The News

The News consists of eight self-contained broadcast studios running an endless procedural loop. Cut off from the internet, floating mouths deliver live commentary on world events they cannot access.

By running the full apparatus of broadcast credibility over an empty signal, the work isolates the news anchor as a trust machine. It offers a safe form of doomscrolling and a working template for broadcast normalcy after there is nothing left to report. Each token mimics the cadence and rhetorical habits of the 24-hour news cycle, and each station filters the same non-event through its own manipulation strategy, such as manufactured urgency or false balance.

The platform requires interactive tokens to be fully self-contained, with no network calls or external dependencies. Malpractice treats this security constraint as the concept: the work cannot know the world, by design. The system clock seeds the programme schedule, so a non-event breaks across all eight tokens at the same moment. The studio sets are kit-bashed from a custom component library, just as the sentences are kit-bashed from phrase banks, and the voices come from an embedded formant synthesizer.