ONLY THE GOOD .ORG

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT


Now in Public Beta the automatic newspaper that serves only the good news. An internet specific work by artist Antonio Riello and the artist duo Donnachie, Simionato & Son, which attempts to serve only the good news taken from the most popular international press agencies (eg. Google News, Reuters) The artists, with the programmer Reinier Feijen, have created an automatic newspaper which can algorithmically filter out all the bad news through the referencing of a constantly growing emotional database.



“NEWS-STONED”


Mass media are usually biased towards reporting the so called “bad news” (crimes, terrorism, disasters, climate-change). There are two different kinds of “bad news”: those connected with structural economic and political issues (usually very technical and less entertaining than other types of news) this kind of news can contain information and thought potentially dangerous to the social structures in place; the second type of bad news is full of emotional appeal, this kind of bad news can usefully “mask” or “cover” the former more politically potent news. Today there is a continuous flow of news which reaches us everywhere and is becoming an obsession for many. The established power structures control our present mass culture (-of anxiety) through the management and distribution of this news-flow. Indeed “breaking news” (very often “emotional bad news”) is often consciously “edited” by the media for deepest emotional effect, facilitating and fostering a permanent collective state of anxiety. The overall consequence is a widespread pessimistic view and common lack of trust in the future - arguably a “symbolic form” of our time which is also affecting contemporary creativity (with a resulting nostalgia becoming the new approach for much creative enterprise). The main aim of ONLY THE GOOD.org in its binary view of the daily news is the interruption of this flow-control, allowing us a more conscious understanding of the mechanisms at play.


AN EMOTIONAL DATABASE


At the project’s core is a series of statistical filtering algorithms which refer to a constantly growing emotional database made up of the artist’s “good” or “bad” responses to thousands of news items. Furthermore, once the computer has learnt a number of human responses it then takes on the burden of decision as to what is “good” and “bad”, in itself this may be seen as a sort of epiphany of the human fear over choosing. ONLY THE GOOD.org indeed shows how digitally programmed machinery today has supplanted the traditional “oracles” of the past.

In summary ONLY THE GOOD.org is:

  • A socially helpful artwork tuned to the contemporary emergency of relentless news “bombing”
  • An artistic exploration of the social use (and abuse) of news
  • An “ambiguous celebration” as we are relieved from the anxiety inducing need to decide what is "good" and "bad"
  • A re-thinking of the controversial, dazzling and fuzzy concept of “good” and “bad” (linguistic, philosophical, moral)
  • A permanent forum for the discussion of the contemporary news system


Antonio Riello, Italian artist used to artistically taking care of the paradoxes of contemporary society, released his first digital artwork (a very controversial videogame about illegal immigration) in 1996: “ItalianiBravaGente”. He teaches videogames aesthetic in several Universities and Art Schools around the world.
www.antonioriello.com

Donnachie, Simionato & Son are the artist duo Andy Simionato and Karen ann Donnachie. Among other things they make the ongoing and highly influential editorial experiment www.thisisamagazine.com since 2002, considered a “publishing phenomenon” the project has been exhibited internationally.
www.donnachie-simionato.com

For more information
hello@thisismagazine.com