SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Yerba Buena Center for the Arts presents Dark Matters: Artists See the Impossible. This group exhibition of hi-tech installations, video, photography and conceptual projects, uncover the unexpected, the invisible and the hidden. Artists include: Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, Trevor Paglen, Bull.Miletic, Sergio Prego, Walid Raad, Kambui Olujimi, Alison Sant, Richard Johnson, Richard Barnes, Alex Schweder and Charles Mason. As part of YBCA's Reality Check series, one of the three "big ideas" that guides programming in the 07-08 season, the exhibition provokes audiences to pause for a moment to reexamine accepted realities and what is normally overlooked.

One of the projects, Listening Post, is by media artist Ben Rubin and statistician Mark Hansen. Listening Post, composed of a gently curving aluminum lattice hung with 231 miniature LCD computer screens, constantly culls text fragments in real time from the Internet. Using several computers to analyze data from thousands of chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums, the installation selects 85 postings beginning with "I am," "I like" or "I love." Gradually, the communiques appear on the displays, filling more and more space with their light. The selected texts vary in length and complexity; simpler and shorter ones come first.

Cycling through a series of six movements, each a different arrangement of visual, aural, and musical elements, each with its own data processing logic, Listening Post becomes a visual and sonic response to the content, magnitude and immediacy of virtual communication. It is a mesmerizing orchestration of a kind of global unconscious mediated by the Internet. Data-mining chat rooms around the globe in real-time, Hansen and Rubin create the first magnificently compelling opera of identity in our 21st century of blogging, instant messaging and chat rooms. This dynamic piece has been hailed as a seminal piece of electronic art.

The exhibition content of Dark Matters: Artists See the Impossible, varies widely and includes many different types of media. David Maisel's, Library of Dust, is a series of photographs depicting the eroding storage canisters found in the basement of a state-run psychiatric hospital. These copper canisters, mineral corroded and blooming with color, hold the cremated remains of mental patients whose bodies were unclaimed by their families. The multi-media installation MURMURS is a collaboration by Alex Schweder, Richard Barnes and Charles Mason, documenting the yearly congregation of a flock of starlings in a suburb of Rome called EUR. The phenomenon takes on a certain portent when one knows EUR was the site where Mussolini planned but never finished the Universal Exhibition, his homage to fascism. Trevor Paglen's work blurs the lines between social science and contemporary art. In The Black Sites, Paglen, an experimental geographer and artist, examines the secret operations of the CIA in its War on Terror. Alison Sant and Richard Johnson's project, PROXIMITY, is a video capture suit designed to record a series of urban encounters collected on walks through a city. Re-appropriating surveillance technology to the body, footage is captured via four small cameras that are triggered by a proximity sensor when one's personal space is entered.

Also included in the exhibition are the multi-channel panoramic videos by Bull.Miletic; Sergio Prego's 360-degree photo captures of ephemeral events; Walid Raad's film and photography that explore memory and trauma, along with additional works by Kambui Olujimi. The artists in Dark Matters provide audiences with super-human abilities to experience what we only suspect exists. Delving into the obscure and often sinister, the exhibition tests the limits of the imagination and offers a range of powerful work.