ON VIEW AT BUFFALO ARTS STUDIO, Sept 12 - Oct 31, 2009

Breaking News is a second project under the umbrella thematic of INFORMATIONALISM - the saturation of data in our day to day lives. The initial project is On Transmitting Ideology, presented in Berlin as part of Transmediale.08: CONSPIRE and in Philadelphia at Vox Populi, both in 2008.

Breaking News is a two-part project about the re-interpretation of the ceaseless data we call “current events.” The first part is a news literacy workshop initially conducted in Buffalo at the Gloria J. Parks Community Center. Children between the ages of seven and eight years old discussed what they consider news, how it disseminates, and recent newsworthy events. They learned to visually deconstruct a newspaper and then reinterpret articles and headlines into drawings and collages. Beyond the pedagogical purpose of the workshop, it served as a means to gather content that informed the second part of the project: the gallery installation.

Based on the premise that we live in a media-saturated world, the project seeks to investigate how young children digest major world events such as Obama’s election, Michael Jackson’s death, Swine Flu - inescapable "realities" that momentarily consume media outlets and seep into our lives. The content generated by the children in the workshop is integrated into the news media visualization presented as part of the gallery installation. The visualization itself consists of a textual feed of current headlines accompanied by computer-rendered illustrations of personalities who have established an understanding of news media in the United States. The illustrations and text help generate new interpretations of what we consider "the news."

Other elements featured as part of the Breaking News installation are a selection of drawings and collages from the workshop, video and printed content used in the workshop to contextualize specific articles, documentation of the workshop itself as well as other related sculptural objects, such as the radio guns previously created for a street performance and now tuned to broadcasting radio news. Breaking News was realized with the help of Cori Wolff, Curator of BAS who contacted me to invite a proposal for a community-oriented project, Jayne Hughes, Education Coordinator at BAS who put me in contact with the Gloria Parks Community Center and helped me execute the workshop and Brooke Singer for guidance through the process.