Upfront

Setting the mood for this month's issue is our cover photograph of Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin's Listening Post, currently featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (www.whitney.org). This remarkable installation runs on four computers and as many operating systems (including Linux, of course) and expresses the collective voice of the Internet, transforming on-line communication into a multimedia installation.

According to the Listening Post web site, “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.”

I was lucky enough to “view” the Listening Post when it was in Seattle in November 2002, and my first impression was an almost eerie sense of humanness the piece unveils—a poetry not typically associated with computer technology. In a dark room complete with pillows on the floor, a wall of tiny screens depict glowing green text gathered in real time from thousands of public on-line communication channels. These bits of text are accompanied by a computer-generated voice with a British accent, randomly speaking different messages as they flash by. I was particularly struck by the “I am” series; real-time messages beginning with the string “I am” spoken into the darkness: “I am tired.” “I am happy.” “I am Norwegian.” Hundreds of people communicating the most basic aspects of themselves at that precise moment from who knows where to who knows who, while my imagination worked double time wanting to fill in the rest of their stories.

Capturing the ephemeral nature of the Listening Post is difficult; however, Ben Rubin, one of the creators of the Listening Post, best describes the piece in his artist's statement:

Visit the Listening Post web site (www.earstudio.com/projects/ListeningPost.html) for exhibition dates and further information.

—Jill Franklin