This gave us an excellent opportunity to take in "Moveable Type", the fascinating installation my the artists Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen. We first encountered these two at the Whitney Museum of American Art where they had installed "Listening Post" in the small gallery off the lobby. This remarkable piece used technological 'spiders' to forage through Internet chat room, postings, and IMs to gather instances and phrases that all shared a common word or phrase; "I am 50 years old" and "I am just wearing socks". These gleaned words and phrases were then displayed in a neat grid of small led display panels. The end result was an engrossing piece which could suck the viewer in for hours without repetition or boredom.
With "Moveable Type" the art duo have taken the concept of "The Listening Booth" and broadened it, both in size and scope. Taking up both sides of a long, wood-paneled entry corridor, the walls are lined with an array of 6" by 1" LED displays totaling an area of 20 feet high by 53 feet long. Using the New York Times and its archives as fodder, the team has set up various searches and function that these walls of information perform. Sometimes the information is so quick its hard to read; with a static sizzle of the screens, it appears and disappears. Occasionally a 'wind' of information sweeps across each wall, sometimes leaving random panels of information for awhile, sometimes not. One feature presents columns of pronouns juxtaposed next to each other. For instance, "I know this works." sits on a screen to the left of one reading "You tie the dog in the yard." I-You is stacked over We-They which is placed over He-She and the phrases keep shifting and changing until the wall are blank and dark. To keep things from being totally word based, occasionally the screens tick out the outlines of states and countries in the news. Then suddenly the hall fills with a wonderful Phillip Glass-like cadenza of electronic keyboards as NY Times stories rapidly rise up the columns of the walls, the music finally fading with the last of the final story.
A favorite function of ours was what we refer to a the 'number pull' (see video above). As numbers appear in the lower right corner of each screen, a phrase or line from the paper with that particular number is typed across the upper line of the screen. The screens build and build with more numbers and fade to a final number 1. Another favorite is the letters to the editors display. The halls fill with the harsh clack of an old typewriter and the letters "To The Editor:" are typed out on the LED screens. As the actual letters start to appears and fill the other screens a growing mummer of the tapping of computer keyboards accumulates and fades. Finally there is the information drawn from the Weddings section of the paper. As a screen fills with information about this person or that it gets surrounded by a simple line box which then continues its journey across other screens until it reaches another screen containing information about another person, presumably a relative or family member. We are presented with an active growing family tree right before out eyes, all to the accompaniment of the sound of touch-tone dialing!
We spent almost two hours wandering up and down the hall on the Times and were not bored for a single minute! Stop in, its well worth a trip uptown (or down)!!
