Mark Hansen / Ben Rubin

Still Image from “Listening Post“, 1990-2003, Mark Hansen & Ben Rubin

Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin Listening Post, Real-Time Data Responsive Environment 2001

Notes on “Listening Post”

“Giving visual and sonic form to the electronic ‘chatter’ that happens every day in telecommunications systems. Listening Post is the result of a collaboration between artist Ben Rubin and statistician Dr. Mark Hansen. Together, they created a large multimedia installation that culls conversations from Internet chat rooms and displays bits of them scrolling in complex patterns across grid comprised of 231 tiny display screens suspended from the ceiling. A voice synthesizer also reads or sings words or phrases selected at random with a simple musical background. The snippets displayed are determined by a variety of algorithms: one begins with the most infrequently used words: another sorts messages from shortest to longest; yet another selects first-person statements, such as ‘I am.’ ‘I like.’ and ‘I love.’ Listening Post cycles through six different movements over approximately twenty minutes, each of which generates a different sort of content, visual unfolding, and soundscape. As Michael S. Grant noted. ‘minute messages accrete words, then rush forward, filling the screens with longer and longer fields of words until the whole array of screens fills up like a field of brilliant light… like a force field.’ He described the experience as both ‘transcendental, a visualization of collective consciousness… [and] voyeuristic, a form of eavesdropping that takes on an added edge of sinister implications in the wake of the NSA’s own data-mining program.”