Opening Beijerkoppen
Former newscaster Noraly Beyer will officially launch the public art project "Beijerkoppen" at Beijerlandselaan on June 5th. Artists Toine Horvers and Paul Cox collaborated with V2_Lab to create this live world wide 24/7 news stream.
Beijerkoppen, Beijerlandselaan, Rotterdam
Beijerkoppen shows live images from television newscasters from around the world. The artists Horvers and Cox based their concept on the fact that watching news on television is part of everyday life in all regions and cultures of the world. The artwork consists of three big full-colour video screens, each placed in a frame. A search engine (specially developed by V2_ for this project) collects, via different satellites, studio images and broadcasting times of news transmissions. The program selects from these fragments in which just the newsreader is in picture and shows them in a continuous stream on the screens.
Before the fragments appear, specially designed software determines the proper crop of the image, so that the newsreader's head appears in the frame as in a classic portrait. Dependent on the length of time that the newsreader is in picture, one fragment fades into a fragment from another station. Because of this, and also because of the different lengths of the fragments on the three displays, an irregular, smooth changing of images is created. Passersby can hear the sound of the news fragments from small loudspeakers.
Horvers and Cox presented the search engine together with Artm Baguinski earlier at Test_Lab: Urban Screen Savers.
Beijerkoppen from V2_ on Vimeo.
Beijerkoppen is commissioned by the Art Centre Rotterdam (CBK), Deelgemeente Feyenoord and Pact op Zuid.
