Ben Rubin

Ben Rubin (born 1964) is a media artist and designer based in New York City.

He is best known for his data-driven media installations and public artworks, including Listening Post and Moveable Type, both created in collaboration with statistician and journalism professor Mark Hansen.

Rubin was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1964.

He graduated from Brown University in 1987 with an AB degree in Computer Science and Semiotics.

In 1988, while still in graduate school at MIT, Rubin was hired as a consultant by Beryl Korot and music composer Steve Reich to develop technology for their multimedia opera, The Cave, which premiered in Vienna in 1993.

He went on to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied with Ricky Leacock and Glorianna Davenport, earning an MS in Visual Studies at the MIT Media Lab in 1989.

Rubin moved to New York in 1993.

In 1994, Rubin began the first of several collaborations with Laurie Anderson, creating software and technical solutions for her performance tours, including Nerve Bible (1994), Songs and Stories from Moby Dick (1999), Dal Vivo (1998), and numerous installation projects.

Rubin was a founding member of The Builders Association theater company.

Between 1997 and 2002, Rubin taught at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program.

In 1998, he founded Electronic Arts Research (EAR), a multimedia art and design studio.

In 2004, he joined as Critic in Yale School of Art's MFA in Graphic Design program where he remained until 2006.

Starting in 2007, Rubin began an ongoing series of collaborations with the New York-based theater ensemble Elevator Repair Service (ERS), developing a performance installation called Shuffle (2009-2014) that remixed text from three 1920s American novels.

His public art installation And That’s The Way It Is (2012) at the University of Texas campus in Austin, a text based video inspired by broadcast television news from Walter Cronkite's newscasts and other contemporary news feeds won the CoD+A Award in 2013.

He co-founded The Office for Creative Research in 2013, along with data artist Jer Thorp and, statistician Mark Hansen.

In 2013, Rubin won an Obie Award for his projection design for Elevator Repair Service's Arguendo, a theatrical piece based on U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments that debuted at the Public Theater in New York.

In 2014, The Office of Creative Research was part of MoMA's Artists Experiment initiative.

Rubin's commissioned work is permanently installed at the New York Times building and the Public Theater in New York, as well as at the headquarters of Adobe Systems in San Jose, California, and Brookfield Place, Calgary.

Since 2015, Rubin has served as the director of the Center for Data Arts at The New School, where he is an associate professor of design.

Rubin joined the faculty of The New School in 2015, becoming the director of the Center for Data Arts.

Rubin's work uses computational methods, including Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, to engage with cultural source material (art collections, literary works, public documents, news, and social media).

His work takes a variety of forms, including sculpture, projections, sound installations, immersive environments, and live performance.

His works have been exhibited at Whitney Museum of American Art, Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Art Institute of Chicago, Fondation Cartier in Paris, Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Vancouver Art Gallery, Skirball Center in Los Angeles (in a show organized by the Getty Museum), Brooklyn Academy of Music and San Jose Museum of Art.

In addition to his own work, Rubin has collaborated with a wide range of people, including musicians and composers (Arto Lindsey, Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, George Lewis, Richard Teitlebaum, Zeena Parkins), architects (Diller+Scofidio / Renfro, James Polshek, Rafael Pelli, Renzo Piano, SOM), artists (Anne Hamilton, Lorna Simpson), and philosophers (Bruno Latour, Paul Virilio).

Many of Rubin's most important works were created in the course of his longtime collaboration with statistician Mark Hansen.

Rubin has been resident artist at the Steim Foundation Amsterdam, Banff Centre For The Arts Alberta, On the Boards Seattle, and Brooklyn Academy of Music and Bell Laboratories.