Art Talk

For the second class, I held my (required) 5 minute "Art Talk". My talk was about the installation I saw at the Whitney in 2003, called Listening Post. Created by Ben Ruben with Mark Hansen, it was a field of phosphorescent screens working individually or in tandem and displaying scrolling words or phrases, while some of the words/phrases were spoken or sung by a synthetic voice. It was a enveloping environment, built around six different "movements" or visual/audio combinations. What really made the work intriguing was where the text was derived -- from hundreds of chat rooms in real time. So the work represented a kind of collective unconscious, at least for those within the Internet sphere. This work had a use for current electronics technology that was novel for me, and allowed me to see how decent art can be made with it.
(picture from NYT, I think)