Grounding Research: the 'Listening Post'

Sitting in the coffee shop today i am reminded of the way things were only a decade ago... the incessant murmur of conversations, communications, ideas being transmitted between humans in a form that has been around for as long as humans themselves...

Surrounded by this beautiful, primitive communication, i reach out through my laptop's screen and keyboard to the unimaginable database beyond, in search of a beautiful interactive installation i remember reading about a few years ago...  Mark Hansen & Ben Rubin's "Listening Post".

In essence, the installation, seen to the right, is scanning online chat rooms for certain phrases and converting them to algorithmic music.  The beauty is in the immediacy, and the scope of the data, with every word in the system being typed only seconds before by someone, somewhere in the world.

In their own words - "Anyone who types a message in a chat room and hits 'send' is calling out for a response - Listening Post is our response [...] a sensual encounter with that data, rendered at the human scale."

There is for me a very warm, comforting atmosphere generated by the piece (even though it is a purely digital dynamic composition): similar to the reason i hang out in this coffee shop for the anonymous presence of others - there is a certain pleasure in the company of other humans.  I wonder if this is how dogs might feel with regards to their owners?

On that note, i think i would like the major project to be like my little pet, a little puppy....