ORANGE AND WHITE.(Whitney Museum of American Art exhibits machine that displays excerpts from Internet chat rooms)

Weird week. Weird, weird week, passing from alert orange to heavenly white and back to the usual muddle of slush. People keep trying to "gauge public opinion" at this moment of crisis. Fortunately, though, in the past year in New York we've had on hand a machine that can tell you what the world is thinking--that actually listens to the world, reads its mind, and tells you exactly what's up in there. The machine, a Jimmy Neutron assemblage of display monitors and loudspeakers and copper wire, is the brainchild of a Bell Labs statistician named Mark Hansen and a sound designer and artist named Ben Rubin, and for most of the past year you could find it in a loft on the Bowery, where you could drop in on it if you knew it was there. For the past couple of months, though, it has been on loan to the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in a rough week it was a pleasure to sit in the dark and listen.

The machine, or "Listening Post," as it is called, works in a way that would be hard for an anxiety-ridden computerilliterate type to understand even if the alert level were back down to Clinton-era cheap-dress blue, but basically the idea is this: Hansen and Rubin have written a program that allows them to probe into all the unrestricted Internet chat rooms in the English-speaking world and dredge up thousands upon thousands of random sentences even as they are being typed. The casual remarks, desperate pleas, and lecherous queries that are sucked out of the stream of world chatter are then relayed in various ways on the two hundred or so small screens and ten loudspeakers that make up the machine's public face. The found words and sentence fragments can be strung out at random on the display monitors or made to race across the screens in constant streams, like a Times Square zipper, giving the thing a Jenny Holzer-like gnomic and oracular quality. Better yet, a speech synthesizer can read aloud from the found chatter--either intoning words and sentences one by one in a sepulchral English announcer's voice or chanting and singing them in fuguelike overlay.

Quite often, the sequences of words and sentences are meaningless, but frequently they take on striking shapes. Two weeks ago, for instance, the machine produced a kind of found poem on the theme of "orange" and duct tape:

WARNING: CODE ORANGE, From fear to affirmation, or at least sex, in nine lines. Other sequences had a more Joycean flow. Finnegans Terror Alert: "Duct tape and plastic for the White House duct tape, and water in the bathtub, eheh hmmm, i got to wear my orange shoes again i like orange and yellow and pink and red its all a plot by saranwrap and duct tape mcm . . . we always have duct tape . . . always."

When the machine was set to take in whole sentences, one found, unsurprisingly, that the music of the world's mind was less ...