“A Serious Game”, inspired by an assignment of the same name, is an interactive art experiment aimed at bringing to light the potential for news feeds to be surreptitiously augmented. The piece would be housed in a number of public spaces and controlled by a kiosk and/or mobile application.
Coded in Python, any number of users could be simultaneously augmenting the feed at any given time by using a ‘mad libs’ style find-and-replace feature to change keywords in the feed for satirical, confusing, or subversive means. The feed would pull fresh RSS news headlines from the web every 30 seconds, such that new unaltered information would be blended in with the augmented news, blurring the line between reality and crowd-sourced nonsense. This piece is inspired by Facebook’s ‘News Feed’, Twitter, and issues of truthfulness in the modern mediascape’s echo chamber.
