Interactivity presentation

“live people as part of the collage“

The Rosemary Initiative

 What are the affects of contemporary surveillance technologies on social interaction? How might they be re-circuited to enhance social connectivity and awareness within open societies?

The Rosemary Initiative probes conditions of social networks within panoptic environments. It explores influences of location mapping and analysis technologies on social interaction via a series of staged events ..

To a certain extent, contemporary social networks can be described as an economy through which personal relations propagate, and within which identities form, cultures emerge and establish themselves, and eventually dissolve. Within this context, one’s social identity becomes (in part) a function of relations, defined by strong and weak ties explicitly established by an individual or inferred through a history of transactions.

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Listening Post

Listening Post by Mark Hansen and Ben Ruben is an art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens. 

This work won a Golden Nica from Ars Electronica in 2004, and has been widely exhibited since then.   In Ruben’s artist statement, he says

“My starting place was simple curiosity: What do 100,000 people chatting on the Internet sound like? Once Mark and I started listening, at first to statistical representations of web sites, and then to actual language from chat rooms, a kind of music began to emerge. The messages started to form a giant cut-up poem, fragments of discourse juxtaposed to form a strange quilt of communication. It reminds me of the nights I spent as a kid listening to the CB radio, fascinated to hear these anonymous voices crackling up out of the static. Now the static is gone, and the words arrive as voiceless packets of data, and the scale is immense. And so my curiosity gave way to my desire to respond to this condition.

Anyone who types a message in a chat room and hits “send” is calling out for a response. Listening Post is our response — a series of soundtracks and visual arrangements of text that respond to the scale, the immediacy, and the meaning of this torrent of communication.”

This installation has inspired other forms of text harvesting – see Debbie’s review of We Feel Fine, or The Dumpster, a Tate Net Art comission that mines the romantic lives of teenagers.