Cătălina Bucos & Mircea Baştovoi

News Gifizer is a speculative digital resource, that addresses and questions online media outlets. The algorithm is a digital media mapping system. It crawls most popular articles and news, transforms their headlines, word by word, into GIF conglomerates and maps the outcome in multiple windows on the website. The map renews daily.

The purpose of the algorithm is to transform popular media headline’s words into Geo Cities Archive GIFs – a collection GIFs from the web hosting service websites that was used between 1994-2009. It selects, deconstructs and encodes the popularity based news search results, one of the main components of the current search engines algorithms, into a random visual system, dictated by the user input (the resulted GIFs are resulted from the description in the GIF meta-data) from a digital era that we have overcome – a era where search engine optimization and user experience design was not the main concern of site creators.

The work argues the epistemology of current mass information outlets, the phenomena of knowledge distribution and hegemony, and the search engines algorithms that facilitate media eurocentrism, racism, classism and others.

The project invites its users to dive in the nostalgia of the eccentric and colorful websites of the 90s – a period when world wide web just have started to be more accessible to people and was generally perceived optimistically, but also review and question it as a period when its capitalist structures – a snowball of the privilege of the big and authoritative just started to roll, intercalating and enhancing a current advanced post truth and post privacy era.

Cătălina Bucos (b.1997) graduated as a graphic artist from the National College of Art, Chișinău. She is actively involved in local exhibitions and residency programs, not only as an artist, but also as a curator. Some of her interdisciplinary works address and critic local social and political issues, others explore the female body. Cătălina lives and works in Moldova.

Mircea Baștovoi (b.1990) is a curios web developer and songwriter from Chișinău, Moldova. His songs chronicle the mundanity of the everyday life. He is also interested in experimental coding and algorithms.