Project I: Revised Proposal 2

Title: Experiments in Visualizing the News

Abstract: 

A mixed-media work that seeks to provide insights and clues on the functioning of the news media in our contemporary moment, over the course of a two week period. Questions the work seeks to raise include: In our consumption of the news, how do we determine what story is most important? What outlets are directing our attention to a particular story and how are those related to the biases of the organizations and audiences? What politics is at work in determining the editorial decisions? What deserves our attention and for how long before another story takes over the top headline? 

Proposal: 

This project is a series of experiments related to my investigation into the news media and will take the form of mixed-media elements in three phases. In phase one, I will start by observing and recording my own news consumption habits for a two-week period. I will save and take a screenshot of every news article that I read (having read defined as actively chosen to click on) through my own self-selected choices. I will create a diary to log and document the number of articles I read, the time I spend reading them, and my immediate emotion after reading them. In addition to this log, I will then transcribe the headlines of each article into a single text document. Phase one will take the form of a digitally accessible slideshow, with each entry including the material from one day of news consumption. My intention is to seek a transparency in my own interests and biases through this process.  

Alongside my self-selected news articles from a wide variety of outlets, phase two will also engage in an observation of the top stories as determined by four deliberately selected websites from the US News Media—that fit into a four quadrants on a grid with the axes of corporate/independent and left/right. Through this process I intend to develop a visual diagrammatic display of how each website promotes or ignores a particular news headline as it occurs.  For purposes of this experimentation, I have chosen the following outlets according to their closest fit to the grid taking into account comparable audience size and influence: CNN (Corporate-Left). (Note: CNN may also be considered moderate or even slightly right-of-center, but for the purposes of this project, it is clearly to the Left of Fox News). Fox News (Corporate-Right). Breitbart (Independent-Right), and Democracy Now (Independent-Left). I will place the screenshots of each of these four sites onto the grid within the same frame, and then save that as a new image. I will then upload these to a website, and allow a user to click through the week’s news headlines as seen on these four websites, in order to find his or her own individual observations, conclusions, and insights on how these four different ideological sites made their individual editorial decisions.

In phase three of the project, I will return to the text document of all the articles I read during phase one. The next step will consist of rewriting the text in order to place the news headlines in three different aesthetic displays. In the first display, I will create a long scroll of all of the stories I have read through self-selection, recreating the effect of a “ticker tape” bar as seen on television or in front of a TV studio. The second aesthetic display will consist of the text of the headlines from the four websites, all scrolling from left-to-right on four different rows of a screen. The third will be an experiment in text and audio, as I will rearrange the words of headlines in the form of a poem, and then use the computer generated voice from Apple to read the poem aloud. This will be created in Adobe After Effects and be in the form of a .mov file to be viewed on a projected screen.  

Background: how does this project relate to your ongoing work? 

This project is an extension of my previous interests and studies in media, language, and current affairs, an attempt to use news media as art material, and a new form of my ongoing practice of documentation of my day-to-day observations, both subjectively and objectively.

Significance of your project:

Each of these experiments will attempt to re-contextualize the news media, through self-observation, changing our visual perception of how we see news headlines, and manipulation of textual language.