In English

What is Newspace? 

When we think about "news" we usually think about negative events and stories that have a tendency to shock people. We often use "the news" as a starting point for converations with strangers and friends alike, so the news also effects what we tend to focus on and talk about with our friends, at the workplace, or while just having a coffee. Modern city environments make it easy to get your daily fix on the news – there are tv-screens at the centres of cities, free newspapers are distributed for commuter at the subway, bus and train stations, and the largest radio stations keep us up to date of the news every hour. To "follow the news" soon becomes a habit, and eventually a socially accepted addiction.

But what do people talk about when they get together? They laugh, they discuss things in free flow, combine themes and compare experiences. We are in it for the atmosphere of sharing, to learn or to exchange stories that are relevant to a specific person and the situation of the interaction. Talking to your friends, to people on the street, the lady next door, you hear a different story and find that everyone has a different angle to life and to what is going on. 

Billions of different things are happening in the world simultaneously, but what gets published and highlighted in the media? What is really relevant to the society or to the individual, and what kind of information really helps us to grow and develop a better society? With this in mind, it seems that the news in the mainstream media is systematically painting a distorted picture about the human experience and the nature of life in the society. Let's face it – on a daily basis, how much violence you see happening around you compared to friendly co-operation and working for the common good in your community, social network or even between strangers? 

Could we re-do "the news" to better reflect our desire for real knowledge and self-creation and interaction? Could the news be creative, wise – and inspiring?  

We think so.

Explorations in conversations

The idea of the project is to create both a mental and a physical arena, "a new space", for exploring social interaction – a place for discussing interesting and important issues and cultural phenomena happening around us. Our purpose is to bring together people with differing and apparently opposite ideologies and points of view to discuss topics relevant to the development of the individual and the society at large.

By exploring the challenges presented by different types of conversational settings, we aim to develop strategies to bring forward and resolve the basic tensions in normative social interaction. Our goal is to develop these strategies into games and practical tools that could be applied in different kinds of social settings, and make them easily accessible for everybody to use when they feel like trying something new with friends or family, in all kinds of group gatherings or even while dating :-)

We hope that this concept could be developed by all people around the world to fit their personal circumstances, needs and desires. In addition, the concept of "newspace" could be used as a key term for sharing these tools for new forms of communication with the world at large, for instance by creating web sites or different experimental gatherings.

On this website, we aim to highlight the sort of viewpoints and ideas that we would like to see displayed in the media more often – to start creating a human friendly and constructive media outlet. Newspace is open to all and everyone, and we invite people to write articles, pull up interesting news and stories from the web and send it to us. You can also share your own artwork or project, we are very interested in hearing from all kinds of new phenomena!  

You can contact us at newscollectingproject@gmail.com

Feel free to join the project!

Newspace begun during the Community Art Process A Study of Playfulness and Limitlessness, and it is open for all and everyone to participate. On a concrete level, we are building transportable settings and elements featuring articles and pieces of newspapers collected from around the world. In order to create this "newspace-studio", we invite people from all over the world to take a newpaper or a journal they find fascinating, important – or very normal :) in any way, and send it to the Living Room: 

Elävän Tulen Olohuone/ 

Project Newspace 

Selininkatu 5 33240 

Tampere, FINLAND

Thank you for creating newspace!