On the ground floor lobby of the New York Times building, artist Ben Rubin and statistician Mark Hansen have installed a massive grid of small screens that through complicated algorithms, spit out poetic phrases from the newspapers massive data base.
The screens, 560 simple fluorescent displays like those in alarm clocks, stream carefully curated phrases drawn from previous articles the paper has published as well as real time search terms and web commentary from the publications website.
The algorithm for the permanent installation is incredibly selective. For instance, instead of just flashing random lines from the paper, it only selects sentences that begin with “I” and then juxtapose them with sentences that start with “you.” Or pick out single lines from obituaries. Or only sentences that begin with numbers.
In an article from the NYT:
“We want it to feel almost like an organism that is living and breathing and consuming the news,” Mr. Rubin said, adding that someone who had not seen the paper or Web site would be able to watch the screens for several minutes and begin to get a sense of that day’s biggest events, though in a way that might feel more like floating on the newspaper’s stream of consciousness than reading it.
[via mediabistro]
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