Newsleak – A Hybrid Media Publication
Newsleak is not an art project.
A Newsleak is a publication: a motivated functional hybrid of real and digital cultures and media. Press a button on a pink box in the urban environment to instantly receive a printed summary of the latest news from around the world, news from your current location, news of internet cultures, events, trends and social media.
Our aim is to cultivate a functional exchange between the real space and the virtual space. Think of a Newsleak as you would any other print media publication: it has a target audience, a distinct style and type of content, and specific intervals and methods of distribution. Most publications are fundamentally focused on the target audience and the target audience is defined by the content and distribution.
Who is our target audience?
Our target audience ranges from those who seldom use the internet and are unaware of cultures or services of the internet. To those who are often connected to the internet and engage in social media of some kind.
The target audience is a mirror of the content we provide and functions to overlap the borders of the real and virtual spaces. Think of how the content of a credible newspaper is structured – world, politics, business and sport. Not every section will be relevant to every reader, but every reader accepts that every section is relevant to their broader environment and culture. As our everyday begins to exist more in virtual spaces and information about how we behave and act in these spaces is made available the more we should reflect and report about it: the more, ‘we‘ should pertain to people from both spaces.
A Newsleak content structure -
Worldwide:
- Latest news worldwide,
- Top Twitter Trends worldwide.
Local area:
- Latest local Twitter posts,
- Latest local internet search trends,
- Current temperature, time and location,
- Latest music performances in area searched from MySpace.
- Latest local photos from Flikr
Internet Culture:
- Twitscoop tag cloud,
- Reddit article,
- Digg article,
- Tumblr images or text collage.
A wonderful venn diagram mantra for Newsleak by Mahir M. Yavuz
Technical Description
Newsleak is situated in different parts of different cities as a button on a box on a street pole with a slot for the news to ‘leak’ from the internet. It is simple, light and fast.
Newsleak will download and store content every 30 seconds so that when the button is pressed the information is instantly printed from a thermal printer. We use a thermal printer because it can print up to 10 meters per minute and can print various lengths depending on how long each edition is. It is light, consumable relevant media. The content will also be accessible in the virtual space via a website that tracks your IP.
This is a collaborative project developed at Kitchen Budapest conceived by Tim Devine CV, Jayme Cochrane CV and Shervin Afshar
Initial Printing Tests
2 Responses to “Newsleak – A Hybrid Media Publication”
kinda interesting. but if this isn’t an art project, then wouldn’t adding some wifi besides just a simple button be even more practical? a wifi which would automatically bring to you a digest site like the news feed you currently present in paper format? this would also help you with the costs involved (ads) in implementing this system in other cities. also, this could be customized for the area the device is placed in (especially good in large cities eg. london)
anyway, keep up the good work!
Thanks for the feedback. We often discuss this idea of customisation and people talk about how it is more practical on a mobile device or in conjunction with a mobile device, but we approach this work from the perspective that Newsleak is a printed publication accessible in urban environments and soon as a digital publication in cyberspace.
One of the main points of this work is that people without wifi or anything close to a smart phone are able to access such information, and that the information the publication covers literally leads the reader from the real world through to cyberspace.
Also the information in the publication is very relevant to the location it is accessed. We show local news, tweets, music events and the device itself is capturing photos every 30 seconds.
It is still being formed but the thesis and format is strong – Global Space > Local Space > You > Social Cyberspace > Cyberspace