Movable Type [installation]

Central corridor of lobby showing two grids of seven rows and 40 columns each on opposing walls; Moveable Type, by New York artist Ben Rubin and UCLA associate professor (in statistics) 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 the NYTimes.com website (browsing, searching, commenting). The resulting refracted view of The Times is displayed on 560 vacuum-fluorescent display screens installed in the lobby. Each screen is 4 1/4 inches tall and 8 1/2 inches long. Their resolution is 128 x 256 pixels. The design was coordinated with the architects, Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Source: New York Times [online archive]; http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/nytarchive.html (accessed 7/10/2012)