UNR Drawing in the Media Stream

Photo taken from drawinginthemediastream.net

“Layer it. It’s like the media stream. The news is always on top of each other.”

These words could not better represent what students came together with Tony Allard to do at UNR’s Drawing in the Media Stream on October 4^th. Students traced news headlines, photos and graphics onto a piece of cardboard that had to be over eight feet high and twelve feet long. Everything overlapped and there was no apparent order to where the news went. The process was chaotic, but after I heard Tony Allard tell a student they were layering different components over each other because that’s what the news does it made sense. The media stream is never-ending and there is constantly information being thrown at the consumers. It’s to the point where it’s hard to decipher what’s true and what makes sense. I don’t know if this was Tony Allard was aiming for, but it’s definitely how I interpreted it. I also appreciated that students and not just Allard himself did this art. Allard even offered me to join in and help trace some headlines onto the cardboard, but having come so late in the process I didn’t want to. At one point there were almost ten people working on the drawing. It was actually really interesting to watch as it all came together. The final product was complex, chaotic, and entirely representative of the media stream.