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In an independent study of the New York subway system, Rubin noticed
that the tones sounded when a card is swiped (below) are
indistinguishable no matter what the results. He proposed new, more
varied sounds (above) that would be informative for users.
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Photos: Top, courtesy Ben Rubin; Bottom, Criswell Lappin
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Though it offers a good example of how he works, there's one way, of course,
in which the subway project is atypical for Rubin: he did it alone. So far
he has made a name for himself as a collaborator, usually working with artists
and designers much better known than he is. Even for Rubin and the artists
he works with, it's tough to give his role in the creative process a precise
definition. Diller says, "I'm not always sure where our work ends
and his begins." But for the most part his consulting work has followed
a familiar pattern: he is brought in by a performer or architect who wants
to incorporate multimedia technology and needs to know precisely how to
carry out that desire.
As Diller told the New York Times, "Artists are always surrounded
by technical help." But Rubin is something different: a collaborator
who can be relied upon by creative people to safeguard their precious conceptual
cargo as it makes its way to the physical world. Over time, many of those
artists begin to trust him to handle more conceptual, and less purely technical,
responsibilities. In the end, at least on the consulting side of his work,
it's not unlike those old television commercials for the chemical company
BASF. Rubin doesn't make a lot of the multimedia pieces you've seen; he
makes a lot of the multimedia pieces you've seen better.
"We're attracted to him because he behaves like an artist and not like
a techie," Diller says. "We can talk with him in a conceptual
shorthand, and we don't have that luxury with too many people."
Rubin worked closely with Diller + Scofidio on Brasserie, a restaurant
the firm designed for Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building on Park
Avenue. In the early stages of the project, the architects explored with
Rubin and some staffers the idea of using multimedia elements to play around
with, and perhaps subvert, the idea of the grand entrance in the epicenter
of what Rubin calls Manhattan's "see-and-be-seen culture." The
concept was unique but straightforward: as each diner came through Brasserie's
revolving door, a camera would capture his or her image, which would then
be projected onto a row of monitors above the bar. One by one, the monitors--like
a silent contemporary version of a butler--would announce the restaurant's
patrons, with the newest arrival appearing on the left-most screen, bumping
the previous ones to the right.
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Rubin also created video projections for the Builders Association's
multimedia production Imperial Motel (above and below), an update
of the Faust story set in an anonymous modern motel room.
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Photos: Koni Nordmann
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Once the group had the concept worked out, Rubin went off on his own to
research the requisite equipment, from screens to cameras to wiring, and
to create a technical specification about how the setup was going to
be built. Rubin then became the liaison between the architects and an audio-visual
systems firm called Scharff Weisberg. "They built the whole system
in their workshop in New Jersey," Rubin recalls, "and I went out
there and worked with their programmers on writing the code." Finally
Rubin brought in a man named Marty Chafkin, with whom he'd worked on projects
for Hamilton and whom he calls "a kind of inventor-engineer,"
to untangle one remaining snag: how to get the camera to differentiate between
people who were coming into, as opposed to leaving, the restaurant. Chafkin
solved the problem with a sensor system, and the project moved ahead. Like
much of Diller + Scofidio's work, the resulting video system works
on visual and conceptual levels at the same time; it's a bravura show of
technology as well as an investigation of surveillance, ego, and several
varieties of public display.
In 1999 an unusual three-year collaboration with Mark Hansen, a researcher
from Bell Labs, resulted in Listening Post, a 7-by-10-foot multimedia
artwork that was displayed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Hansen
and Rubin met at a conference--organized jointly by BAM and Lucent Technologies,
which owns Bell Labs--that brought together multimedia artists and researchers.
Their collaboration began as a research project. Rubin and Hansen were both
interested to see if they could mine sound from data, specifically
from the Internet. Eventually Hansen suggested they zero in on chat rooms,
and together they wrote some code that figures out what the most popular
chat-room topics are at any given moment. Then, using text-to-voice software
developed by Bell Labs that Hansen and Rubin tweaked to fit their project,
they succeeded in bringing those conversations to life as sound. A voice
(the New York Times called it "crisp" and "British-inflected")
reads phrases taken verbatim by the software from actual chat-room text,
in real time. Finally the pair created a sleek formal apparatus--110 small
vacuum fluorescent display screens arranged in a grid and attached to hanging
steel cables--for the text from those chat rooms to scroll across. Atmospheric
music composed by Rubin gives the whole thing the feeling of a performance.
It's as if a couple of composers figured out how to "play"
the Internet like an avant-garde musical score.
During last winter's Next Wave Festival at BAM, the piece was installed
in a remote room on the fourth floor of the Hillman Attic Studio building.
Word got around quickly among the city's digerati. "My reaction was
that it seemed to forge new sculptural possibilities in terms of how Internet
art is presented and experienced," says Debra Singer, associate curator
of contemporary art at the Whitney, where Listening Post will appear
next, beginning in December. "It didn't rely on the familiar interface
of the computer monitor; instead it's sort of rendered at a human scale,
a bodily scale. And that means it registers in a way that is more visceral
than cognitive." Wayne Ashley, who ran the Bell Labs-BAM partnership
and saw Listening Post develop from its earliest stages, says simply,
"I think it's going to set the bar for multimedia artwork, this piece."
The two questions that loom for Rubin are to what extent he'll step out
on his own, and whether he'll move decisively in the direction of producing
art. "I'm not sure I would want to go to a place where I was only making
artwork for art contexts," he says. "I have a long-standing interest
in work that functions in public as well, and I think they drive each other.
It's more a question of being able to do self-directed, self-initiated projects,
rather than simply being a participant in a project where a lot of the factors
are already determined before I get there." Astonishingly, Rubin estimates
that this year he's probably spent two-thirds of his time writing various
kinds of grant proposals, the bane of any artist or designer working without
institutional affiliation or significant name recognition. "I
wish I could spend more time making," he says. "That time
is vanishingly elusive."
For now Rubin seems content to enjoy a reputation that is constructed more
of buzz than actual fame, and to work in the reflected glow of praise
from some of the art and architecture worlds' most compelling figures.
"What I would say about Ben is that when we talk it's such an easy
conversation, even if the subject is really complex," Hamilton says.
"Also, he's such a generous person--conceptually generous and personally
generous." Diller, as it happens, says something nearly identical:
"He's very generous. Other potential collaborators would be much more
cautious and suspicious about the process and who was going to get credit
for what."
Though he himself would never say so, there is something disingenuous in
all of this talk about Rubin's generosity. For all the lip service we pay
to the increasing frequency of creative collaborations, most of us still
subscribe to an auteur theory of design: it's a lot easier somehow to think
of Brasserie as the work of Diller + Scofidio than as the work of Diller
+ Scofidio and Rubin and all the other unheralded creative types who
did the lighting and installed the bar. And wouldn't our image of Laurie
Anderson as a creative genius be disturbed, or at least diluted, if we gave
full credit to all the people who help her pull off her stage work? Movie
critics like Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael hashed out these issues a generation
ago in dueling essays about whether the director of a film could rightly
be called its single author. In design, the subject has barely been broached.
In that sense, bringing up Rubin's generosity is just another way of saying
he doesn't make a fuss when his name is listed down near the bottom of the
credits. And it's easy to get the feeling that calling himself a full collaborator
on any of his projects with famous artists--which Rubin is careful not to
do--might strike those famous artists as somehow aiming above his station.
Although most of those Rubin has worked with are quick to compliment him,
Anderson seemed unnerved when I asked her about the specifics of Rubin's
contribution to shows like Nerve Bible and Moby Dick--almost
as if I'd asked Jacques Pépin about the pleasures of collaborating
with the guy who washes the vegetables.
Rubin had told me that his work with Anderson had grown more conceptual
over time, but when I asked her about that, she became tight-lipped. "I
know he was doing interesting stuff in his other work," she said, "but
I haven't really collaborated with him except in a technical way. Mostly
on screens for video projection." And what exactly did that work entail?
"Well, you want an image to be bright and have a certain amount of
resolution." That was the extent of it? No theoretical conversations?
"You want an image to be bright and have a certain amount of resolution,"
she repeated.
The question of credit can slice both ways, as Rubin is learning as he begins
to take on projects in which he's the better-known partner. Not long after
I talked with Hansen about his work with Rubin on Listening Post--which
he called "hands down the most gratifying collaboration I've ever had"
and "everything you hope a collaboration would lead to"--he e-mailed
me a simple request. It was a plea to make sure that I credited the project
accurately. Apparently the magazine Artforum had identified
Listening Post in a caption as the work of "Ben Rubin and Mark
Hansen." Hansen wanted to make sure I understood that his name was
supposed to go first.
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