Listening Post is a single artwork installation, composed of a gently curving aluminum lattice hung with 231 miniature computer screens that cull text fragments in real time from the internet. Using several computers to analyse data from thousands of chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums, the installation selects 85 postings beginning with "I am," "I like" or "I love." Gradually, the communiques appear on the displays, filling more and more space with their light. The selected texts vary in length and complexity; the simpler and shorter ones coming first, with the beep of a telephone answering machine preceding the appearance of each message.

Cycling through a series of six movements, each a different arrangement of visual, aural and musical elements; each with its own data processing logic, Listening Post is a visual and sonic response to the content, magnitude and immediacy of virtual communication. Created by Mark Hansen, associate professor of Statistics at UCLA, and media artist Ben Rubin, Listening Post sheds light on the enormous quantity of online discourse in the digital ‘Tower of Babel’ and reveals the absolutely unbelievable mass of communication on the internet. The installation won the 2004 Golden Nica Prize from Ars Electronica.
 
The piece, acquired by the San Jose Museum of Art, is the cornerstone of ‘Edge Conditions’ exhibition, curated by Steve Dietz.

Ben Rubin: Artist’s Statement
I used to wonder whether it might be possible to hear the sounds of ancient potters’ chatting by ‘playing’ the grooves formed on pots thrown a thousand years ago. For years, I have thought about ways to hear inaudible phenomena, ways to map the observable world into the sound domain.

My starting place was simple curiosity: What do 100,000 people chatting on the internet sound like? Once Mark and I started listening, at first to statistical representations of web sites, and then to actual language from chat rooms, a kind of music began to emerge. The messages started to form a giant cut-up poem, fragments of discourse juxtaposed to form a strange quilt of communication. It reminded me of the nights I spent as a kid listening to CB radio, fascinated at those anonymous voices crackling up out of the static. Now the static is gone, and the words arrive as voiceless packets of data, and the scale is immense. And, so my curiosity gave way to my desire to respond to this condition.

Anyone who types a message in a chat room and hits "send" is calling out for a response. Listening Post is our response–a series of soundtracks and visual arrangements of text that respond to the scale, the immediacy and the meaning of this torrent of communication.
Every word that enters our system was typed only seconds before by someone, somewhere. The irregular staccato of these messages form the visual and audible rhythms of Listening Post. The sound-generating systems are almost like wind chimes, with the wind in this case not being meteorological but human, and the particles that move not being air molecules but words. At some level, Listening Post is about harnessing the human energy that is carried by all these words, and channeling that energy through the mechanisms of the piece.

Listening Post represents the most significant outcome so far of my collaboration with Mark Hansen, the only artist I know whose medium of expression is statistics. Since we began working together, my conceptual vocabulary has grown to include notions like clustering, smoothing, outliers, high-dimensional spaces, probability distributions, and other terms that are a routine part of Mark's day-to-day work. Having glimpsed the world through Mark's eyes, I now hear sounds I would never have listened to.

Mark Hansen: Artist’s Statement
5:45am, November 29, 2001, Chinatown. On this rainy morning, I am alone in Ben's studio putting the various pieces of Listening Post through their paces. It takes four computers and as many operating systems to generate the pulses of soft blue light and the accompanying waves of synthetic sounds and voices. After a little more coffee, I'll check on the data. Thousands of people are waking up and signing on, greeting friends in chat rooms, posting messages and sparring for the inevitable online debates that will take place once the rest of their world revives.

I met Ben two years ago at a workshop organised by BAM and Lucent Technologies. The event was held in the upper floors of a building at the southern tip of Manhattan. There, with all of Brooklyn spread before us, Ben told me about his life with sound. Given the subject of Listening Post, it seems fitting that this initial conversation took place high above the city. From that vantage point, it is hard not to be drawn to the pedestrians, the taxis and subway trains, all in motion–the flow of thousands of lives.

At that workshop, Ben told me about his interest in translating data into sound. He described a community of researchers tapping the human auditory system for new ways to make meaningful observations about data. Can we hear certain patterns in a data set that are difficult to recognise with traditional visualisation tools? Ben's eloquence and conviction were hard to dismiss, and so our collaboration began. Our proposal for the BAM/Lucent programme was primarily about ‘data sonification’; it seemed like a natural first step for a statistician and a sound artist.

At that point, my research focused on modelling how people made use of information systems. Think web sites, search engines and WAP phones. I was accustomed to discovering users through the traces of their activities left behind in (massive) log files captured by various servers in the network. Early in our work together, Ben and I agreed that our projects should have a strong social component. As we considered various data sources, I remember suggesting chat as an ideal candidate. After a couple weeks of observing the dynamics of active online forums, we knew we were onto something. Over the next few months, we refined our ideas through public performances and academic talks and publications.

From its conception, Listening Post has been a product of our combined talents. The space is as much about an artistic expression as it is about data analysis. There were no (well, few) disciplinary divides in the process that produced the space you are about to enter. Ben had as much input in data collection and modelling as I did on questions of design and aesthetics.

And that's how I come to find myself sitting here this morning, in the company of so many stray thoughts, appearing and disappearing on the displays, resonating in sound and voice. This installation, its physical presence as well as the underlying intellectual questions are new for me, as they are for Ben. I suppose it is the mark of a genuine collaboration that the participants are led in directions they could never have imagined.
To the architects of the BAM/Lucent programme, Wayne Ashley and Marah Rosenberg, I offer my deepest thanks. I also want to mention my friend and Department Head, Diane Lambert, who gave me the freedom to pursue this incredible opportunity.

Mark H. Hansen is a Member of the Technical Staff, Statistics and Data Mining Research Department, Bell Laboratories. His research concerns methods for data-rich applications, especially those arising in telecommunications networks.
EMAIL: cocteau@research.bell-labs.com
URL: http://stat.bell-labs.com/who/cocteau

Ben Rubin is a sound designer and multimedia artist, whose installations and performance works have been exhibited internationally. Rubin teaches at the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Programmwe. He is the director of EAR Studio, a multimedia design and technology firm in New York City that he founded in 1993.
EMAIL: benrubin@earstudio.com
URL: http://www.earstudio.com