The advent of online communication has created a vast landscape of new spaces for public discourse: chat rooms, bulletin boards and scores of other on-line forums. While these spaces are public and social in their essence, the experience of "being in" such a space is silent and solitary. A participant in a chat room has limited sensory access to the collective "buzz" of that room or others nearby -- the murmur of human contact that we hear naturally in a park or a plaza is absent from the online experience.

A collaboration between myself and artist Ben Rubin (EAR Studio), Listening Post is a multimedia art installation designed to convey the magnitude and diversity of online communication. This unique space provides a meaningful rendering of a massive data stream consisting of thousands of simultaneous conversations. The visual centerpiece of Listening Post is a suspended, curved grid of more than two hundred small screens. These screens display fragments of text that are continuously gathered in real time from unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other forums. The work is structured as a sequence of "scenes," each of which organizes incoming communications according to different statistical criteria. Mirroring the fluidity and dynamism of the Internet itself, topics emerge and change from day to day, hour to hour. A coordinated audio component underscores the content presented on the screens, layering algorithmically generated musical compositions with the vocalization of captured messages, spoken by a text-to-speech system.

Listening Post is the most recent outcome of my three-year collaboration with Ben Rubin, initially sponsored by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Bell Laboratories. Our work together began with the notion that finding meaning in complex data requires a balance of data analysis and design, of formal modeling and aesthetics. In this talk, I will describe how our work has evolved, starting with our early experiments with pure sonification of Web traffic. I will end with our most recent project, a public art commission involving a live data feed from Google's news service.

Listening Post was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, December 20, 2002 through March 9, 2003.

http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~cocteau
http://www.earstudio.com/projects/listeningpost.html