NYT Movable Type Installation

I heard a piece on NPR a little while ago about the a new installation entitled Movable Type at The New York Times headquarters, and finally got around to finding the web site for the installation, which has more pictures.

Moveable Type, by New York artist Ben Rubin and U.C.L.A. associate professor Mark Hansen, is an artwork commissioned for the ground-floor lobby of The New York Times Building in New York City. [It is] a dynamic portrait of The Times. Statistical methods and natural-language processing algorithms [are] used to parse the daily output of the paper (news, features, editorials) and the archives, as well as the activity of visitors to NYTimes.com (browsing, searching, commenting). The resulting refracted view of The Times [is] displayed on 560 vacuum-fluorescent display screens installed in the lobby.

I love the real time display of snippets of stories coupled with the old sounds of a newsroom. In this digital day and age, the newsroom is eerily quiet compared to those noisy, busy news rooms you see in movies. Movable Type brings some of that hectic heyday back into the headquarters of The NYT. The installation continually plays the sounds of old typewriters, printing machines and teletype machines as it displays the random snippets from the stories of the day.

I'll definitely visit next time I'm in NYC.