Fajardo – RSS Overload News Crawl from 2015 01 (sped up)

This is video documentation of a generative artwork titled RSS Overload. In the wake of September 11, 2001 televisual news media began increasing the prominence of headline news crawls, in many cases stacking them three deep. The news became more and more alarmist. The logic of “if it bleeds, it leads” overwhelmed common sense. All journalism became yellow. As an attempt to curate my own news intake I looked to RSS feeds on the World Wide Web. I wrote (remixed) a news crawl algorithm in Apple’s Quartz Composer, a node-based programming environment. This set of newsfeeds became my screensaver for many years. This is the only extant video documentation of the work. Many of the websites I relied on for measured voices either abandoned that stance or hid their feeds behind paywalls, or both.
The work is generative in the sense that it relies on live data (headline text and lengths) for its form. I structured a set of velocities that suggested differences in urgencies. I kept it black and white for the sake of simplicity.

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