Learn more
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.
The idea is that anyone can create a decent -informed - political or news-related cartoon.
You choose a live RSS news story and are invited to respond to it with a Yahoo search. This is your
contribution. The aim is to research around the subject, and so incorporate other voices, views and information on
that subject, with the intention of forming a balanced view or judgement on the news story. The goal is not to
provide a subjective opinion, it's to provide balanced research, and I intend the resultant cartoon to acquire more
depth from this objective approach.
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.
You can print the cartoon - the size is 1000 x 750 pixels, which prints ok, but if there is sufficient demand I can
add the facilty to print at a higher resolution.
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 (or intended) connections
- To enable informed visual news commentary - through a Yahoo search