Tom Schofield, MFA

• artist of the month
• open frequency
• curated selections
• MAstars
  • current artists
  • archive
  • about MAstars
  • selectors
  • institutions
  • contact us
  • sign up to the e-bulletin
• public realm
• future 50

Graduated from Newcastle University

Selected by Ben Jones

newsGlobe, 2009

Walking into a darkened room in the bowels of the art department, as your eyes get used to the darkness you are confronted by three very different but connected objects. In the centre of the room is a lectern on which is a piece of instructional text. In front of the lectern is half a sphere attached to a wall with a map of the world projected onto it. To the right is a printer attached to the ceiling with fax paper dropping down and splaying over the floor. 

Tom Schofield's work 'newsGlobe' (2009), with support from the university's Culture Lab, is described as a live art project. The project uses open source software to process and collate newspaper rss feeds with the aim of searching the content for country and capital city names, and presenting the information on the sphere as spikes of colour. Previous presentations compared Western and East Asian newspapers, whilst this incarnation studied five prominent British national newspapers, concentrating specifically on countries that have been colonised or partly colonised by Britain. The aim being, to present the bias of British newspapers towards Western based news stories. This information is presented for each day and sporadically spewed out by the printer.

‘newsGlobe’ is a project still undergoing development. Sometimes with similar projects there is the possible problematic issue of the technology overriding meaning. However in this artwork technology is integral and does not, as a result, encapsulate the artist’s intent. One question that could possibly be directed at the project is that maybe the viewer is already aware of a bias in Western media towards Western news. However as ‘newsGlobe’ is an ongoing project there is plenty of scope for further development in terms of information collated and the technology employed. (Ben Jones, 2009)