Dec 11, 2007 8:00 AM

All the news that's art

I’m not naive, I’m superficial.

I hate change, and nothing changed till Pleasant came.

I can bet $100,000 and feel nothing.

UCLA statistician Mark Hansen sometimes finds himself wondering, “Did somebody really write that?”

But he knows somebody really did, and in the New York Times no less. Selected sentences like these from the day’s print and online newspaper, multiple millions of words by reporters, editors, bloggers, letter writers and e-mailers take on new meaning in “Moveable Type,” a multimedia sculpture by Hansen and New York-based media artist Ben Rubin.

Commissioned by the Times for the lobby of its glistening new skyscraper in Manhattan, which opened Nov. 19, “Moveable Type” makes the old printer’s term literal. Letters and words march, dance and sweep across 560 vacuum fluorescent display screens arranged in grids suspended along two walls of the lobby’s 65-foot-long central corridor. Each individual display is mounted to a custom control board that contains an embedded Linux processor, and all are networked to produce an elegant architecture, both physical and digital.

“The news in the newspaper is framed in a very particular way,” said Hansen. “We take the pieces of information apart, and then put them back together to reveal new aspects of the paper.”

The piece plays with language and with how stories are told, and with the news and our memories of recent and distant events. Hansen and Rubin created algorithms that identify patterns of language use, culling material from the Times’ vast database and presenting material in a series of short “movements,” much like movements of a symphonic composition. Between one and five minutes long, each movement adopts a different visual and sonic personality, extracting and choreographing different types of data from the day’s news.

One movement, for example, juxtaposes unrelated quotes from the current paper beginning with the word “We” and “They or “You” or “I.” The effect is the back-and-forth of intriguing conversation where none really exists: We’ve yet to find our identity/They don’t think about nothing but food, food, food.

In other movements, the news is retold through statistics: 19 approved methods include tactics like “good cop-bad cop.”

Most of the movements also include sound, which is intended, the artists noted, “to provide a warm energy as a counterpoint to the cool electronic quality of the visual displays.” For instance, one movement presents 560 letters to the editor typing out one clacking typewriter keystroke at a time.

“Moveable Type” is in a constant state of flux, based as it is on the Times’ ever-evolving daily news database. Late at night, the artwork dips into the newspaper’s “morgue,” archived material dating back to 1851, when the Times was founded. During this “dream state,” the artwork extracts and replays events from a bygone era that resonate topically with the day’s news.

An associate professor in the Department of Statistics, Hansen also holds an appointment in Design|Media Art — where he regularly teaches a course on database aesthetics — and electrical engineering. Rubin teaches at the Yale School of Art. The two met in 1999 when Hansen worked as a researcher at Bell Laboratories, which sponsored a conference with the Brooklyn Academy of Music to bring science and art together.

Drawing on Hansen’s research background in large, complex data flows and Rubin’s digital media savvy, “We began a series of studies that used data as material to make art,” said Hansen. Their groundbreaking installation, “Listening Post,” drew on data from public Internet chat rooms and bulletin boards and won the 2004 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art.

“They are like dynamic portraits,” Hansen said of both artworks. “We design a basic structure, we design the algorithms, and then the data sift through telling and retelling the underlying stories.”

Hansen and Rubin’s fascination with transforming data into art continues with a new performance work they are developing, “Counting,” scheduled for debut in 2008.

See a video on “Moveable Type” at video.on.nytimes.com.

1