The Art of News Feeds
Newsreaders and RSS aggregators aren’t known for being particularly flashy. But some mashups transform headlines, photos and other ephemeral nuggets into expressive exhibitions. The result? Bohemian RSS! By Eli Milchman.
RSS newsreaders deliver headlines with all the panache of a brick.
But a growing number of bohemian RSS mashups are combining news feeds with style, art and whimsy.
Electronic artists are tweaking RSS interfaces, harnessing Flash animation and relational algorithms to breed outlandish, new ways of presenting information captured from news feeds.
Average Shoveler, for example, resembles an old Commodore 64 game that lets the user wander through the streets of New York, stopping to shovel piles of snow that suddenly transform into images from current news.
Passersby blurt out chunks of news — drawn from Yahoo’s news feed — in cartoon bubbles. All this is set to music composed by Gabriel Yared, award-winning composer of scores for movies such as The English Patient and Cold Mountain. Average Shoveler was created by artist Carlo Zanni. The graphics were inspired by the late-’80s classic, Leisure Suit Larry.
Another artsy newsreader, Phylotaxis, presents an array of gently quivering dots that contain a photo, a story preview and a link to the story’s web page. Its elegant, sunflowerlike pattern was created by Jonathan Harris based on the Fibonacci series.
Meanwhile, Ofer Luft and Yaniv Steiner combined the popular Flickr photo site with RSS news feeds, creating FlickrFling, which pulls Flickr images tagged with words that match headlines picked from several news services. The result is a kind of collage of not-quite-random images correlating to news headlines.
Poeme Dada RSS looks like a cross between news headlines and popular fridge-poetry magnets. Robin Stein’s project draws RSS feeds from three major news services and then allows virtual poets to further pare down what subjects to draw headlines from, like the Middle East or science. Poeme will even randomly pluck words from headlines and offer up sage — if enigmatic — messages.
While original and interesting, these flashy mashups generally don’t present news in a way that’s actually meaningful. So why create them?
Zanni says he is trying to “overthrow dead culture.”
“The Shoveler is another attempt to describe our society, our daily life, our fight with information and disinformation, and many other themes more or less hidden in the game,” he says. “Another very important aspect of this project is the collision between the fictional environment in which you are immersed and the real and shocking feeling driven by the online feedback you are playing with.”
Attempts to make the web more visual are nothing new. A slew of companies, like Apple Computer and Xerox spinoff Inxight Software, have tried to map information graphically, with mixed success. Apple’s HotSauce, for example, was a mid-’90s project that presented the web as a 3-D space. It never caught on.
Tim Bray, co-creator of XML, helped start the now-defunct Antarctica Systems in 1999. The Canadian company tried and failed to develop a way of navigating the web in 3-D.
Bray said: “I think there is a huge opportunity for someone to develop a new style of user interface … (but) I have a lot of hands-on experience in trying to visualize the net, and it’s rife with huge conceptual and psychological and scaling problems.”
[tags]reblog, rss, feed, art, info_hub[/tags]
(Via Wired News.)
