The Listening Post exhibition at the Whitney this winter is presented to the visitor as a visual and sonic response to the magnitude and immediacy of virtual communication. The multimedia installation, assembled by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, is composed of a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens. Fragments of texts are gathered in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, newsgroups, bulletin boards and other public forums. Statistical analysis then organizes their messages into topic clusters based on content. Since the work displays the texts according to the frequency of randomly selected words, topics change daily and even hourly. A coordinated audio component alternates between musical passages and sections vocalizing the text.

The screens capture the contributions of tens of thousands of people, and the content is varied and ever-changing. Fragments of text are displayed simultaneously in order to convey the scale of the system being observed. The dynamic nature of the forums is reflected in the patterns that emerge and mirror the rhythms of individual communication. Vocalizations may occur simultaneously, and the pitches and tones are designed to respond to the changes and patterns in the content of the messages.

The integration of motion, text, sound, and space seeks to transform the ordinarily silent and solitary experience of the Internet into a more sensual and public encounter. The content and structure of the online community is presented as both reachable and compelling. Sound strives to create movement and heighten the presence of multi-layered space. The grid, consisting of multiple screens loosely connected to one another, asserts the importance of both void and construction to the overall space. Rather than presenting a two-dimensional grid displaying mere text, Hansen and Rubin enliven the experience, seeking to create an ordered atmosphere that simultaneously encourages movement, listening, feeling, and viewing.

Can one ever bring order, cohesiveness, or immediacy to the vastness and elusiveness of the online community? Though online public forums provide places for inventive forms of communication and connection, the ostensible locus for self-expression is achieved in a space that repeatedly resists its existence. Unlike speech, writing creates a boundary between printed words and the human voice that formulates them. The seclusion and separation of writing from its author is only enhanced when it becomes digital.

Listening Post replicates the repeated attempts to infuse the technological world of the Internet with the individual self through domains such as public forums and chat rooms. Writers respond to the strangeness of online communication and the loss of authorship by repeated attempts to project and assert themselves into the online community. The self continually pours out into collective online space. Online lives are sorted out in repetition rather than causality, and continuity is created through the echoing of common themes and preoccupations. Listening Post reflects this tendency through the display of texts pertaining to similar subjects. The most notable attempts at self-expression are presented through a segment in which multiple texts and vocalizations are displayed beginning with the phrase, "I like...", for example, "I like Joe Millionaire," "I like pink."

Mark Hansen & Ben Rubin, Listening Post, 2003. Photograph by David Allison. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Listening Post explores the varied means of presenting the self online. In the medium of the Internet, self-expression becomes a process marked by the mindful selection and manipulation of identity. But ultimately, communication and self-expression become dependent on the interpretation of the online reader. The text also relies on the technological medium for its existence since online forms of identity formation and communication are unable to be constructed without participation from the computer. As fingers move across the computer keyboard in a seeming action of selection and control, the letters and words seem to form a distinct and separate realm, flowing with their own semantic and mechanical power. The digital text emerges with its own force and reminds the writer that the words are no longer simply his creation.

In online discursive spaces, one wonders exactly who speaks through the text and to whom the words are directed; the distinction between the self and technology ultimately collapses. The boundaries between the self and the text are effaced, as the two realms begin to take on traits of the other. The original denial of the machinery at work returns in alienated form, and thoughts become doubly dissociated from the body with the existence of both reader and computer. Machinery takes on human characteristics, and thinking becomes a form of representation and reproduction. Personal experience becomes blurred with technological materiality.

Online public domains—chatrooms, instant messenger and other forms of online socialising—provide spaces marked by the conscious presentation of the self and the most familiar forms of self-expression. Yet within the most familiar and conscious domain, the unfamiliar erupts, making certain identity a sudden mystery. Desires for familiarity and association give way to the strangeness and elusiveness of the technological space. Readers become so engrossed in online lives that they continually find themselves logging on to discover the latest episodes or events in others' lives. Yet ultimately the anticipation, desire, and empathetic response become directed toward streams of information rather than the human behind them. Despite Listening Post's efforts to provide a literal voice for the online community and replicate the rapid pace of the Internet, the stillness and seclusion of online forms of communication and identity formation linger. The visitor responds to streams of digitized information rather than human sound or movement. Both text and automated sound become a separate system of similarities and variations, producing an effect ultimately more alienating than continuous.

The desire to record and know online language and identity creates a repetitive compulsion to keep reading and listening. The more one seeks to discover, the more elusive the identity and text becomes. The obsessive interest in recording and tracking lives in Listening Post is thwarted by the ephemeral nature of the text and sound. The exhibition proves that between the body, mind, and machine, a field of interactivity exists which continually undermines the self's attempt to reach a stable core of self-certainty. When the private individual attempts to enter the public through the seemingly stable mediums of writing and technology, identity and meaning enter a phantasmal space of continual grasping for that which continually eludes. What once generated meaning, now subverts it. The viewer wonders not only about the author of each message, but also about the recipient.