S C R I B B L E

The automatic drawings we sometimes scribble in a free moment on a piece of paper are thought to say something about the contents of our subconscious. When we absently doodle on the photo of a politician in the newspaper - giving him big ears, for example - we are expressing our opinion about him. But of course while everyone can read the opinions expressed in the newspaper we "deface", nobody gets to know about our graphic contribution to political discussion, even though in some cases the drawing may be more communicative than words.
Scribble is a web where I take the news presented in major world media almost exclusively in the form of text and photographs, and doodle on it in public. It's a kind of visual weblog and so a subjective commentary, but then - what news in the media isn't subjective? All of it is to some extent, even the reports that pretend to be objective.
The project works like this: the current CNN page gets "hacked" and scribbled over with drawings that change in real time depending on the content of the lead article and the most important links. The system recognises the most frequently used words in a certain order and hierarchy. The drawing that it puts on top of CNN corresponds to the theme, but is at the same time a surprise. The system cannot predict the contents of the article with complete accuracy, and so sometimes my automatic "commentary" hits the target, and sometimes it's wide of the mark. But as the project develops over time, it is learning to recognise more and more words and so the visual vocabulary of doodles will keep on expanding and getting more precise.
Scribble was launched 9th January 2005 and I expect several more months of continuous developing.

More about Scribble from press:
Interview in Czech
Italian Exibart, translated by Google
8 - 12. 3. 2006 - Scribble on exhibition Radical Software, Piemonte Share Festival, Torino, curated by Domenico Quaranta, more Random Magazine