“BREAKING NEWS”

by Jonas Downey

“A piece about media focus and obsession with world aggression. The software compares hourly network-based World News feeds from Yahoo.com and bbc.co.uk against a database of synonyms of the word "aggression," then outputs the matches as angry, fighting capsules. More matches return more, and angrier, capsules. Built in Processing.'

Download:http://rhizome.org/artbase/22804/breakingNews.zip

“In my work, I am interested in using software and technology to explore the idea that image, language and mathematics can be re-interpreted as raw, interchangeable data. I view my work as a process of discovery, and often focus on visualizing language through computational abstraction, or in some cases, more straightforward conversions.

I am currently a third-year graduate student in Narrative Media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of Art+Design. I teach a class called "Programming for Artists," and have exhibited work at the University of London; Montreal, Canada; the University of Split, Croatia; various gallery spaces in Illinois; and many websites.”

Jonas Downey 2003.

Hi Patrick

Thanks for your interest in the piece!  This is a quick synopsis of how it
works:
- When queried, two PHP scripts on my web server connect to XML (RSS) news
feeds from yahoo and bbc.co.uk.  PHP minimally parses the news data into
plain-text output.
- The bulk of the program was made with Processing.  There are three main
parts (I did the first two parts separately from the visualization, and then
I combined them at the end.)
- First, the program connects to the PHP scripts and reads the plain-text
result of the feeds, and then processing divides it all into arrays, where
each word is a unique element in the arrays.  It also does some clean-up
stuff, like removing punctuation, spaces, and it turns everything to
lowercase.  This process repeats every half-hour (when the feeds refresh on
yahoo and bbc.)
- Second, each word from the feeds is compared against a predetermined
database of synonyms of "aggression", most of which were derived from
thesaurus.com, but I also pulled some by reading the news for a week or so.
When a match is found, the program records it.  (Obviously two counts are
saved, one for each news feed.)
- Third, the program takes the numbers from step two and draws them as
fighting, bouncy circles.  The algorithm that draws the circles was somewhat
accidental -- I was trying to get them to fight with each other, but it
turned out to look more like capsules than circles.  I liked the effect, so
I stuck with it.  I can give you more details about this part but it's not
very interesting...mainly a lot of boundary checking and collision
detection.  
I originally expected the American feed to be more aggressive than the
British one, which was generally true at the time (perhaps because I made it
during the period when they were capturing Saddam Hussein.)  But since then,
it seems to have mostly evened out.
Let me know if you have any other questions.  And hey, just curious, where
did you find out about the piece?  

Best,
Jonas

The presentation during the seminar was limited as the piece 'Breaking news' is based on the news from bbc world and yahoo.com the news from both sites seemed to have been fairly equivalent thus showing very similar visualisation on the screen. This piece is designed to be seen over a period of time.As i have verified, the output at different time can be very contrasted.

The main criticism was; the visual output seemed arbitrary not expressing the violence it was supposed to highlight. In my opinion, it does convey the meaning using a very portable form and a minimalistic expression.

Everybody taking part suggested different possibilities and ways the violence or the news content could be expressed visually. One could imagine doing it with the use of symbols , allegories, in a baroque way, comic way, romantic way etc . It is the responsibility of the artist to make such decision. One could imagine that the algorithmic translation of text into a visual expression could be a classic exercise in computer art as the translation of edifying stories used to be a traditionnal role in painting. Asking the ever recurent question; not what to represent but how to represent. Bringing then the problem of Art versus Illustration.

As for the technical implementation, the extraction of keywords seemed sufficient to get the flavour of a text. The use of a database such as wordnet to create the local table or list of keywords can be a satisfactory solution. The use of natural language toolkits could be also be used to get a more precise meaning but at higher cost not suitable for an artwork needing a fast response.