Data-mining, the gathering of data about individuals from information given on the internet, is a highly controversial subject these days. Countless websites do it: Amazon uses data-mining to suggest other items you may be interested in purchasing, the NSA uses data-mining to track potential terrorists. The use of data-mining provides the "miners" with various statistics of how they spend their time online. Many people fear this invasion of their privacy, but others, like Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, turn this act into art.
The Listening Post, housed in the San Jose Museum of Art, features small screens that display phrases taken in real time from chat rooms. An electronic voice reads some of these phrases aloud, accompanied by soft music in the background. These phrases vary, the computer program can be set to pick out phrases and words at random, or it can be set to find phrases that start with certain words: "I am", "I like", "I love".
You can follow this link to watch a video of the art piece.
This piece brings around an obvious discussion: Many people find data-mining invasive when it's done by the NSA, but does in have the same connotation here? Can this process of data-mining, used to secretly gather information, really be evaluated as art? What is art in our modern and technological lives?
Since the introduction of the Internet, our society has changed rapidly. In the art and design world, the Internet has brought around a mass sharing of art on websites like
Flickr, discussion forums on websites or blogs like this one, and much more. With the creation of
The Listening Post, we are moving into a new usage of the Internet in art: it has been created literally out of the Internet. Rather than being shared or discussed on the Internet, this piece takes a part of what is inherently part of the Internet, instant chatting, and puts it back into the physical world as art.
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