Hear Allan Coukell's feature on this exhibit for Here and Now.

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Previous generations built stone temples and cities, learned to plant crops, smelt iron and erect skyscrapers. The defining technological advance of our age, however, is the internet, which unlike everything before it, is all function and no form. Or is there a form?

The Listening Post, part of the Son et Lumiere show at the List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, MA, is a bold attempt to transform a billion disembodied electronic conversations into something that can be seen and heard on a human scale.

The piece is a collaboration between New York multimedia artist Ben Rubin and UCLA statistician Mark Hansen. They have designed a curved curtain of 231 digital displays across which words and snatches of conversation flow. The text is drawn from online forums and internet chat rooms. A sophisticated synthesizer and nine speakers suspended above and behind the listener convert some of the data into spoken words and phrases.

The piece runs in a seventeen-minute cycle, which is divided into several "scenes." Each plays out over the screens to the accompaniment of clicking relays and a soundscape of synthesized music and sampled recordings of real-world sounds.

Some of the scenes are simple. In one, a blizzard of blue text sweeps across the display, giving a sense of the immense volume of raw information. A second plumbs the margins of the data, to send hundreds of the least common words -- scratched, gander, swiller, and so on - tumbling down the screens. Because the Listening Post draws from the internet in real time, no two scenes are ever the same.

Another scene attempts to "map" the threads of related conversations. As a phrase is spoken, it appears in one area of the display and, like the seed of a crystal, forms a nucleus for other related fragments of conversation that begin to spread outward. Meanwhile, other conversations are blooming elsewhere on the wall. (On one Sunday morning, popular topics included the political fortunes of a certain Senator from Massachusetts, and the extent of Chinese involvement in the Vietnam War.) The conversations grow until the whole thing dissolves into a visual cacophony.

I am erotic.
I am too.

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Perhaps the most effective part of the piece originates with Mark Hansen's observation that the phrase "I am" is one of the most common ways to begin an internet posting. Hansen's software culls these phrases, sorts them by length and samples them. The phrases are then "sung" to a spare, fugue-like score (reminiscent of Phillip Glass) written by Ben Rubin.

The beautiful but emotionally neutral music provides the texture over which the self-revelatory litany unfolds. Ripped from their original context, the phrases seem by turns sad, hostile, confident, and funny. It is left to the listener to impose some kind of story or meaning.

I am 13.
I'm from England.
I'm sending Nader a campaign contribution.
I am drinking coffee with lemon very tasty.
I am 17 M - anyone want to talk?
I'm lucky.
I am.

The internet has fast become the nervous system of our society. It is central to government, the media, and the way we talk to one another. It is fashionable, among some circles, to claim that online relationships enhance, and may eventually supplant, conventional social interactions. And there is some evidence for this, at least in the world of online dating.

So who is out there? And what are they, or we, talking about? The Listening Post doesn't really try to answer that question. Hansen and Rubin use their statistics to manage data, not to query it. Are web heads male or female, young or old, Republican or Democrat? Are we having sex or just talking about it? The piece looks at systematic slices of a vast conversation, but, for the most part, doesn't follow up the leads it turns up.

Among his artistic antecedents, Rubin cites the avante garde composer John Cage, who incorporated randomly tuned radios into some of his works, and the early twentieth century Dadaist movement, among whose founders, poet Tristan Tzara composed at random by choosing scraps of newspaper from a hat. But Rubin and Hansen have created something much more reliable and accessible: a richly textured, carefully structured and presented piece.

The pleasure of Listening Post is that of watching a city at night from the vantage of a tall building or a distant hill. One becomes aware of a vast world, of the existence of millions of individual stories: each private and separate, but ultimately interconnected. Even as the individuality escapes us, we believe in its totality, and our part in it.

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The Son et Lumiere show at MIT's List Center includes five other multimedia installations. In Michael Mittelman's Hallway, the viewer walks into a narrow, dimly lit space, not unlike the upstairs corridor of a typical suburban home. In place of the usual family portraits hang framed squares of black glass. At one end is a darkened window. As the viewer explores the space, peering into the darkened frames, ghost-like images begin to appear in the window. It is a mildly creepy experience, one that taps into the deep-seated fear of the night. Subtle use of sound adds to the anxiety. The second chill down the spine comes when the viewer realizes that image in the window is his own, played back on a long delay.

Cornerpiece - The Space Between Us has women's voices whispering from speakers mounted on two white partitions meeting to form a corner. From behind the corner white lights flash in sync with the sounds. The latter is made up of an urgent susurration about lips, eyes, fever, desire and romance, as well as plenty of reference to corners, meetings of walls and mirroring. The effect is a bit like eavesdropping on high-strung adolescent girls, not yet seriously involved with boys or drugs.

In Bruce Bemis's Bipolar Radiance, a figure skater in a sequined dress performs an endless pirouette. The film loop is projected onto two mirrored globes, which bounce distorted images onto a nearby wall. A similar effect, though smaller, could be had by watching televised golf reflected on the back of a spoon.

Traffic Patterns presents a plastic drop ceiling, which changes from red to green to yellow. For no apparent reason, these changes are in sync with a traffic light in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The artists, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, claim that the display is "both a delightful minor protest and an absurd monument to the intractability of [post-colonial] political inequalities." It is neither. More like a redundant reminder of how dull it is to be stuck in traffic.

Son et Lumiere (Sound and Light) is the name applied to the pre-programmed displays of music and colored lights that play on the walls of tourist spots throughout Europe and Asia. The worst of these displays are kitschy and amateurish. The best are educational as well as genuinely entertaining. The difference in quality proves that sound and light are not enough. They must be wielded with skill, preferably by designers, like Rubin and Hansen, who have something to say.

Son et Lumiere will be at MIT's List Visual Arts Center until April 4, 2004.

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