This project is blankets depicting a snapshot of a news source, showing all or part of a headline, photo, and news story text.
The news media act as extensions of our own senses. The anxiety of the absence of agency we might feel when we learn of faraway news, is paradoxically accompanied by soothing pleasure from the sensation of control in ingesting it with the help of the media conveying it to us. In airports and hospital waiting rooms around the world, anxious travellers can be seen soothed into a trance ingesting news. News stories are folk tales, they freeze moments in time for present and future generations.
The cotton blankets with news headlines and stories woven into them are storytelling objects, folk heirlooms, and describe society’s growing relationship with the news where it is a source of comfort, mediating reality through concepts like objectivity and neutral presenters. News media provide to the public an extension of their own senses that reaches events far away, allowing them to witness these events without real humanity and the consequences of direct presence in the messier parts of life. Each blanket makes an appropriate cover for tranquilized 24hour news channel watchers, wrapping themselves in the warm embrace of the omniscience newsmedia give, and the experience of a mediated serving of real life somewhere else.
When we can laugh at the news as a whole, empathize with those in it and those who make it, and their human motivations, we can finally relax.