Decorative Newsfeeds
(Heerlen / Wilhelminaplein 14)
In their work, Thomson & Craighead (1969 and 1971) examine how technology has changed our view of the world. With their installation Decorative Newsfeeds, Thomson & Craighead reduce the news to nothing less than a hallucinogenic drug experience. They take the visual addiction to news to the extreme. By means of a projection, they show a continuous stream of real-time news messages that are selected by a computer from various 24-hour news broadcasters. The texts that normally accompany the news images are transformed into Decorative Newsfeeds in extravagant baroque spirals. The piece is twofold: from a distance, it is a peaceful automated animation of series of text, but up close, the pathos of the news messages becomes clear and the texts form new relationships between different facts.