Takeaway Festival: Listening Post

Enjoy a private view of the award-winning art installation Listening Post, which explores the ways we communicate online.

Join artists Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin as they talk about their work and ask them questions via video linkup.

Listening Post immerses us in a rhythm of computer-synthesised voices reading, or singing out, a fluid play of real-time text fragments. The fragments are sampled from thousands of live, unrestricted internet chatrooms, bulletin boards and other online public forums. They are uncensored and unedited.

Stray thoughts resonate through the space in sound and voice as texts surge, flicker, appear and disappear, at varying sizes and speeds, across a suspended grid of over 200 small electronic screens. An ambient soundtrack accompanies the activity with isolated pulses reminiscent of computer modems, clatterings, footsteps and the beeping of mechanical answering machines. At intervals darkness and silence take over, creating momentary pauses before Listening Post continues with its next movement.

This event, accompanying the display of Listening Post in the Science Museum, is part of the Takeaway Festival 2008.