Acrylic on MDF / 56x101cm
Transcription From News Clip:
This is BBC News, the headlines for you. Civilians shelter in metro stations in Ukraine as Vladimir Putin confirms Russia bombarded the country overnight in response to its attacks with UK and U.S. weapons last week. A former soldier who has admitted escaping from prison in London has been found guilty of spying for Iran. 21 year old, 23 year old Daniel Caliph collected information useful to an enemy, and had a list of special forces soldiers. A world first social media ban for under 16s has been passed by the Australian Senate.
The One Minute World News: Deconstructed and Reconstructed
In a time where news is delivered in relentless, bite-sized bursts, the BBC’s One Minute World News stands as both a personal convenience and a symptom; condensing the complexity of global events into a series of compressed 60 seconds headlines.
This project reflects on how we visually and psychologically absorb such fleeting information.
Using a custom method build from a developing understaing of computr programming – Python, I extract a single vertical column of pixels from each successive frame of a one-minute news video: the first column from the first frame, the second from the second, and so on. Thus building a single composite image that spans the entirety of the video. This becomes a visual trace of time, movement, repetition, and rupture. This image is then translated back in to the real world in the form of paint.
The result is often abstract, sometimes eerily recognisable. Faces may emerge if they linger long enough onscreen (a huge breaking story). Other times, all that remains is a ripple of motion, an image that’s been seen, forgotten, and reassembled.
The viewer is left to question what they’re looking at, much like how we often engage with the news: scanning, half-understanding, then moving on.
As someone living abroad, the BBC remains a tether to a familiar worldview. But in a world increasingly shaped by algorithmic feeds, misinformation, and shifting truths, even familiarity becomes uncertain.
This work doesn’t offer answers it pauses the scroll.
