Listening Post

Mark Hansen

Statistics & Design/Media Art
UCLA

Date: Friday, March 5, 2004
Place: CS Conference Room
_____ Engineering 1, Rm. 2114
Time: 4:00 pm — 5:00 pm (Refreshments served at 3:30 pm)

Abstract:
A collaboration between myself and artist Ben Rubin, 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 complex data stream sampled from 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.

The technical challenges implied here are considerable; from "frugal" monitoring agents that continually recognize and cull new content, to statistical natural language processing and dynamic clustering schemes that allow us to track topics and extract representative phrases. In this talk, I will describe how our work has evolved, starting with our early experiments with pure sonification of Web traffic. Throughout, I will emphasize the interplay between data analysis and design, between modeling and expression. 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, during the winter of 2003. It is now installed at the List Center at M.I.T. through March, 2004.

http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~cocteau

http://www.earstudio.com/projects/listeningpost.html

MARK HANSEN is an Associate Professor of Statistics at UCLA, where he also has an appointment in the Design|Media Art department.

Host: George Legrady, Professor of Media Arts & Technology and Art