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News cartoon
News cartoon is a live news cartoon generator, which takes it's input from RSS feeds and Yahoo searches.
It's a spin-off or further step from my interactive story experiment
Shirley Bassey Mixed Up,
and
netdraw - my illustration generator.
It's a generative composition machine - written in PHP- that makes art from web searches and RSS feeds.
You are presented with the a live RSS news story and invited to respond to it - make a comment, express an
opinion or maybe try to present another angle on the news. In this way you collaborate as a commentator,
critic or journalist.
You make your contribution by making a Yahoo search. Your search terms are converted into lines and arcs
of different colours and sizes, depending on the results of your search, and the search words sprinkled
on top. A set of pre-set 'themes' allow the line art to take different forms, all of which is subject to
controlled randomness, built into the program.
The RSS news story is split into words and (my) illustrations pulled in which correspond to those words.
These are mixed in with your contribution.
The result is a live news cartoon - created in collaboration between yourself, myself and the network.
This version lets you print at A4 size, but in reality there are no limits to the size of artwork it can create.
My big aims here are:
- Use web feeds and internet searches to automatically construct powerful/ meaningful socio-political
visual images, in the style of a political cartoon
- To explore network narratives- mixing up - or mashing up- found material on the web to construct unintended new
stories
- To enable visual news commentary - through a Yahoo search