New York, New York

After a short weekend away in the Big Apple I found something that may be of some interest to me in my final year. I was walking past The New York Times building on Broadway, if I'm correct, and noticed two walls filled these strange black boxes. I thought nothing of it as I knew I wouldn't be able to get in because of the security at the entrance. I turned a corner to find an entrance open to the public, perfect opportunity.


Two walls filled with about 400 6" screens. All connected to a computer. This was very weird at first sight. Each individual screen seemed to be displaying a different piece of information. Then at certain intervals, some would start and then stop making different patterns, but exactly the same on both walls. I read that the piece was called 'Moveable Type' by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin [2007] and said the following on the project




"Moveable Type is an active portrait of the New York Times that is fueled by the contents of the daily paper and to the visitors to NYTimes.com who are browsing, searching, reading and commenting. The artists have programmed the work to extract fragments - words, phrases, quotes, numbers and places - from The Times' growing, living, real-time news database, and to recombine these fragments into a series of ever changing kinetic compositions."

Interesting. Just a little bit.