The Tapestry project is an exploration of the visual rhetoric of news on a global scale. Using hundreds of sources, Tapestry searches for, extracts, and re-presents news images to reveal what the media is covering, where its attention is focused, and how that focus varies or propagates across geopolitical boundaries. Its broad search set taps globally and ideologically dispersed sources to collect and simultaneously redisplay many hundreds of news images, resulting in an unprecedented aggregate view of media rhetoric and world events in news-based real time.

Tapestry is not about providing an alternative browsing experience. It's also not specifically about information art. Tapestry is about media appropriation and critique, with the aim of providing broad perspective on the scope of world events beyond what is reported by our immediately familiar news sources. It is also generative media art, using repeated and procedural cycling through news sources to create evolving image collections that reflect how stories flow in and out of media focus.

Tapestry's objective is to evoke content questions. Its apolitical compositions invite immediate cross-regional comparisons and enable viewers to consider how their perceptions of the world are constructed by the news media. Separated from their accompanying text, what do news images themselves communicate? How are images of stories-in-common used by media across the world? Where are most stories focused? How does portrayal vary by subject or region? How are images framed? What do they tell us about how the media choose to decorate their stories? And what new meanings surface when the images blend into new compositions?

Compositionally, Tapestry recalls aspects of the traditional collage methods of art as well as the “intellectual montage” of avant-garde cinema. The latter, especially, emphasizes dynamic and discontinuous relationships between images to synthesize an abstract idea not present in any individual image.

With a similar objective, Tapestry re-contextualizes and weaves news images into evolving, computer-generated compositions in collage form. With news images as the source of collage elements, the font of available raw materials is ever changing and unpredictable. The chance compositions that result evoke the critical, fragmented, and potentially absurd qualities and juxtapositions initially exploited by Dada and Futurist artists of the early 1900s.

The results can be striking. Even in prototype form Tapestry revealed interesting compositions and chance juxtapositions. When Edvard Munch's The Scream was stolen, images of the painting flooded the media. Tapestry responded by delivering a highly compelling display of this iconic figure intertwined with images of fighting in Iraq. The compositions have another uncanny nature: the widespread appearance of an individual's image usually announces their death. Such was the case for Rodney Dangerfield, Christopher Reeve, and Johnny Carson.