LISTENING POST
Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin

San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, Calif.
June 3, 2006 - February 4, 2007

Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, Calif.
Nov. 16th, 2004 - Feb. 27th, 2005

List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Mass.
Feb. 5th - Apr. 4th, 2004

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Dec. 17th, 2002 - Mar. 9th, 2003

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.

"[Listening Post] operates in the gaps between art, entertainment and documentary; it is almost irresistible, like magic" –Roberta Smith, New York Times

At a stroke Listening Post fulfils the promise of most Internet-based art, affecting a simultaneous collapse and expansion of time and space with implications ranging from notions of private and public space to individual thought and its role in group dynamics - and it advances all of this within a form that finally allows net art to compete with the more sensual pleasures we associate with sculpture. –Peter Eleey, Frieze

News & Links

Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica international prize for interactive art form from Ars Electronica and ORF Austrian Broadcasting, May 4, 2004


Webby Award Winner in the Net Art category, June 5th, 2003


Nominated for Wired Rave Awards in the Artist/Performer category, Jan 1st, 2003
Residency and performances at On the Boards, Seattle, Nov 13th - 24th, 2002

Exhibition at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, Dec 6th - 20th, 2001

Details about the work that lead up to Listening Post, including sounds and research papers, can be founds at: http://cm.bell-labs.com/stat/ear

Here are links for information about Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin.