[NetBehaviour] Breaking News

marc garrett marc.garrett at furtherfield.org
Thu Sep 24 22:51:26 CEST 2009


Breaking News is a second project under the umbrella thematic of 
INFORMATIONALISM - the saturation of data in our day to day lives. The 
initial project is On Transmitting Ideology, presented in Berlin as part 
of Transmediale.08: CONSPIRE and in Philadelphia at Vox Populi, both in 
2008.

http://www.ambriente.com/breakingNews/

Breaking News is a two-part project about the re-interpretation of the 
ceaseless data we call “current events.” The first part is a news 
literacy workshop initially conducted in Buffalo at the Gloria J. Parks 
Community Center. Children between the ages of seven and eight years old 
discussed what they consider news, how it disseminates, and recent 
newsworthy events. They learned to visually deconstruct a newspaper and 
then reinterpret articles and headlines into drawings and collages. 
Beyond the pedagogical purpose of the workshop, it served as a means to 
gather content that informed the second part of the project: the gallery 
installation.

Based on the premise that we live in a media-saturated world, the 
project seeks to investigate how young children digest major world 
events such as Obama’s election, Michael Jackson’s death, Swine Flu - 
inescapable "realities" that momentarily consume media outlets and seep 
into our lives. The content generated by the children in the workshop is 
integrated into the news media visualization presented as part of the 
gallery installation. The visualization itself consists of a textual 
feed of current headlines accompanied by computer-rendered illustrations 
of personalities who have established an understanding of news media in 
the United States. The illustrations and text help generate new 
interpretations of what we consider "the news."



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