This too

Turning headlines into art - A therapeutic response to #Partygate.

Published

July 12, 2022

The series

The idea behind this series was to create a new piece of art every day based on the headline of an online newspaper. The title “This too” evokes “This too shall pass”, with the series designed as a way of marking headlines and reflecting on the fact that yesterday’s news is often quickly forgotten.

My first explorations of this script coincided with the revelations of the parties in Downing Street and with Christmas plans needing to change for the second time, due, in part, to how Downing Street handled communications around the Omicron strain. Making art out of the increasingly frustrating headlines proved therapeutic.

Around the time when I had finalised the script was was thinking of automating the process, the news became more grim than I was prepared to make art from. The headlines surrounding the start of the war in Ukraine were not ones that were soon to be forgotten, nor ones I was prepared to trivialise.

I therefore decided not to automate the process and instead to reserve this for further #PartyGate headlines.

Highlights

The first exploration

First exploration with the original #PartyGate headline - with apologies for the erroneous URL!

A few of my favourites

For these, I added texture by using data from the article itself as well as the headline. The colours are automatically generated in the form of RGB vectors, by counting the number of Rs, Gs, and Bs in the article and headline.