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He's a techie who thinks conceptually, a designer who makes art, a humble
collaborator with ideas of his own. But what, exactly, does multimedia maestro
Ben Rubin do?
By Christopher Hawthorne
July 2002
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Sights and sounds from Rubin's MTA presentation.
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Arrival Sign Sounds
Existing/New
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Turnstile Sounds
Existing/New
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Ben Rubin with Listening Post in his New York studio (above).
A collaboration between Mark Hansen and Rubin, the piece (at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music last year, below) is an art installation that displays text
from Internet chat rooms and translates it into sound.
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Photos: Top, Evan Kafka; Bottom, courtesy Ben Rubin/EAR Studio
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You've got to feel a little sorry for the unsuspecting dinner-party guest
who turns, salad fork in hand, and asks Ben Rubin what he does for a living.
The answer to that question, though fascinating, could stretch through the
end of dessert. "It's certainly hard for me sometimes to describe what
I do," Rubin says. "At times I run the risk of feeling like a
dilettante."
Rubin, who is 38 and lives in New York, is known primarily as a sound designer
and a multimedia consultant. He has worked regularly with architects Elizabeth
Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, artist Ann Hamilton, composer Steve Reich,
and performance artist Laurie Anderson, among others; teaches sound design
at New York University; designs museum installations; and produces digital
artworks, one of which, a joint project with Bell Labs statistician Mark
Hansen, was shown last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and will go
on view later this year in a first-floor gallery at the Whitney
Museum of American Art.
Rubin grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, dreaming of a career as a filmmaker.
He has a graduate degree from the MIT Media Lab, but it's his undergraduate
work that perhaps best sums up his unusual skills: at Brown, he double-majored
in computer science and semiotics. At nearly every stage of his professional
development, Rubin has begun work in a field just as it was making
the awkward transition to the digital age. That was the case in his first
job out of MIT, in which he helped develop a sort of protodigital film-editing
system called Montage. (He later used those skills to edit a Sally Kirkland
movie of the week called The Haunted, which Rubin remembers as "really
terrible.") It was the case in his work in the early 1990s with Reich
and Beryl Korot's groundbreaking multimedia opera The Cave, and with
the techno-savvy downtown theater collective the Builders Association. And
now it's the case as he establishes himself in the realms of architecture
and the visual arts.
On the one hand, Rubin is a singular figure--not just because he's
carved out a comfortable niche beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries
of the design world but because, as a friend of his put it, "he's just
smarter than a lot of other people who are working on this stuff."
On the other hand, Rubin's fuzzy job description is surely a sign of things
to come. As the arts grow more and more tightly bound up with technology,
there is going to be increasing demand for people like Rubin who can bridge
the gap between concept and execution. And there is going to be a need for
the public, and the media, to stop insisting on putting creative people
in tidy, easy-to-label boxes. Rubin's work is paving the way in both areas.
Not that you'd know it from talking with him. You know those celebrities
who discuss themselves in the third person, as in "Charles Barkley's
just got to do what's best for Charles Barkley"? Ben Rubin is decidedly
not that kind of guy. If you ask Rubin about Rubin, in other words, you're
not likely to get anywhere. On my first visit to his Manhattan studio,
which occupies the rear half of a third-floor loft building on the
Bowery, I tried a direct journalistic approach, which quickly fizzled.
When I came back a few weeks later, we simply talked for a while, and then
he began showing me examples of his work, clicking his way through a couple
of projects on the two huge computer monitors that crouch on his desk between
a pair of Tannoy speakers. That was infinitely more revealing.
If there is a thread connecting Rubin's disparate design work, I came to
realize, it is a certain analytical elegance: the problem is well-framed
before it's well-solved. That, in a nutshell, is why people like Diller
+ Scofidio and Hamilton keep hiring him as a collaborator, and it's
why curators are so curious about his forays into the art world. That quality
was certainly evident in one of the projects Rubin showed me on my second
visit. It was a study he'd made of the sound design in the New York City
subway system--specifically the beeps that are produced when passengers
slide their MetroCards through the turnstiles and the three bleats that
ring out in certain stations when a train is approaching. He'd prepared
the presentation for a conference of sound designers and researchers in
Glasgow, but the project was essentially self-financed research and
development for his own firm, which is called Electronic Arts Research
Studio, or EAR Studio.
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Nerve Bible (1995; above) was one of Rubin's early projects for
musician Laurie Anderson.
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Nerve Bible is Anderson's metaphor for the human body, and the
show dealt with her feelings about technology. Rubin helped to
choreograph the projections (above and below) with her songs and
movements. |
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Photos: Top and middle, courtesy of Canal Street Communications; Bottom, Koni Nordmann
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What Rubin had discovered was not particularly inspiring. "If anyone
thought this through at all," he said, twisting in his chair to face
me, "there's no evidence of it." The sound to signal an arriving
train, especially, is stress inducing and empty of information: a harried
symbol of the hate portion of New Yorkers' love-hate relationship with the
city. The turnstile sound--a long high-pitched whine--is virtually the same
whether your card swipes successfully or has no money left on it. "These
sounds as they're deployed are nothing but noise pollution," Rubin
said. He didn't sound upset by this; his tone was quietly matter-of-fact.
Rubin's tone is just about always quietly matter-of-fact.
Rubin had broken down the problems with the current approach and proposed
some new sounds. First, he'd realized that there are three possible outcomes
when a rider swipes his or her card: success; the dreaded "Swipe Again,"
meaning the card has not been read; or failure, caused by an expired or
empty card. So he made up a separate sound for each: the first--success--was
short and bright; failure was a brief alert, not unpleasant but thoroughly
distinguishable from the first sound; for "Swipe Again,"
Rubin made up a more complex, musically unresolved sound.
The remarkable thing about the presentation was not the sounds themselves,
though they were surely an improvement. It was that Rubin had analyzed the
situation--the rider at the turnstile, Metrocard in hand--from a spatial
point of view as well as a purely aural or technological one. "There
are three different ways you have to send your body depending on what happens
when you swipe the card," he said. "So you need a different sound
for each of those."
This brought to mind something Elizabeth Diller had said to me about Rubin:
"I think what's really unusual about him is that he's able to engage
ideas about new media and space in a way that nobody else can. So it's not
just about the technology, but also about artistic intervention in space.
That's what makes him valuable to architects."
Next Rubin played me the sounds he'd developed for the arriving-train signal.
There's just one sound for that now, and it's the same for all trains, so
if you're rushing through the turnstile and you hear it, you can't tell
if it's announcing the train you want. Rubin's simple solution was to have
each sound carry the information it needed to convey to riders. (Once again,
the new sounds were easier on the ears than the existing one, but that seemed
like a pleasant by-product of the design process rather than its starting
place.) He had invented four different sounds: one each for an uptown express,
uptown local, downtown express, and downtown local train. The sounds were
sophisticated but easy to recognize; the uptown ones used rising tones,
the downtown ones falling tones. The express sound was simply the local-train
sound at a faster tempo.
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His collaborations with architects Diller + Scofidio include a video
installation at the Brasserie (above) that captures images of guests as
they enter the restaurant, and a permanent video marquee called Jump
Cuts (below) for a United Artists theater in San Jose, California.
Surveillance images from inside the building are displayed on the street.
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Photos: Top, Michael Moran, courtesy Diller + Scofidio; Bottom, courtesy Diller + Scofidio |
The last part of the presentation was a video Rubin had made of the inside
of a subway station, showing people moving through the turnstiles. He had
simply replaced the sounds he'd recorded with the new ones he'd come up
with, leaving the visuals intact. The result had a good-natured Eamesian
flair. The city on the screen looked exactly the same, but it had been
transformed into a place somehow infinitely more humane. I asked Rubin
if he'd shown the presentation to the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which
operates the New York subway. He said he had, but that the meeting was more
an informational visit than a sales pitch, and that as far as he knew the
city has no plans to change the existing sounds.
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