Patrick Thomas to produce real-time graphic response to real and fake news for Rapid Response Unit

Graphic artist Patrick Thomas has been commissioned by The Rapid Response Unit to spend a single day responding instantly to news headlines. Taking place tomorrow (5 April), the project will see Patrick work from RRU’s news bureau in Liverpool, using processing and coding software to “sample and remix” live news content pulled in from local and international news feeds.

The news will be a mixture of real and fake, local and global, trivial and serious. The project aims to investigate “the impact media has on our lives” by having Patrick creatively respond to the 24-hour news cycle. Members of the public will be encouraged to interact to “enhance and distort” the day’s news by contributing unverifiable content via social media or as they pass the live projections on site.

The Rapid Response Unit is a year-long art project and cultural experiment that began in March 2018, inviting artists to respond creatively to global events and current affairs, to “interpret, create and challenge how we receive news”. It recently commissioned Turner prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller to create How to leave Facebook, a campaign series of posters depicting detailed instructions on how to leave the social media platform.

Liverpool-born Patrick is best known for his work for The New York Times, and his book Protest Stencil Toolkit (2011) which has sold over 20,000 copies. He founded design studio laVista in Barcelona in 1991, and now works as a graphic artist and exhibits internationally, alongside his role as professor of visual communication at Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design.

Patrick’s work for RRU will be distributed digitally via RRU’s social platforms, and the live projections will be located in various locations in Liverpool – find out more here.