Newscomic (2008) recycles the news, re-mixes it, subverts and distorts it. It takes live news feeds, chops them up, reworks them and places the text into speech bubbles in a comic. The result is a disjointed reading experience, where the words and pictures don’t quite match but create their own meaning from the network.
Newscomic has been described as a generative satire, that takes RSS feeds from major newspapers, uses PHP and databases to chop them up and generate interesting strings, based on the feed content and user input, then puts the resultant text into speech bubbles in a 3-panel comic format.
The result is a disjointed comic, where the words and pictures don’t quite fit but instead make their own story, blurring fact and fiction. Sometimes the story makes sense, and readers/ users always found it fun to experiment with the stories. Possibly, this early experimental idea seems to be part of what is now referred to as “Conditional Text” in recent interactive story works (Ambient Literature).
Often the stories generated are quite surreal, and can even be revealing.
Link to Flickr stream
Please note: sadly newscomic isn’t working properly right now, as PHP has been updated and I need to re-work the code