Listening Post is an artwork that visualizes Internet chatroom conversations.[1] The work was created between 2002 and 2005 as a collaboration between the artist Ben Rubin and the statistician Mark Hansen.[2][3]
Listening Post uses custom computer programs to automatically collect thousands of chatroom and bulletin board conversations. The conversations are then parsed by the software into smaller phrases that are displayed on a hanging grid of 231 vacuum fluorescent text displays.[4][5] The displays are hung in a grid format 12 feet high and 21 feet wide,[6] suspended in 11 rows and 21 columns.[7] A text-to speech synthesizer voices some of the phrases as part of the accompanying soundtrack.[8] Writer Adam Gopnik described its soundtrack as "intoning words and sentences one by one in a sepulchral BBC announcer's voice or chanting and singing them in fugue-like overlay".[9]
^Eleey, Peter (6 May 2003). "Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin". Frieze (75). Archived from the original on 9 October 2019. Retrieved 9 October 2019 – via frieze.com.
^"Exhibitions + Collection". San Josรฉ Museum of Art. 21 December 2009. Archived from the original on 9 October 2019. Retrieved 9 October 2019.