news

"March Madness, 1974" is a fictionalized work in found-text form by Richard Holeton. The text splices together real and imagined events, which take place over the course of a month in March, 1974. The fictionalized story follows two students, named "R" and "U," who fall in love while studying at the Stanford overseas campus in Tours, France.

The month begins with news of Richard Nixon's indictment for his role in the Watergate scandal. The daily entries are, in part, a record of current events and cover a range of topics including: politics, crime, economics and celebrity drama. These news bites are cut together without context. However, the most recurring themes are those of death and disaster: a major airplane crash, a deepening global recession and missing and murdered college women. Despite the atmosphere of dread, as evoked by the news media, the youth remain optimistic and the final entry describes the couple venturing out into the world "full of hope."

In terms of the factulaity of the story, some of the 'news' appears to be clipped directly from the headlines. However, certain facts, like the day serial killer Ted Bundy murdered his first victim, were not publically known at the time. The narrator's special knowledge of events further blurs the divisions between "found" and "made" text. As one of the reports reads: "It can be hard to tell the real signals from the false ones" (March Madness, 1974, March 13).

News Wheel, 2016 is an iOS app that explores the poetics of ever changing news headlines. It begins as a static disk divided into nine sections each representing a different news source. Tapping anywhere on the screen causes the wheel to spin. Another tap stops the wheel and suddenly a headline in one of nine pre-selected colors appears on the screen. This playful interface invites users to start and stop the wheel eventually filling the screen with a collage of current headlines. Individual words can be deleted and repositioned so users can create their own poems from this content. In addition, dragging one's finger across the screen creates an animated chain of fragmented and poetic text derived from today's headline news. News Wheel is a creative and poetic way to view, juxtapose and interpret world events. (Source: http://www.jodyzellen.com/newswheeltalk/)

Newscomic recycles the news, re-mixes it, subverts and distorts it.
It takes live news feeds (RSS feeds) from major news sources, chops them up at random and puts the resultant text into speech bubbles in a comic. The comic illustrations reflect the current latest news, and are regularly updated to keep up with the news. The result is a disjointed comic, where the words and pictures don't quite fit but make their own story.

Often the story is quite surreal, but can by chance make sense, and even be quite revealing.
To make the story more fun, you can contribute by adding your own words and sentences (up to a hundred characters long). These replace the word 'the' and other characters in the speech text. You can use this to perhaps get your own views across, or to manipulate the story so it makes more sense to you. Your word or sentence is stored and seen by the world until the next person comes along, and adds their words, replacing yours.

The result is a unique combination of a disjointed news reader, and a live comic story builder. It enables you to get the gist of the latest news, and at the same time enjoy a surreal comic, one that you have contributed to.

The RSS feeds currently used are as follows:
Showbiz --> Daily Mail (TV/ Showbiz)
News --> Guardian (UK latest)
Politics --> BBC (UK Politics)
Football --> BBC (UK Football)
Arts --> Guardian (Arts)

(Source: http://davemiller.org/projects/newscomic/learn_more.php)

Wish4[0] takes as its inspiration the perpetual tugging at a user’s consciousness by the digital. Each work takes as its immediate inspiration a headline (or item) drawn from the electronic news cycle of that specific day. The resulting block of poetic works: 1) Act as a digital and creative “literary snapshot” of a specific period. 2) Highlight the accelerated nature of an electronic/networked-based news cycle. 3) Illustrate the discrepancies – and perhaps similarities - between how a digital audience responds to items deemed newsworthy and creative responses to such items. 4) Echo (and partially emulate) elements of digital culture that have become seamlessly integrated into our everyday lives (including programs such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Vine, Snapchat and Instagram). This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

written in java this applet gets a lot of rss feeds (in the french zone) in real time and composes, in real time also and as a work in progress, with them visual poems; each of the results are exported to my local computer in order to finally get, at the end of the 2013 year, some kind of archive of the "news" by which we are invaded each day---- and that we very often forget the day after! - it 's a kind of work about our "media-collective-memory". The words are treated in relationship with frequency in the news: the biggest are the most frequents. But not allways the most importants...

This generated poem takes a deceptively simple concept and executes it beautifully. It harvests headlines and cover images from the New York Times published between 2005 and 2006 and randomly combines them to create a mock cover. This juxtaposition of text and images re-contextualizes both to create an incisive and occasionally humorous comment on the content of news coverage at this time in American history. Because the images refresh every 6 seconds, the sequence created between headlines form a kind of poetic text, a layering of lines over time that forms fascinating streams of compressed, verse-like texts. By providing images of the front page of the NY Times, she reminds us of the original context, which we are now predisposed to read with ironic detachment.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This responsive multimedia poem is built from several objects that work together to critique how news is reported and received in print, images, and television. She uses JavaScript to produce a scrolling poem composed of 40 newspaper headlines, each with a link that opens a tiny pop up window with an image that one needs to make interpretive leaps to relate to the headline. The Flash object presents a slices of grainy television images sliced into vertical strips while two text-to-speech voices read news sound bites— television’s equivalent to a headline. Depending on where the reader places the pointer, loudness is assigned to a male voice on the left speakers or a female voice reading on the right. The voices read the same looping text, seemingly in the same order, but starting in different points, and are synchronized to almost take turns, though there are overlaps. Both the scrolling lines of text and the spoken words reveal a prosody of headlines and sound bites: the rhythms of the news.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This poem takes on the coverage of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after the September 11, 2001 attacks particularly how by 2007 it seemed to have been somehow de-emphasized in the media. Zellen composes this piece out of newspaper headlines, data visualizations, iconic images, journalistic photography, text, and news media sound clips to make readers aware of the deaths that result from war and occupation. Slightly interactive, the reader triggers and ends scheduled sequences that display some of these materials in visceral ways that make it difficult to ignore the suffering. This multimedia hypertext is divided into three main sequences— “Death,” “Seen,” and “Extended Harmoniously—” and in all of them we see layered, stacked objects that contain language that has been remixed to produce newly readable poetic texts.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)