Document:Q11573

Cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan said that people don't read newspapers so much as submerge into them; likening this action, a veritable "sinking" into disparate streams of information, as something an individual would approach as casually as they'd slip into a warm bath. This work provides a similar immersive media experience by amassing the front page of hundreds of newspapers from around the world and displaying these images within the screen space of a single webpage. Launched in 2007 and viewed by over 30,000 people, collecting more than 600 newspapers originating in six continents, continuously gathering data from these sources without pause. These pages are organized to form a massive grid that references the familiar "image gallery" and "array of thumbnails" that are associated with managing digital information assets but subverts these organizational frameworks towards different ends. The examination of the front page, as multitude, neutralizes the newspaper as a document and transforms the entire medium into a regimented gestalt. Each paper reduced to an image, a node in a networked text - totalized, overwhelming, and illegible.