Words words words! We're drowning in them - if you have any doubt about that you should visit the Listening Post exhibition at the Science Museum. That's what Tiffany Tondut did with a band called Ungdomskulen. There's a word - 'Ungdomskulen'. Look at if for five seconds, then close your eyes and try to repeat it. You probably messed that up... unless you happen to know what the Norwegian word for Middle School is.

The internet is a dark and lonely place. Millions of us around the world log on in the hope of finding someone else out there. Chat rooms are filled with endless words, a billion desolate voices ringing out into cyberspace. Endless letters are typed out over and over again, spelling out every gamut of human experience - pain, pleasure, hatred, suffering, boredom, absurdity - all forgotten almost as soon they’ve been scribed, dissolving into the meaningless void of the interweb.



I am standing in the Science Museum with Ungdomskulen at an exhibition called Listening Post. We’re surrounded by small LED screens that display scrolling text plucked in real time from chat rooms across the world. Every now and then a synthesized voice will read out a random phrase. It’s a cold mechanical voice, only transformed and given a certain humanity by the words it speaks. Some of them are touching, some dull, some just ridiculous, but they each represent a real person, calling from somewhere in the depths of the internets. The Listening Post feels like being trapped in a scene from an eighties science fiction series but somehow, it’s enthralling.



Post-punk band Ungdomskulen (it means middle-school in Norwegian by the way) are an interesting bunch. Their music is experimental and clever and members Kristian, Frode and Øyvind have a good sense of the absurd, which makes our surroundings rather fitting for their photo shoot. As they climb on top of each other to form an awkward human totem pole, the synthesised voice suddenly blurts out, “Dutch girls are easy.”

"It’s really beautiful. You really sense the humanity behind it,” says front man Kristian. “It’s touching. It’s like Kraftwerk injecting personality into something mechanical.” It’s interesting to hear the internet being talked about on these terms. For me it’s always seemed like a depressing place with its chat rooms populated by the desperately bored or lonely. “Yes,” agrees Kristian, “but we’re all on the internet in some way.”  Bass player Frode nods. “You can see so much of someone’s life in one sentence," he says. "When you see some of those sentences you think, ‘that could be me.’”



Come to think of it, I do spend an alarming amount of time on the internet. Much of it propagating this version of me that only really exists on social networking sites. “We’re becoming more and more isolated as humans because all of these gadgets we use to communicate,” suggests Kristian. I can’t help feeling that he’s completely right. I start to think about how much time I spend communicating with people without seeing them face to face. It’s depressing. “We have a split personalities now. We have ourselves and our online selves.”

I guess there’s an important lesson to take away from artists Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s Listening Post.  Despite the huge barrier to human physical contact that’s been created by the internet, all of us that use it are still humans; humans looking for things that humans have always looked for. “On the internet when you’re checking your email or Myspace you’re really just looking for a message from someone that says they care about you and really, the internet is the worst place to look for love,”  says Kristian. And he’s right.

For more from Ungdomskulen go here.

For more about the Listening Post exhibition at the Science Museum go here.