Project: Newsshaper

Students: Mahir Yavuz, Javier Lloret

“Newshaper” is a tabletop interactive system that deals with the re-contextualization of daily news items gathered from live news feeds. It allows users to create their own relational networks and ‘maps’ based on actual live news streamed from the Internet. Due to the dynamic nature of live data streams, the system constantly creates different content for users and due to manipulations made by the users it generates different visual results of the same content. In a more general sense, users of the “Newshaper” system shape their own reality and perception about the daily news and share their emotional news-scape with other users. Most of the time, mass media sources deliver the daily news in a certain context. This context creates a meta-meaning which usually affects the simple meaning of the news. Thus, by tagging, by categorizing, by geo-locating, by making it popular or unpopular, mass media manipulates the perception of the daily news. “Newshaper” allows users to break these pre-defined structures delivered by the source.

Project: The Society of The Spectacle

Student: Tim Devine

Incubation of a fertilised chicken egg begins on the 16th of August at 37.5 Cº with a humidity of 60%. On the 3rd of September the humidity will be set to 85%. If the temperature or humidity changes too much for too long during the following three days this could be fatal to the egg. By looking at the egg you will cut off the power from the incubator.

Saturday the 5th of September 2009 marks the end of the expected gestation period for a chicken egg: a chick should hatch at some point during this day. From Sunday 6th the incubator will continue to nurture either an egg that is past gestation with no chance of life, or a baby chick.

Project: GLIFIC

Students: Jayme Cochrane, Anika Hirt, Travis Kirton

The concept of “GLIFIC” is a reversal of contemporary trends in web-based media, whereby the concept of tagging media is transformed back onto itself. Rather than tagging images, video, and content with words like Flickr, Delicious, and other social bookmarking sites, we use media (primarily images) to tag words themselves. Instead of tagging one photo with a dozen words, we seek to tag one word with a dozen images. At any given point the word AUTOMOBILE could have tens of different visual representations. Using images as tags we then rebuild narratives, news and events by replacing the words in their text.

Narratives, news and current events are translated back into a glyphic form that breaks language barriers through the re:symbolization of communication. Obama’s inauguration speech, C.S. Lewis’ “Alice in Wonderland”, or the continuous stream of news feeds from sources like Al Jazeera or The New York Times can be written backwards from their linguistic forms into pictographic reinterpretations.