something I said

If you are a local reader you are likely to have read Joanna Geary’s pieces about redesigning the Birmingham Post website. There’s been an enthusiastic response to that prospect, and it’s had several people thinking about what they’d like to see in the new format.

I have continued to think about it in an offhand way, and was prompted to write about an idea that came to me after reading David Byrne’s reflections on a visit to the new New York Times operation.

Byrne’s piece contains this photo of an art installation in the Times’ lobby.

The piece is by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, and looks like a bunch of video screens or LCD displays, which Byrne says

usually displays random text excerpts trolled from the online archives, at that moment it was displaying the shapes of nations and states that might be in the news. I recognized the shapes of Afghanistan and Minnesota.

I can add Washington State to that list, and possibly Florida. But what of the other shapes and squiggles? What are they about? How many of those shapes do I recognise from news stories I’ve read? Do any of them represent journeys? What kinds of shapes might one derive from a given news story?

This was enough to get the idea percolator going. This art installation should be more accessble to the public. In fact, it should be online, visible to those of us who might recognise the squiggles. What’s more, the grid evokes a crossword, in which a row or column of squiggles might hold clues, tell other stories, and give readers a game-like challenge.

I imagine a Flash-based display on the Post’s new website. Forget about the random text excerpts. Make it more challenging: find some way of converting news stories into hieroglyphics; turn it into a puzzle. I might want to check in every day to see if I can decipher the shapes, figure out some answers, or just look at what’s being served up. Readers would turn up to the home page just to play with the brain teaser. I’m thinking, ‘what shapes would I expect to see in the NY Times today?’ Iowa, New Hampshire, definitely. Kosovo, Argentina? Could they be clues to some of the other shapes? What’s that squiggle that looks a bit like tea pouring from a kettle? And the one that looks like a movie ticket stub? More clues. To which stories?

Creating those shapes and programming the display would require a combination of skills that might live just down the road in Digbeth among the new-media types, who would have a clear incentive to come up with this and other, better, bits of artwork. Again, I’m thinking ‘can the Post do something to foster creative ideas like this, and in turn, can the artists bring readers to the Post?’ Could this be about Birmingham promoting itself in ways that other cities haven’t yet imagined?

So what happens if there’s some sort of symbiosis between the Birmingham Post and some local artist/programmers? What would it represent in terms of mutual cooperation and a joint raising of profiles? What would it mean in terms of attracting readers, and in terms of blurring the edges of what news organisations do in the Internet Age?

I cannot think of any online news site that provides interactive artwork, nor even a puzzle. Maybe I’m just ignorant. Maybe It’s happening over at the Independent right now. But maybe it’s an idea that the Post could run with. I can see a Rubik’s Cube of squiggles that derive from today’s news. Or portions of photographs to identify. Games that involve other readers; games that involve subscribers giving answers; competitions, prizes. I can also see the potential for this to be really lame. But if it’s set out explicitly as experimental art with a particular kind of challenge to the artists it won’t run the risk of becoming just another advert. It might just turn out that the adverts become a bit more interesting too.

So, how’s that for front page news?

PS: Information about the Rubin and Hansen piece Moveable Type is available as a PDF.

It clarifies the nature of the installation: “The artists employed a technology called a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD). Developed in the 1960s in the form of vacuum tubes, VFDs are now used most commonly in industrial applications and appliances such as microwave ovens, gas pumps, digital clocks and cash registers.”

And this about the content:

Algorithms developed by the artists parse the daily output of the New York Times (news, features, opinion, blogs) as well as The Times’s 150-year archive. The activities and comments of visitors to The Times Web site also provide input to the work.

The information (and therefore the artwork itself) is in a constant state of change, because it reflects the up-to-the-minute production of the news by The Times, both in print and on-line.
The artwork draws its content from three sources:
• a live feed from The New York Times, capturing text and data in near real-time as the information is published;
• regular summaries of on-line page views and search activity by readers of The Times’ Web site (www.nytimes.com); and
• the complete Times archive dating back to 1851.

The artists have programmed the work to extract fragments – such as quotes, details, questions, numbers, and places – from The Times’s growing, living, real-time news database, and to recombine these fragments into a series of kinetic compositions.

PPS: This is the sort of incidental topic that fits my intentions for this blog as a site of public discourse, as mentioned in the first post. The piece is of no consequence, but may be of interest to people thinking about similar topics, so I think it fits comfortably within the remit of this blog.