Listening Post

Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s Listening Post uses fragments from public forums such as chatrooms to create a real-time exploration of text dissociated from traditional communication.  The project displays the text on more than two hundred small screens, while using a voice synthesizer to intone the words.  The installation includes six movements, each built upon different data processing logic.

Listening Post began as an effort to “map” sound and data–to visualize the fragments in a way that has both aesthetic and research value.  Ben Rubin explains the project’s roots as a synthesis of curiosity about the nature of language, an interest in data, and a childlike sense of wonder: 

My starting place was simple curiosity: What do 100,000 people chatting on the Internet sound like? Once Mark and I started listening, at first to statistical representations of web sites, and then to actual language from chat rooms, a kind of music began to emerge. The messages started to form a giant cut-up poem, fragments of discourse juxtaposed to form a strange quilt of communication. It reminds me of the nights I spent as a kid listening to the CB radio, fascinated to hear these anonymous voices crackling up out of the static. Now the static is gone, and the words arrive as voiceless packets of data, and the scale is immense. And so my curiosity gave way to my desire to respond to this condition.

The work, although stripping words from their original context, gives viewers a sense of the scale of Internet communications while often creating found poems that would make the Surrealists proud.  Reflecting the range of public data, the project’s stunning visual and aural displays turn the artists’ original fascination into innovative real-time art.