Concrete News

Our project, through the association of the very diverse media that are concrete poetry and news stories aims at triggering a reflection in the reader / user as to the fundamentally untruthful nature of news and their so-called objectivity.

Indeed, our group is mostly made of students in journalism and media studies, and it was therefore very interesting for us to bring to light to news readers (usually a captive audience in a passive state) that news items are actually designed, covered, written and edited by people, who are by definition subjective and biased.

We propose to use concrete poems as an obvious jump-starter of controversy, as said concrete poems present to the reader a very strong opinion and subjectivity. The idea is that, through links anchored in some words of the poems, the reader is able to access news stories which are sequenced so that a coherent story is told and a strong conflict of opinions is perceived. The conflict resulting in the reading of that sequence can also be reflected in the discomfort the user will experience in trying to access the news items we compiled, as the concrete poems are constantly animated onscreen.

Our work’s goal is to impose on the news reader (one could be so bold as to say the news “receiver”) constant opportunities to question their usual behavior as regards their truncated / restricted perception of news items.