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Watching and processing a constant stream of news can feel like a 24-hour job when you consider how much information is relayed on TV and the Web these days.
In his latest Twitter-bot project Glitch News Network, UK-based artist Eric Drass, aka Shardcore, takes advantage of various online news sites to make quick, nonsensical videos. The social-media bot “scrapes various online news sources for images of the latest stories” and the visuals are “glitched and mashed into a video which lasts less than two seconds.”
“We are visual creatures, hard-wired to recognize and react at astonishing speed, yet we’re ‘unaware’ of 99 percent of the visual stimuli we encounter,” Shardcore writes in his blog explaining Glitch News Network.
“If we objectively examine our behavior, the vast majority of our actions are being carried out ‘subconsciously,’ and hence they tend to remain ‘invisible’ to us, and therefore seemingly of no concern,” Shardcore continued. “Subliminal messages play on this disconnect between subconscious and conscious recognition. That’s how advertising works.”
Glitch News Network report: 2016-03-02 18:00:16 pic.twitter.com/1VnUKNQFjG
— Glitch News Network (@glitchnn) March 2, 2016
The super-short video mashups from Glitch News Network already shared on Twitter show quick glimpses of political debates, the Academy Awards, soccer matches and even a fox’s face. The only way you can see the images clearly is if you pause the video itself at random intervals. It’s definitely an intriguing look at all the visuals we’re subjected to throughout the day.
“The Glitch News Network perhaps offers a glimpse of the future, where we further disengage from our conscious central executor and merely stream blipverts at our subconscious,” Shardcore concludes on his blog.
Previously, Shardcore created bots to do everything from rile up hipsters by mismatching band names with images on T-shirts to misinforming the public with absurd and untrue factoids.
