In April, Landmarks, the public art program of The University of Texas at Austin, unveiled a new commission on campus: an architectural projection entitled And That’s The Way It Is by New York artist Ben Rubin. Later this month, Rubin and his team of EAR Studio Collaborators — data artist and programmer Jer Thorp and statistician Mark Hansen — will return to Austin to update the piece with additional content and programming changes.

And That’s The Way It Isis a six-channel video projection that illuminates the façade of the Communications A (CMA) Building along the newly dedicated Walter Cronkite Plaza every evening from dusk until midnight. The piece projects an interwoven grid of moving text from televised news broadcasts onto the building, choreographed into various scenes that alternate in a series of patterns. The work acquires its content from two sources: closed caption transcripts of six live network news broadcasts and archival transcripts of Walter Cronkite’s CBS Evening News broadcasts from the late 1970s and 1980s. Rubin’s own software scans the digitized transcripts for patterns in speech and grammatical constructions, and selects related sequences of text from each source to interweave and project into two- to three-minute scenes, each of which has its own compositional rhythm, visual presentation, and internal logic.

Rubin returns to Austin in late June with collaborators Thorp and Hansen to further refine the piece. One of the most noticeable improvements will be a new composition added to the existing text-based scenes that change every few minutes. While in Austin, Rubin and his team also plan to provide improved processing of the live TV broadcast caption feeds and to update the Cronkite archival content with text from more than 11,000 pages of recently digitized CBS Evening News broadcast transcripts, dating from 1978–1981.

Ben Rubin lives and works in New York City and is highly regarded for his pioneering experiments in audio, visual, and digital electronics. He studied computer science and semiotics at Brown University and earned a master of science in visual studies from MIT’s Media Lab. He studied under some of the great figures in documentary film, minimal music, and video art, including Beryl Korot, Richard Leacock, and Steve Reich. These investigations inspired his interest in the patterns of language and grammatical structures that continue to inform his work.

Rooted in visual art, performance, and current events, Rubin’s work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris, and the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. Rubin has created large-scale public artworks for the New York Times, the city of San Jose, and the Minneapolis Public Library, and his work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Science Museum, London.