What does "AT" mean?

A tropism is a biological term defined as the turning of all or part of an organism in a particular direction in response to an external stimulus. Examples of tropism include phototropism (response to light), chemotropism (response to particular substances), hydrotropism (response to water), thigmotropism (response to touch), traumatotropism (response to wound lesion), and electrotropism (response to electric current).

Anemotropism refers to an organism's orientation in response to a current of air or wind. Anemotropism (or this project's shorthand, "AT") feels like a fitting title for the exercise/wily art experiment that is this website, as this is a space created to reflect on how understanding is shaped by currents of information or by curated/manipulated ideas and data that seem to be just "floating" through the air.

ANEMOTROPISM

AT Feed Process

1. Source current environmental news headlines
   Current headlines are pulled via RSS feeds¹ from top news websites, focusing on feeds that are as specific to climate and environmental news coverage as possible.² The landing page of this website posts current, unaltered feeds, and this list is automatically updated as each source updates. This arrangement provides an opportunity to compare content, tone, and coverage from a variety of news sources all in one place.


2. Generate a lead headline using AI
   Once a week, the current list of environmental headlines are dumped into ChatGPT³ with the instruction to consider the content of all headlines and generate one summary news story at a max length of 3000 characters. A second instruction asks ChatGPT to write 20 associated headlines for the summary story it created, and from this list, one is selected to be the "lead headline" for the weekly AT Feed story.


3. Generate a lead image using AI and then interpret this via hand-drawing
   The ChatGPT-generated "lead headline" is then fed as a prompt into Midjourney⁴ to create an associated AI-generated image. The AI-generated image is used as reference material to create a hand-drawn illustration. These illustrations are created in hatched pen and ink on newsprint; the original size of the illustration is approximately 6x6" square.

AI-GENERATED IMAGE

DRAWN INTERPRETATION


4. Publishing the AT Feed
   The AT Feed is updated on this website every Friday.

Purpose of the AT Feed

The AT Feed is a place to reflect on how we — as individuals and groups of individuals — understand the world around us. How do information and experiences shape our understanding? Which parts are "true"? How much remains "true" after information is filtered, parsed, and interpreted many times over — physically, digitally, personally? Where do we dig deeper, and when should we stop listening? What would inspire us either way, to lean in or disengage? How does understanding translate to action?

This may sound very arty and philosophical (and perhaps it is!), but when there is a lot at stake — like say, the climate changing — how are we making sense of this? And what are we doing with whatever sense we're able to make?

Author

The AT Feed is a project by Philadelphia-based illustrator and designer Sarah Kaizar

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¹ RSS feeds (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) are web feeds that allow users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator, which constantly monitor sites for new content, removing the need for the user to manually check them. News aggregators (or "RSS readers") can be built into a browser installed on a desktop computer, or installed on a mobile device. On this website, RSS feeds are curated by Sarah Kaizar and pulled by a custom php script.

² As many US news sources were included in this project as possible. Many news sources offer streams of their content via RSS feed. Some sources do not offer their content via RSS feed at all. Some sources offer environmental-specific RSS feeds, like the New York Times or NPR. Some sites offer "Science and Technology" feeds, like CBS or Fox News. There are other "top" news sources that have not been included in this project because they did not offer a climate or environmental news-specific RSS feed, like the Wall Street Journal. Is there a feed missing? Email me

³ ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that uses natural language processing to create humanlike conversational dialogue. The language model can respond to questions and compose various written content, including articles, social media posts, essays, code and emails.

⁴ Midjourney is a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform that allows users to generate unique artwork such as characters, images and depictions through short text prompts.