Breaking News is a two-part project about the re-interpretation of the ceaseless data we call “current events.” The first part is a news literacy workshop initially conducted in Buffalo at the Gloria J. Parks Community Center with children between the ages of seven and eight years old.

The second part of the project informed by the workshop is a gallery installation that features the Breaking News application built with Processing.

The application is projected onto a wall and controlled via a trackball and push button that are embedded into an office work desk. The application displays a series of 2D illustrations of famous news-related personalities wrapped onto a 3D sphere. Behind the portrait is hidden the logo of the broadcast company that the individual is most closely identified with; the trackball allows users to turn the 3D sphere. When the user pushes the button adjacent to the track ball the virtual sphere spins and stops with a randomly selected portrait and logo or with an iconic news photograph. Famous news photographs are interspersed with the news personalities. Below the 3D sphere are real time news feeds from a variety of online sources. The application uses the Minim audio library, Bruno Nadeau's romeFeeder library, and the opengl library. Thank you Ben Fry, Casey Reas and the Processing community.