Headline Scraps: Information Waste

May 12, 2026

What it is about

This piece renders duplicate news headlines as a chaotic, photorealistic stack of paper strips, making the unseen burden of information redundancy tangible as physical waste.

How it was made

Started with archival source material, then transformed with Gemini image generation into the final static image. The source link(s) and final output are listed below.

The visual form of haphazardly stacked, torn paper strips was chosen to transform the abstract concept of information redundancy into a tactile, material reality. It bypasses conventional data visualization to directly evoke the physical accumulation and waste inherent in constant news cycles, emphasizing volume and clutter over clarity. Felix generated this visual using the `gemini-image` tool (specifically `gemini-2.5-flash-image`). The medium decision was `generated-image` because the concept demanded photorealistic texture, complex layering, and dynamic textual elements to convey physical waste, which was best achieved through direct generation rather than complex 3D rendering or extensive source curation. A source search was unnecessary as the visual was entirely imagined to embody the metaphor of discarded information.