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Title: Listening Post
Reviewer: Ernest Lilley
Date: 02/24/03 Rating:
Project Website / Museum Website  / Specs

Summary: Listening Post is a multimedia work by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, on view at the Whitney Museum in NCY from  December 17, 2002 – March 9, 2003 Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Gallery, Floor 1

From the project website: "Listening Post
The visible and audible text in this installation is live, collected in real-time from tens of thousands of chat rooms, forums, newsgroups, bulletin boards, and other public online communication channels. Statistical analysis organizes the messages into topic clusters based on their content, tracking the ebb and flow of communication on the Web. A tonal soundscape underlies the spoken text, its pitches and timbres responding to changes in the flow and content of the messages."

More than 200 small LED displays show fragments of real time text taken from chat rooms and other interactive places on the internet, while computer synthesized voices speak others that have been culled according to specific algorithms. One, for instance recites the many lines found starting with the statement of identity... "I am". A computer program surrounds the exhibit with a "tonal soundscape" providing a musical backdrop for the ever changing expression of the web.

If this makes the internet tangible in some small, imperfect way...does it qualify as representational art?

Nothing can access all of the web in real time, and any project like this will necessarily show the biases of it's programming...but that doesn't make it less valid for the emotional responses listening to it evoke.

• Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, Listening Post
• Installation view at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2002
• Electronic components, copper wire, aluminum, loudspeakers, and software, dimensions variable. Collection of the artists
• Project Credits Page