[Fwd: ATC Monday 7:30pm: Mark Hansen]

Aug. 23, 2003

Type: discussion

—————————- Original Message —————————-
Subject: ATC Monday 7:30pm: Mark Hansen
From: "Ken Goldberg" <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, August 22, 2003 10:06 am
To: "Announce ATC @ UCBerkeley" <[email protected]>
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ATC@UCB:

Listening Post: Rendering the evolving landscape of online public
discourse (or, a statistician, an artist and 200,000 complete strangers)

Mark Hansen
UCLA, Dept of Statistics

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
Mon, 25 August, 7:30-9:30pm: UC Berkeley,
Location: 160 Kroeber Hall
All ATC Lectures are free and open to the public.

Listening Post, a collaboration between Hansen and NY artist Ben
Rubin, is an award winning multimedia art installation designed to convey
the magnitude and diversity of online communication. Exhibited at the
Whitney Museum of American Art, December 2002 through March 2003,
Listening Post provides a meaningful rendering of a massive data stream
consisting of thousands of simultaneous Internet-based
conversations. The visual centerpiece of Listening Post is a
suspended, curved grid of more than two hundred small screens. These
screens display fragments of text that are continuously gathered in real
time from unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other
forums. The work is structured as a sequence of "scenes," each of which
organizes incoming communications according to different
statistical criteria. Mirroring the fluidity and dynamism of the
Internet itself, topics emerge and change from day to day, hour to hour. A
coordinated audio component underscores the content presented on the
screens, layering algorithmically generated musical
compositions with the vocalization of captured messages, spoken by a
text-to-speech system.

The technical challenges implied here are considerable; from "frugal"
monitoring agents that continually recognize and cull new content, to
statistical natural language processing and dynamic clustering schemes
that allow us to track topics and extract representative phrases. In this
talk, I will describe how our work has evolved, starting with our early
experiments with pure sonification of Web traffic. Hansen
will emphasize the interplay between data analysis and design, between
modeling and expression and end with their most recent project, a
public art commission involving a live data feed from Google's news service.

–
Mark Hansen is currently Associate Professor of Statistics at UCLA, where
he also has an appointment in the Design|Media Art
Department. Previously he was a member of the Technical Staff in the
Statistics and Data Mining Research Department of Bell Laboratories.

Mark will give a related talk in the Neyman Seminar in Berkeley's
Statistics Department on Wednesday August 27, 4-5pm, in 1011 Evans.

http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~cocteau
http://www.earstudio.com/projects/listeningpost.html

********************************************************************** The
ATC Colloquium continues our partnership with the Berkeley Art Museum to
present online video of ATC talks, available both in
QuickTime (highlights) or MP3 audio. For links and the full 2003-2004
series schedule, please see:

http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/lecs/
**********************************************************************