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Ben Rubin is a media artist currently based in New York City. He received a B.A. from Brown University and an M.S. afterwards from the MIT Media Lab. His artwork is displayed all around the world including the San Jose Museum of Art, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris. One of his most recent creations is the Shakespeare Machine for the Public Theater in New York which displays text on a chandeliered of quotes and adjectives Shakespeare wrote. Currently, he is a professor at the Bard MFA program and at the Yale School of Art.
Mr. Rubin gave a talk at the EYEO Festival in 2013 about his projects and inspiration. He began his talk by speaking about the importance of words and language in our society. He believes language is able to “write, transmit, interpret, regard, understand, perform, analyze, receive, and read,” and he desires these attributes in his artwork. This is why the major majority of his works all feature words. His first major project was inspired by the first text display ever in New York City. He implemented the conveyor belt design of horizontal words on an elevator shaft. This work would read the recent books checkout in a library, but would only show the word as the elevator was moving.
Another project he spoke about was the time when he worked closely with Steve Reich, one of the most innovative and well know of the living contemporary composers. Together, they made a program that translated works into syllabic rhythms that can be given to percussionists to perform. Steve Reich then added music on top of this to create a vocal composition accompanied by percussion that emulated the speech in drums. It is amazing how words can be so impactful in artwork, very similar to many of the beliefs of choral music that tells a story with words and music instead of just the notes. This is in correlation with artwork as he utilizes words and art to evoke a much deeper emotion than when they are separate.
