People so often ask “Will newspapers be a thing of the past?” It feels as if people have been asking this question since the early 2000’s, as the world grows more and more into a place where technology reigns. Whether the days of paper printing will be over soon or not, newspapers will live online for years to come as they are once again gaining new readers in scores, as people are getting more involved with their local news and the world news. We can’t even so much as open our laptops or look at our smartphones without reading an article or seeing that someone had shared a link to a news story of some sort.
This hectic around the clock, almost suffocating avalanche of constant news stories is what inspired Joseph Ernst, an artist and filmmaker, to came up with his idea for his project Nothing in the News. As you can see in the art work here, there is something very calming and peaceful about this theory of nothingness, the idea is deep, stripping away the noise, the controversy, and the unpleasantness and leaving behind relaxation and new thoughts. This invokes quite thoughts and allows the mind to rest and to find a state of happiness. Imagine this if you will. You are sitting in a loud and busy coffee shop where you are trying to, just for a moment find some inner peace. The background noise of people and mechanics make it nearly impossible, you can’t even focus enough to read the book you brought with you. So you think about Ernst’s art, the refreshing and cool blank pages, where you can zone in on the quite and the peace. Clear. White. Isolation.
“Eventually, we need to switch off, to process, to think it all through,” – Joseph Ernst.
It is plain to see that the title of these popular newspapers are all that remain, the concept is simple, yet the message is bold…
In an email to Co.Design, Ernst explains his vision and purpose for Nothing in the News
“The newspaper is competing with the mobile device, and in the post-Brexit, post-Trump world, the news has taken on a similar effect–everything is screaming for our attention, everything is competing for our time. And there are only so many hours in the day. Eventually, we need to switch off, to process, to think it all through. In the midst of this information overload, we become numb, we switch off, we stop caring. But the point is we should care. All these things are important. We just need to learn to switch off a little, to spend some time digesting the information we consume, to seek and find alternative critical points of view, to fight the algorithm–all the algorithms that control our lives.”
Joseph Ernst is also known for a similar project Nothing on the Internet, which he created “mockup” pages for websites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
