Of All things (written) in New York

December 8th, 2008

While the overnight bus is rather difficult to love to say the least, my recent sojourn to New York City was filled with enough surprising aesthetic conjunctures and intersections to make even the border crossing worthwhile.

Take Movable Type for instance, that intersects at 8th Avenue and 41st - the huge installation currently dwarfing visitors who dare to walk through the hallways at the New York Times, by statistician + artist Mark Hansen and media/sound artist Ben Rubin

I had heard of Hansen and Rubin’s collaborative works before, as Listening Post, their 2005-2006 acclaimed installation piece that uses sampling from internet chatrooms and public forums online was one I was always sad I never had a chance to experience in the flesh, as it were.

So it was pretty exciting to walk off the bus and find myself accidentally smack-dab in the middle of this newer work by the duo. Its poetry, like that of their past endeavours, lies in the mundane - the 560 screens that make up the piece sample bits and clips of all things written culled from the New York Times database.

And like most things of the ordinary, it is the rhythms and musings between all of the screens flashes and one-off phrases that creates in this piece a sense of space, loss, introspection and hope. Yeah, that sounds rather cheese-dick-y, but remember:

a) I was very tired when I saw this

and

b) there is something extremely moving in the realization that our boring snippets and wordbytes seem profound and worthy of reflection when pooled together and accentuated, pizzicato-like, in multiplicity.