What forms of intimacy take place in the city? How can poetry replace efficiency? Our everyday movements through the urban environment seem to allow for intense possibilities of exchange and interpenetration. In certain zones, economies of desire replace the economy of efficiency. What does it look like in these places?

Founded in 2001 by Krista Connerly, urbanintimacy.org is both a collaborative project space and research initiative that responds to these questions. Urbanintimacy.org highlights projects by artists and thinkers who address issues of urban life and its effects on our psyches and our relationships. As a collaborative research initiative, urbanintimacy.org has instigated many projects that seek to replace rationality with sensuality, and isolation with relationship. Collaborators include: Krista Connerly, Tracy Featherstone, Thomas Feulmer, and Jen Thomas. Urbanintimacy is always seeking interested thinkers/makers for future collaborations. Please e-mail krista(at)urbanintimacy(dot)org if you are interested.

How do we connect to each other and the world around us in a meaningful way? This question drives the work of artist/designer and poetic sociographer Krista Connerly. To investigate, she works in a variety of media including the internet, photography, writing, performance, and video among others. Whatever the media, she is interested in turning art viewer into collaborator, provoking forms of interaction that through humor and poetry temporarily override the efficiency and rationality of everyday life.

Connerly’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in places such as Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, Memphis, Basel, Cairo, Dublin, and Melbourne. Some of these venues include: The Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Michigan, The Next Wave Festival in Melbourne, Australia, WOW, Women’s International Film Festival in Sydney Australia, The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, and at the Egyptian Ministry of Culture in Cairo. Connerly lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She earned her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and was a Visiting Professor at Chatham College, Grand Valley State University and Oregon State University. She was also the Program Director of Digital Media and Photography at Anderson Ranch Art Center where she re-invigorated the Photography program with a critical bent and created the new Digital Media program which included classes in video, animation, code-art, interactive installation and physical computing.