Listening Post-Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, 2002
“It is as if Hal, the haywire computer from Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, were giving an avant-garde poetry reading with subtitles.”
Listening Post is a collaboration on the part of sound artist and statistician that presents a visual and aural experience based on the thoughts of the virtual world. A suspended, semicircular grid comprised of 231 LED screens displays various forms of text data collected from thousands of unrestricted internet chat rooms, online forums, and other sources of digital discussion spaces in real-time, and read aloud by synthesized voice. Computer algorithms and software filters sift through the successive waves of incoming text and display and announce particular words or phrases based on a preset that can be set and adjusted by the Listening Post database. The system goes through a cyclical rotation of successive algorithms that change the way that the system interprets and portrays the information it has collected, each with a unique visual mapping and sound dynamic. Essentially, Listening Post “gives a visual, palpable, and audible form to online activities”. Rubin contends that, “while these spaces, (chat rooms, etc.), are by definition public and social, the experience of “being in” such spaces is silent and solitary”. Hansen and Rubin have produced a tangible acknowledgement to the existence of these online social networks and given them a voice. The Listening Post translates this chatter into a physical environment.
The nature of the interactivity of the project is not one of the system interacting with the natural environment, as in many other interactive projects, but rather the system operating in accordance with the otherwise unseen stimuli of the collective conscious of the world. It has been deemed to possess a level of “delegated interactivity” where the viewer can see the dramatization of the system output of the interface between human to machine to human and participate in the exchange.
The challenge in designing such an interface is apparent in that the system has to take the mass of
incoming messages and translate it into something comprehensible both visually and audibly. For
the designers, “the primary design problem presented by the project was one of intelligibility, of enabling visitors to infer meaning from the textual commentary, without losing sight of its complexity and dynamism”. The filters and presets prevent the output from being overrun with information. Even with only a small portion of the screens active, it is sometimes difficult to interpret
the entirety of the content. Sound becomes essential for the visitor to “extract meaning from the installation”. The “melody rises and falls in response to shifts in online traffic volume, like a wind chime stirring in response to fluctuations in air
mass”.
Video:
Sources:
AD March 2005
Boumon, Margot. The Machine Speaks The Worlds Thoughts. Parachute no112 108-25 2003
Bureand, Annick; Torgoff. Ars Electronica. Art Press no307 72-3 D 2004
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