News Cycle #2

20′ for video and tablet-driven live electronics with video by Anthony Discenza

News Cycle #2 is a live collaborative digital artwork consisting of reprocessed and interwoven excerpts from three 24-hour cable news networks. The raw material is 36 hours of news footage, 12 hours each from CNN, MSNBC and Fox news from one day in summer 2006. Each section of the piece represents a different compression of the day’s footage, exposing digital and analog artifacts inherent in the technical processes. The resultant sound from this footage is manipulated using a customized digitizing tablet to “draw” a score by extracting data from the video stream. The tablet is used to select specific scan lines from the piece, generating changing buffers that are subsequently convolved with either the audio content of the video, pink noise (in silent sections) or a mixture of the two.

Commissioned by The Getty Center and The Montalvo Arts Center.