“In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.”

–Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

The project

According to Wikipedia, a missed connection is an occurrence where two or more people are unable to exchange contact information or the information that is exchanged is lost. These missed connections are generally associated with romance, but they may also be business-related or otherwise. Through the use of publications and websites some people seek to reconnect with their missed connection.

We find there’s something poetic about this desperate hope for the reencounter, but also something very ironic about using the internet as the tool to achieve it. It turns out that in the era of social media, when we’re supposedly connected to anyone in the world, the network of missed connections is one of the most inefficient ones.

I Wish I Said Hello attempts to bring missed connection stories back to the public space in the form of street art.

Our goal is not to be another platform for reconnection, rather than a celebration of everyday poetics, a physical mapping of a digital network, a commentary on the role of technology in human communication.

We try to encapsulate specific encounters into stickers. We combine parts of the original text with graphical elements that resonate with it. We use a common, universal style derived from public signage, as well as shapes and colors that imply the digital origin of the story. Once the illustrations are created, we place them at the exact location where that missed connection happened and we document it on the website.

Currently, a series of stickers are installed in different areas of Manhattan, but our goal is to provide a method that’s simple enough for collaborators to join and spread the movement through other cities.

The authors

Lisa Park

Lisa is a Korean artist whose main interest is to create experimental pieces by integrating different artistic media: film, performance, photography, and digital art. She explores the notion of breaking with the traditional space of institutional setting and create environments where everyone is directly involved with the artwork. Her recent works deal with human emotions of loneliness, isolation, identity, and memory. Check them out at http://thelisapark.com 

Adria Navarro

Adrià’s background is Multimedia Engineering, but his passion is to design interactive experiences that nurture people’s creativity. His work plays with the boundaries between digital and analog formats, exploring different ways of blending this two in a wide range of media and technologies, such as print, motion graphics, mobile applications or installations. You can take a look at his portfolio at http://adrianavarro.net

Both Lisa and Adrià are currently studying at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in New York.

You

You are the artist we need to spread this project. Join us and follow this simple steps to create your own Missed Connection street art!