data sonification

Color Yourself Inspired™ is a generative artwork that creates unpredictable poetic phrases from Benjamin Moore’s paint color database; it is an interdisciplinary exploration of sound, color and language. An online collection of over 1000 unique color names are poetically sequenced using phonetic analysis and parts of speech analysis in a computer program designed by the artists. Instead of labeling color with language as the marketing team has done in the original database, Color Yourself Inspired™ (a marketing slogan from the Benjamin Moore website) inverts this relationship and uses language to generate visual information. (Source: http://thenewriver.us/color-yourself-inspired/)

Listening Post is an art installation by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens.

Listening Post cycles through a series of six movements, each a different arrangement of visual, aural, and musical elements, each with it’s own data processing logic.

Dissociating the communication from its conventional on-screen presence, Listening Post is a visual and sonic response to the content, magnitude, and immediacy of virtual communication.

Listening Post can be seen at The London Science Musuem and The San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, Calif.
(author-contributed entry, Ben Rubin post at EAR Studio)