17_IN_BRubin_m&a:Maquetación 1
26/6/08
17:24
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chatrooms. As you watch, you slowly become aware that what you are seeing and hearing is, effectively, a snapshot of the world talking. It is strangely moving. It’s also ground-breaking as the first work of art to communicate effectively the scope and nebulous nature of the internet. In a review of the art/technology festival Ars Electronica in 2004, where the piece won the Golden Nica award for interactive art, Michelle Kasprzak of Mute magazine described it as a “monument to the present”. A computer attached to the screen-bank takes all the messages posted in the preceding half hour from several thousand English-speaking chatrooms across the internet, then sorts this raw data according to one of seven programmes that Hansen has developed, before displaying the results on the screens. Each of these programmes is behind a different “movement” of the piece, and each has a different intention: one, for example, picks out only screen names for display—toothlessblond, whoever you are, you made my day. The feed of data is continuous, so it never repeats itself.
Listening Post, 2002-2006
“The icons of the 20th century, such as Stephenson’s Rocket and Apollo 10 are big, beautifully crafted objects,” says Hannah Redler, the Science Museum’s head of arts projects, “but contemporary science and technology is very much in the micro-world, the world of concept. It’s a constant challenge for us to find things that communicate science in themselves, and this does that.” This isn’t how Listening Post started, however. When Rubin met Hansen at a conference designed to introduce artists to researchers at the famous Bell Labs (out of which have come the transistor, the laser, information theory and
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