[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfIFndB1jo8&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]

I used the Port Authority Bus Terminal for my commute and witnessed the construction of the new New York Times building.  The building has several restaurants and NYC’s first Muji store (outside of Moma).  I pass it by every day but one day, I decided to walk through the building lobby  which runs from the 40th Street to the 41st.  The building’s main entrance is on 8th Ave.  The hallway that joins the lobby to the main entrance has lots of little boxes hung on both walls.  On closer inspection, they are tiny video screens suspended by cables that runs down from the ceiling.  It is a piece of artwork called Moveable Type (2007) by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen.  Here is the official description (click here for more information):

Vacuum fluorescent displays, copper and steel cable, custom software  … Algorithms developed by the artists parse the daily output of the New York Times (news, features, opinion, blogs) as well as The Times’s 150-year archive. The activities and comments of visitors to The Times Web site also provide input to the work.  The information (and therefore the artwork itself) is in a constant state of change, because it reflects the up-to-the-minute production of the news by The Times, both in print and on-line. The artists have programmed the work to extract fragments – words, phrase, quotes, numbers and places – from The Times’s growing, living, real-time news database, and to recombine these fragments into a series of ever-changing kinetic compositions.

The video above shows one of the pieces called “To The Editor”.  I stood there for well over 20 minutes to film the performances.  Love the old fashion typewriter chatter and the occasional ding.

The two pictures below are borrowed from the official ftp site, not mine.