February 5, 2005
News Readers
Christiane Paul was Lo-fi‘s guest curator for January, and the show she put together is called News Readers. The pieces range from large public artworks to small rectangular applets made with Processing. Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss’s Energie_Passagen (Energy_Passages) “reproduces the linguistic space of the city in form of a data flow. Hundreds of catchwords taken from current newspaper reports appear in a projected ‘information flow’ and are spoken by artificial computer voices. As soon as passers-by select individual words, thematically related networks of terms start to perform in this flow, which can also be experienced as an audiovisual echo.” Ed Burton’s Recent Events “dissolves three texts into a fluid suspension of letter tokens. The dissolved texts are drawn from a live source, updated on the hour, every hour. In their gathering stream, these tokens grow sticky tendrils towards potential neighbours, coagulating to form clots of recovered text.” I’m also pleased to say that my News Reader collaboration with David Durand, Brion Moss, and Elaine Froehlich is included. (Thanks to Turbulence for the tip and the commission.)
I enjoyed looking through these “News Readers” quite a bit, though I must admit to some disappointment at (if not disagreement with) the message that gradually coalesced in Recent Events.