Notes tagged with Daily Basis

News of the world

Luke McKernan writes:

allthenews

News is not an absolute. Though we talk about world news, what is news to one person is to necessarily news to another. News is a report of an event of specific interest to a particular audience. So it is that online news services such as Google News or Yahoo News offer means to tailor the world’s news streams to your particular interests. Sign up to the BBC news app, and it will shape the news to your location. Publishers deliver, but it is readers and viewers to ultimately construct the news around what interest them, around their world.

Nevertheless the idea remains of an absolute world of news. It’s more a concept for an artist than a journalist, and I have been fascinated by Martin John Callanan‘s online installation, I Wanted to See All of the News From Today. Created for an exhibition held earlier this year by the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art, it persists online. What he has done is generated feeds for all (?) of the world’s newspaper websites where they make their front pages available on a daily basis. This he then ingeniously publishes on a single webpage, allowing you to scroll through hundreds of newspaper pages from every land and language imaginable – and with every concern under the sun. And as a new page is published, so the website changes. The screengrab above is for a small part of the news pages for 30 August 2013, a heady day for news indeed.

scemfa_5478

Callanan’s artwork makes one ponder the nature of news and community. It shows how we all thirst after news, but how different our concerns are. It shows how news separates us, how different we all are, even if the same kinds of story persist wherever we are (celebrities, murder, scandal, sport, animals). it is the world’s news, but also no one’s news in this form.

newsmap

There have been other attempts to pull together the world’s news in one place, for journalistic rather than artistic reasons. Mostly based around maps and Google News feeds, these efforts have come and gone. The standout effort, which is superb as a news source quite as much as an ingenious piece of programming, is design engineer Marcos Weskamp‘s site Newsmap.

Newsmap visualises data from the Google News aggregator on a continual basis, displaying the world’s news with headlines taken from news websites (which link to those sites) displayed according to priority, territory, theme and time. So one can see all the world’s news, algorithmnically ordered according to its significance in relation to other news stories. The newsmap can be tailored to different countries or groups of countries, and is classifiable by themes such as Business, Technology and Sport, which are colour-coded for easy reference. The colour then comes in different shades according to how recent the news is. It is a brilliant realisation of a solution to the information problem Weskamp identifies on his personal site:

Currently, the internet presents a highly disorganized collage of information. Many of us are working in an information-soaked world. There is too much of everything. We are subject everywhere to a sensory overload of images, bombarded with information; in magazines and advertisements, on TV, radio, in the cityscape. The internet is a wonderful communication tool, but day after day we find ourselves constantly dealing with information overload. Today, the internet presents a new challenge, the wide and unregulated distribution of information requires new visual paradigms to organize, simplify and analyze large amounts of data. New user interface challenges are arising to deal with all that overwhelming quantity of information.

I find that Newsmap is not just an inspired attempt at making the information overload manageable; it makes knowing more about the world desirable. While I Wanted to See All of the News From Today shows how divided we are all, and how mutual understanding is a fantasy, Newsmap demonstrates that our news is anyone’s news. The one cannot contain the world’s news on a screen and can only let us scroll endlessly through page after page. The other distills, condenses, classifies and makes clear. It is news for the world.

Newsmap has been running since 2004, and Weskamp’s last blog entry about the site was in 2010. I do hope it will continue to be supported. It’s one of those key sites that tells you what the Internet is for, and how it has changed us – for the better.

Orginal article

Studies in Temporal Urbanism: The urbanTick Experiment (Data Soliloquies)

Studies in Temporal Urbanism: The urbanTick Experiment (Data Soliloquies)

Chapter from Data Soliloquies included in Studies in Temporal Urbanism by Fabian Neuhaus

This book is very much about what the name urbanTick literally says, about the ticking of the urban, the urban as we experience it everyday on the bus, in the park or between buildings. It is about the big orchestrated mass migration of commuters, the seasonal blossoms of the trees along the walkway and the frequency of the stamping rubbish-eater-trucks. It is also, not to forget, about climate, infrastructure, opening hours, term times, parking meters, time tables, growing shadows and moon light. But most of all it is about how all this is experienced by citizens on a daily basis and how they navigate within this complex structure of patterns. The content of this book is based on the content of the urbanTick blog between 2008-2010. One year blogging about this topic brought together a large collection of different aspects and thoughts. It is not at all a conclusive view, the opposite might be the case, it is an exploratory work in progress, while trying to capture as many facets of the topic as possible.

Hardcover: 283 pages
Publisher: Springer; 2011 edition (4 Aug 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9400709366
ISBN-13: 978-9400709362
Product Dimensions: 15.5 x 2.3 x 23.5 cm

Wars During My Lifetime – Whitstable Biennale 2012

Harbour News, Whitstable

This new work for Whitstable Biennale 2012, Wars During My Lifetime, collects together wars that have taken place all over the world during one individual’s lifetime. A fascinating – and rapidly expanding – document, the newspaper makes no comment, but quietly brings the list to our attention. Many are wars we hear about on the radio on a daily basis, others are long since finished, or so small or distant they haven’t touched our consciousness.

Available from Whitstable Library, Elliotts Coffee Shop, Tea & Times, and Harbour News, throughout the festival: 1st to 16th September 2012

Saturday 8 September, 2pm starting from HQ
for this special one-off event, a local town crier will read out the wars within the newspaper.

talk at The Place, The Choreodrome Lecture Series

the place

During The Place’s biennial Choreodrome research and development project for choreographers there will be three presentations given in the Robin Howard Dance Theatre on different aspects of creativity. The series involves theatre, performance and live artists working on the far edge of choreographic practice, and are designed to inspire new conversations about choreography, movement and performance. The seminars are open and free to all who wish to attend.

Martin John Callanan is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans numerous mediums and engages both emerging and commonplace technology (http://greyisgood.eu). His work has included translating active communication data into music; freezing in time the earth’s water system; tampering with banknotes; writing thousands of letters; capturing newspapers from around the world as they are published; taming wind onto the internet and broadcasting his precise physical location live for over two years.

Martin’s work is always decidedly deadpan and served with a dash of ennui. Some of his more well-known pieces include the ambient audio installation Sonification of You, the meta-news aggregator I Wanted to See All the News From Today and Text Trends, which abstracts the casual manner in which we receive, scan and process information and language on a daily basis.

Martin is currently Artist in Residence at UCL Environment Institute and Teaching Fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art UCL.

He will discuss the power of narrative and the role of performance and metaphor within his work. You will be asked to question whether the artist or audience is the real performer: where and when the performance really takes place.

http://www.theplace.org.uk/1701/whats-on/the-choreodrome-lecture-series-martin-callanan.html

Text Trends

Text Trends

Greg at Serial Consign has written a review of my new work Text Trends

… In experiencing the piece, the viewer sits idly and watches animations plot out the ebb and flow (or lack thereof) of a series of search terms over the last four years. This all plays out matter-of-factly with all the passion of a market index or a readerboard… In viewing this piece, I found that it invoked a bit of anxiety and I felt a little helpless… It is not too often that you come across a data-based project that makes you step back and think about how you qualify and evaluate visualization. More importantly Text Trends abstracts the casual manner in which we receive, scan and process information and language on a daily basis.

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