First take first take first

ArtForum, Jan, 2002 by Daniel Birnbaum

Which isn't to say there are no blinking lights. His most recent project, a collaboration with Bell Labs statistician Mark Hansen, opened last month in a dark attic gallery at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The focal point of Listening Post is an array of LED screens that scroll text fed in by data-mining agents capable of lurking simultaneously in thousands of Internet chat rooms. As postings are trapped and rerouted live, a synthesized voice reads out each line and a sonic "pad" evolves under it all in response to traffic volume and other baseline dynamics. The intention, in Hansen s words, is to "make a place where people can connect to this weird stream of data."

"Technology isn't the topic," Rubin says in what might be a blanket disclaimer for his work. "It's a lens on human social behavior. Listening Post is not about the Internet." No, it's about realizing that, if you can hear it all at once, the Internet sounds like the dream of a city.

An architecture and design critic who lives in Brooklyn, PHILIP NOBEL is a contributing editor of Metropolis magazine, where his outspoken if not curmudgeonly "Far Corner" column appears monthly, addressing everything from the rebuilding of the Twin Towers to the design of a twenty-one-and-a-half-foot-high stool. He has written for the New York Times, Vogue, Architectural Digest, and Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, among other publications. A trio of his essays on the New York architecture firm LOT/EK will be featured in a monograph forthcoming from Princeton Architectural Press next month.

Matthew Higgs on SCOTT KING

SCOTT KING, ARTIST, DESIGNER, AND SELF-CONFESSED Joy Division fan--his forearm bears the tattooed legend LOVE WILL TEAR US APART--operates unashamedly from within the mainstream. An award-winning graphic designer and former art director of i-D magazine, King still holds a day job, as creative director of the upstart lifestyle rag Sleazenation, and that affords him access to a broader audience than most artists could even dream of. Yet in the rarefied microcosm that is the art world, it is King's nefarious activities as a coconspirator behind the occasional journal Crash!--a self-styled "parasitical tool for critical interventions"-- for which he is best known. Since 1997 King and long-term collaborator Matt Worley have waged a two-man attack on the perceived mediocrity at the heart of British cultural life, and in the inaugural issue of Crash! they proclaimed "DEATH TO THE NEW." Colliding the hectoring UPPER CASE polemics of Wyndham Lewis's magazine Blast with a pop psychology borrowed from R.D. Laing and man gled by way of Sex Pistols album designer Jamie Reid's graphic sloganeering, Crash! takes no prisoners. The introductory essay to the publication that accompanied the 1999 exhibition "CRASH!" at London's ICA began: "Compromise is the devil talking." It continued, "CRASH! is both a reflection and a condemnation of life at the end of the twentieth century. . . the century. . . that succeeded in turning creativity into product, idealism into irony, dissent into consent, hope into hopelessness, aspiration into careerism, work into alienation, desire into consumption, progress into profit.. ." and so on for another four pages. If all this feels a bit familiar, that's probably because it is. King and Worley liberally recycle whatever material comes to hand, misappropriating quotes or simply making them up. They are the bastard offspring of Guy Debord: Where King and Crash! have succeeded--and where so many wanna-be media subversives failed--is in their apparent willingness to cooperate with the very culture they co ndemn. In biting the hand that feeds them, King and Worley have been unusually successful at getting their message--whatever it may be--into the public domain.