Listening Post Art Exhibit.

Whilst visiting the Science Museum in London for Amanda's birthday trip we went to see an audio visual art installation at the museum called the Listening Post. The display consisted of lots of small LCD screens set up in a dark room in a grid. The installation basically listened to thousands of Internet chat rooms and forums. This text would then be converted into synthesised, and vocoded speech.


The display must have used some kind of search algorithm to decide what to play, but you essentially heard computer speech in surround sound played over what sounded like a generative ambient sound score. It sounded really impressive, I certainly recommend going to see it if you are in London. The science Museum is FREE to visit and is near South Kensington tube station.

The listening post is running from Feb 19th 2008 too Feb 19th 2009.



Here is some blurb from the site:

Listening Post is a ‘dynamic portrait’ of online communication, displaying uncensored fragments of text, sampled in real-time, from public internet chatrooms and bulletin boards. Artists Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin have divided their work into seven separate ‘scenes’ akin to movements in a symphony. Each scene has its own ‘internal logic’, sifting, filtering and ordering the text fragments in different ways.

By pulling text quotes from thousands of unwitting contributors' postings, Listening Post allows you to experience an extraordinary snapshot of the internet and gain a great sense of the humanity behind the data. The artwork is world renowned as a masterpiece of electronic and contemporary art and a monument to the ways we find to connect with each other and express our identities online.