

The project will go live at the ITP Winter Show

Sunday, December 16 from 2 to 6pm
Monday, December 17 from 5 to 9pm
721 Broadway, 4th Floor
http://itp.nyu.edu/show

My project will be in room 447, the room designated for mobile and other phone projects.

GOING FORWARD

I would like to not rely on phone numbers for identifying entries in the database. I think people would be more willing to use it if it did not store their phone numbers. This would require building some sort of dynamic PIN system, or perhaps a combination of randomly generated PIN and user-selected ID. If this project were entirely web-based (with virtual calling cards instead of printed cards,) these things would be much easier to accomplish. But due to the high cost of printing, I am unable to print cards with unique PINs for this version of the project. For the ITP Winter Show, many cards will be printed with one PIN, callers are identified in the database by their caller ID.

I plan to use this project as proof of concept for my application for the 2008 Digital Artists Residency Program (DARP) at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my mom and dad for being supportive of and receptive to “my cuh-razy ideas.”

I would like to thank Shawn Van Every for all the fish. And for his scripts:

Thanks to Patricia and Felipe for helping me troubleshoot the Wordpress audio posting.


 

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