I came to the much-hyped Listening Post at the Science Museum expecting to see the latest offering from the digital installation world. Reading the text just outside the installation’s entrance, I was surprised to see that the work is several years old – ancient by technological standards.
As those more clued-in will know, this digital display has been awing visitors since at least 2003. But its very content, the continually changing landscape of the internet, keeps this textual parade as compelling now as it was five years ago, or will be five years in the future. Like the early computers that precede it in the Science Museum’s galleries, it is a tribute to technological ingenuity. Unlike them, it is also a tribute to the power of language, and therefore infinitely inventive.
The Listening Post is a visual and auditory treat. A wall of 200-odd luminous screens displays fragments of text pulled real-time from online forums and chatrooms. A synthesized voice reads selections from these, while ambient music sets a mechanical tone complete with beepings and pulses. The installation cycles through various patterns of display – one shows a hyperactive permutation of single words, another focuses on phrases beginning ‘I am…’ while a third shoots texts across screens at increasing speed. The result is an unsettling, but utterly compelling, virtual translation of the babble of human conversation.
Spend a moment with the installation, and visit the whole range of human experience: from the banal (‘I’m pretty tired today’) to the wholly condemning (‘Just bomb both countries’). The artists’ statement portrays the installation as a snapshot of the mass energy and informational output of Internet communication – a sort of fleeting view of the zeitgeist. But part of its power surely lies in what isn’t displayed, the untold stories behind the fragments of text. Ambiguity abounds. Scrolling snatches of conversation like ‘I’m glad you haven’t totalled her,’ ‘I’m guilty of that myself,’ invite us to fill in the missing context. While the installation’s content derives from our need to express ourselves, the hypnotic power of this mass of words is our curiosity about one another.
Listening Post will be on permanent display at the Science Museum.
