Forgotten in this project does not just mean that the memory of news is forgotten, but also that it is blocked or hidden or deleted by the government. Most of the news content we see now is what the government wants us to see after vetting.
This project is more about censorship and how does censorship affect the authenticity of news events. So my enquiry moves from, “why do the news events that have been highly visible get forgotten by the Internet? Shifting to“How does the Internet’s forgetful behaviour towards news affect the accurate dissemination of news?”
In this week, I tried some temperature-sensitive inks that are printed on the entire text. When the ink senses a higher temperature, it will produce a discoloration effect, and the blocked text will also appear. It’s like when some news is clicked by everyone on the screen, as the number of clicks and popularity increases, more truth will be presented. As the heat dropped, this piece of news was gradually covered in black and forgotten.
Moreover，When the finger is in contact with the paper, the ink will change color with increasing temperature. The blocked information also appears, like the presentation and hiding of information manipulated by the government or the power behind the Internet. To the Internet, however, government manipulation of online news is invisible. So the manipulation of information through publication is much more traceable.
This black newspaper’s content comes from the web code of an article that revealed news events that were blocked and hidden in 2022. I translated this article through code programming, but within a few days the page was blocked, and the code I recorded became the only trace. So I tried to translate the content of this article directly in the form of the original code of the page, and published it as an invisible news.
A printed version of news content is more valuable because print is a fixed version that is difficult to tamper with. Any change will be magnified. Yet news presented on the Internet can easily be copied over and over again. Even tampering is hard to spot.
In my reference, it is mentioned that “the easiest way for the online newspaper archives is to put up barriers so that they are not as easily accessible as they are today “. So all the experiments I did were to represent this forgotten behavior by creating some dyslexia.
This process I simulated the Internet to create a content full of dyslexia. This is used to show the impact and challenge of this forgetting behavior on communication.