Photo: Graham Peet

Internet chatrooms – think of any subject and you can probably find an online discussion about it going on right now, from the banal to the most sensitive political topics of the moment.

And what would it sound like if all this text was spoken aloud? What would 100,000 people chatting online sound like? That’s the question two artists posed themselves in order to create a new electronic artwork just unveiled at the Science Museum in London.

‘Listening Post’, by sound artist Ben Rubin and statistician and artist Mark Hansen, is a dynamic portrait of online communication, produced from turning public forums into computer voices. It samples live text from thousands of unrestricted internet chatrooms, message boards and other public forums, culling fragments for a visual and sonic display.

The visual element is in the form of a curved, suspended lattice of 231 small electronic screens standing 4m high and 5m wide, with an aural of computer-synthesised voices reading, or ‘singing’, the uncensored and unedited words as they surge, flicker, appear and disappear over the screens.

Photo: Graham Peet

“With Listening Post, Hansen and Rubin offer us an insight into the constant chatter of this virtual ‘public square’ of online social spaces,” says Hannah Redler, Head of Arts Projects at the Science Museum. “It is an awe-inspiring ‘portrait of chat’ that reveals people’s most personal thoughts and most universal concerns.”

“As a snapshot of the text-based internet, Listening Post may also have a finite lifespan, inviting intriguing questions about the present and future of internet and web technologies, and even perhaps the nature of museum objects. Listening Post emerged from the messaging phenomenon of the solely text-based era of the internet over five years ago,” she continues.

“Now, changes to forms of expression online, such as the proliferation of video and animation, will change the content source that Listening Post relies upon, perhaps even rendering it silent one day.”

Hansen’s computer programmes collect, sample, process and analyse thousands of public online conversations, which are then sorted and filtered to become the raw material for the artwork. Rubin has programmed a voice synthesiser, which is accompanied by other tones and sound effects that respond to shifts in the data streams, building up a musical score of online activity.

Photo: Graham Peet

Listening Post plays out through a series of seven cycles, lasting 25 minutes in total. Each cycle brings together different combinations of aural and visual elements, together with their own data processing logic.

The work was first launched in 2002 in New York and won the Ars Electronic Golden Nica for Interactive Art in 2004.

The work has been purchased by the Science Museum for its contemporary art collection with a grant of £110,000 from The Art Fund (the total cost was £121,275). The public will be able to eavesdrop on the online world in realtime at the free exhibition until 2010.

“We are thrilled and humbled to be able to show Listening Post at the Science Museum,” say the artists. “To be seen alongside iconic classics such as Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and the Museum’s extensive collection of artefacts from antique to modern telecommunications systems is an incredible context for our work.”

Mark Hansen is Associate Professor of Statistics at UCLA, and New York based artist Ben Rubin exhibits internationally work that tries to find ways of ‘hearing inaudible phenomena’.