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

Listening Post is an art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens.
Listening Post cycles through a series of six movements, each a different arrangement of visual, aural, and musical elements, each with it's own data processing logic.
Dissociating the communication from its conventional on-screen presence, Listening Post is a visual and sonic response to the content, magnitude, and immediacy of virtual communication.
More info:http://www.earstudio.com/projects/lis...

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Peter Davis]

I saw this at the London science museum. I was visiting the city alone, and say in this room watching and listening for about an hour. I was the only person in the room. It was one of the most poignant moments of my life.

[AllenTracy188]

One of the best experience of my life!!!!!!!!!!

[Lia Croft]

Yupp, on level 1 in the "contemporary arts" section.

[Linn BC]

Is it still there?

[Lia Croft]

Same here... I was like a little spot in darkness alone in this room. One of the most relaxing and exciting thing I've ever experienced. Please go there! It is hard to explain, because the idea is so simple but so lively...

[kipperboy9]

I was extremely sick when I saw this, I went for credit for one of my art classes, I was only able to take away a small bit of what this piece could have conveyed to me but it was enough for me to stick with me and think about it years later

[kiopl2003]

i cant wait to go see this again!

[jinkblade7]

I feel you bro, I had kind of the same experience yesterday. It was like the Internet was giving a hand to Philip Glass to write an electronic opera, mesmerizing shit!

[K Durga]

yes, describing is never the actual experience, and aren't we all doing a similar thing here and on platforms like Facebook?

[adi sulistyo]

beautiful, unethical, dangerous... this is WRONG!!!

[James Barrett]

Amazing.

[iXNineR]

I like to visit it every month or so - I went today. It is such a moving and melancholy experience, eavesdropping on the words that ultimately count for and signify nothing in the great scheme of the universe. And it's also sad to think that one day - as the artists say it will - it will grow quieter and quieter as the message boards and forums that it curates from become obsolete and close down... until it too becomes as meaningless as our noisy little lives. Sigh. Oh, get me. (roll)