Newscocoons is a set of pulsating furniture objects that display news - user-generated videoclips, pictures, stories, blogs - fed from geographically dispersed sources. The cocoons glow and breath slowly. Each cocoon tracks specific keywords (such as “body,” “emotive,” “recombinant,” “alienation,” “reality,” etc.), and aggregates content tagged accordingly, created locally and over the Internet, by amateurs and professionals. The global shape of Newscocoons is constantly in flux, emerging from the particular constellation and intensity of information flows from the various sources.

News happen everywhere, inundating our daily lives. Increasingly created bottom-up, in decentralized fashion as blogs, videostories, picturebooks, news come from the most unexpected places, in different multimedia formats and at unpredictable times. We subscribe, and news feed us. The ambition for Newscocoon is to create a new kind of furniture for news consumption, one that breathes news, has a memory and fosters social interaction in the form of co-zapping.

Breathing
Newscocoons live and breath news, articulating tangibly the energy that flows in them. They are made of inflatable, translucent rubber, connected by a thin tube to a central air compressor. Each cocoon pulsates as it is fed with information.

Memory
Digitally controlled air valves express visibly and audibly how much memory is stored in a cocoon. When memory size grows, the cocoon grows, giving memory a sense of physicality, a sense of weight, a sense of volume. Cocoons grow up to a point when the eminent danger of an explosion becomes unbearable.

Co-zapping
Each cocoon features an autonomous microchip and a touchscreen. As visitors hover over a touchscreen, the cocoon senses the visitors’ presence and plays the in-streaming audio and visual news. Individual cocoons represent different news channels, similar to TV channels. Visitors can physically zap between the channels by moving from one cocoon to another. Co-visitors can co-zap by tagging along.