Paul Rucker's soundscape tracks U.S. prisons

In September, City Arts covered the interdisciplinary show at Cornish College of the Arts that included Paul Rucker's multimedia work, which often incorporates sound and visual graphing of some sort to get viewers to interact with the work.

His multimedia piece Proliferation, which debuted at that show, tracks the growth of prison systems in the U.S. since the 19th century in a slow progression of animated mapped statistics complemented with a beautiful, though erratic, musical score. The work is a great example of art successfully taking on an activist role — effective, without being heavy-handed.

It made me cry.

He just posted a sliver of the experience on his Web site .