Listening Post

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.



As a work of art and a piece of technological ingenuity in its own right, Listening Post is hard to categorise. An extraordinary investigation into the meaning and malleability of statistics, it combines a Minimal art aesthetic with the elements of chance and randomness common to experimental art from the early 20th century to the present day. But its engagement with media technologies and sophisticated data-analysis techniques differentiates it from traditional visual art. It relies not on the found objects of Modern Art but on found data and extracted thoughts - the very unstill lives of a hundred thousand active minds. Listening Post is an acknowledged masterpiece of electronic art; it references issues and themes central to software and interactive art, while subverting notions of interactivity. By anonymously drawing from active public places on the internet for its raw material, using thousands of expressions from thousands of unwitting online contributors, it repositions the point of interaction to the point of source rather than the point of encounter. It is itself as much a voyeur as the gallery audiences to whom it performs its findings.