Math Meets Art at Times Tower

Play "Fabulous People"
by Electric Six

I went to an inaugural event at TheTimesCenter. Renzo Piano's signature is all over the building: hard edges, flat surfaces, bursts of color and a general feeling of openness and sterility, even in the auditorium, predominate.

I met someone who worked at the Times and asked how she liked working in the Times Tower next door. "It's great — especially the elevators," she said. "But the building is huge! I have no idea where anyone outside my department sits!"

I walked into the Times Tower and asked the huge security guard if there were tours available. Hey, I'm still new in New York, so I can ask touristy questions, right?

Sadly, there are no public tours. But I did get to walk around the lobby. In a long corridor that divides the building into New York Times side and law and accounting offices side was a long folding table and a bald-shaven man of medium build frowning at a laptop. A copy of Edward Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" lay open to a page showing dance notation.

I asked him what happened. "Oh, I think the server just crashed," he said. Onscreen were windows full of names and numbers — the name of every writer who had something published in the Times and the number of articles they had written.

Along the walls were 80 individual readouts about the size of a very large index card suspended between thin wires. Turns out the frowning man was Mark Hansen, associate professor of statistics at UCLA and media artist.

He and collaborative partner Ben Rubin of ear studio have been commissioned to create a work that reflects the essence of the Times.

The project, Hansen explained, mimics the newspaper's clip archive.

Each readout is like an individual card file that shows writers' names (first initial, last name). The person's name stays on the screen in relation to the number of articles they've written. Some names, therefore will stay on the readout longer than others.

It's still a work in progress and won't be officially unveiled until some time in October. But Hansen and Rubin will be at the Times Tower for the next six weeks working out the kinks in the software and refining the idea.