Public Projects

BEACON at the National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia

Beacon (2010) is an light sculpture created by media artist Ben Rubin; its animated shapes are based on the unique visual structure of the pages of the Talmud. It was commissioned by the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, where it was permanently installed in November, 2010. The Talmud is the central document of Jewish law, [...]

Moveable Type

Moveable Type, by New York artist Ben Rubin and U.C.L.A. associate professor 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 [...]

San Jose Semaphore

SEMAPHORE: a visual apparatus for communicating messages over distance. San Jose Semaphore (2006), by artist Ben Rubin, is a permanent public artwork commissioned by Adobe Systems Incorporated in collaboration with the City of San Jose’s Office of Cultural Affair’s Public Art Program. Located within the top floors of Adobe’s Almaden Tower headquarters in San Jose, [...]

Four Stories

Built into the structure of the two glass elevator cabs in Library Hall, “Four Stories” displays the titles of recently checked-out books in large, illuminated text as the elevators move between floors. This text is visible from much of the Library Hall. “Four Stories” is a permanent public artwork commissioned by the city of Minneapolis. [...]

Story Pipeline

In the BPEC community center in Anchorage, Alaska, stories told by Alaskans appear on a plasma video screen and simultaneously emerge as real-time text transcriptions on a 150 long LED display. The text zig-zags indoors down a glass corridor, then veers out through the plate glass, dancing between the trees until it disappears out of [...]

Brasserie

Customers entering through the revolving door are photographed by a video camera. An ephemeral record of the clientele emerges as the images shift to the right each time a new arrival appears on the leftmost screen. Together with the architecture, the video installation plays on the notion of a “grand entrance.” The Brasserie won the [...]