broken news

• By admin

13- September – 5 October 2013

Foyer space: Jo Fulton (TAS) – broken news 

Image: Jo Fulton, broken news, 2013, online Python and Processing program, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.

 

Consider what news is, or more importantly, what the concept of news is. News can be thought of as the information which drives our understanding of the world around us and the events which shape our society. When considered in this way, “news” can be viewed as a conceptual object that exists in our collective consciousness; the system which drives the concept of news is thus not the physical system that produces and disseminates information, but rather, the concept of news is our collective understanding of what the idea of news represents. By considering news as a virtual object, it follows that it does not exist physically, but rather in a conceptual space as an idea, a meme, an understanding of the act of understanding. Through unconscious interaction with virtual news objects, Jo Fulton’s broken news seeks to elicit this conceptual space within the mind of the viewer.

Jo Fulton is a Hobart based new media artist working primarily with generative software art and online installations. Interested in emergent complexity, Fulton’s practice bends simple programs to create complex visual outcomes grounded in Minimalism. As one of these online installations, broken news consists of a program which automatically takes headlines from a database of news sources collected from the Internet and presents them as part of an amorphous ocean of text, obscuring the meaning and relevance of news in an ever increasingly online and interconnected world.