Introduction
To symbolise the destruction of trust in politicians, interest and lobby groups, and the media, live news media stories are collected from the internet and used to destroy the face of the media.
David Upton
Project report
Trust, in in our society today, and especially in politicians, issue politics, is being destroyed by people who use words as weapons rather than signs. Prof. Harry Frankfurt's book "On Bullshit" clearly explains the process by which language in particular becomes meaningless. News media screens are gradually destroyed by a live feed fron the BBC of the words the media is itself carrying.
The work is also a homage to Gustav Metzger, who demonstrated https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/mar/03/gustav-metzger-obituary"autodestructive art" in London in 1960. demonstration in 1960. Metzger sprayed his canvas with acid, eating it away, just as words used without intergrity or concern for trush eat away at trust in society.
Technical:
This project was written in C++, using OpenFrameworks. It accesses the BBC's RSS sites to produce a stream of data which is fairly regularly updated. In case wifi is not available, it also saves the last data it downloaded and uses that repeatedly until wifi comes back.
Sounds were all downloaded as .mp3 files from ZapSplat. They are all either non-human noises, or human noises that are non verbal, and increase is volume and unpleasantness as he destruction of the screen progresses. (I became a little more expressionist here than I had intended, partly becaue ZapSplat has so many nice sounds - but also because I feel very strongly about this issue.