NEWSCAPES
NEWSCAPES
Newscapes is a generative art project by Giuseppe Lo Schiavo that transforms daily world news into AI-generated landscapes. Expanding on his Windowscapes series, the project employs a custom automation system that collects global headlines from multiple RSS feeds and integrates them into a fixed text prompt defining structure, light, and mood. The prompt is processed by an image-generation model that renders a new “window” each day, automatically published online. The works presented here were generated from the news of October 2025, forming a visual chronicle of that month. By merging data retrieval, prompt engineering, and image synthesis, Newscapes turns automation into an aesthetic act, transforming the volatility of information into a contemplative and poetic record of the present.
AUTOMATION
The development of Newscapes began with a training phase designed to transfer the visual and conceptual DNA of my Windowscapes series. A selection of my Synthetic Photography works was used as aesthetic reference to define the visual grammar of light, composition, and materiality that characterizes Newscapes. This ensured that, although the system employs generative processes, its imagery would remain grounded in the same crafted sensibility that defines my previous work.
The heart of Newscapes lies in its prompt—a meticulously structured piece of text that functions as both concept and code. Rather than manually composing each scene, I designed a dynamic prompt capable of absorbing and transforming information. It defines not only the aesthetic parameters of each image but also the conceptual framework where technology, data, and poetics converge.
At its core lies a variable placeholder, {title}, which is continuously replaced by real-world news headlines, embedding the emotional charge of current events into the visual system.
Each morning, an automated RSS script gathers the latest global headlines from sources such as Reuters, NASA, The Guardian, and Nature, isolating their titles and inserting them into the prompt. Once completed, the system sends this text to the image-generation model, which renders a new Newscape in a 2:3 ratio—always a perfectly frontal orthographic view of an open window with dark shutters and glass doors, continuous with the Windowscapes aesthetic.
The AI interprets each headline poetically, transforming factual information into a symbolic landscape beyond the frame. The process is entirely autonomous: once the image is generated, it is automatically published on my website, creating a live exhibition that renews itself in real time.
If an error occurs during data retrieval or image generation—whether from a missing news feed or a failed prompt—the system produces a closed window, a silent interruption that becomes part of the project’s visual language.
Occasionally, the model retains fragments of previous news, subtle visual residues that echo past events. These unintended overlaps—traces of memory within the system—reveal the poetic vulnerability of automation. On some days, the algorithm even merges two distinct headlines, generating hybrid scenes where multiple narratives coexist within the same frame.
Within each composition, the object placed on the windowsill symbolically represents the selected news item, acting as a small sculptural metaphor between the intimate space of the window and the vastness beyond.
Through these nuances, Newscapes becomes more than a technical exercise—it is a living, imperfect organism where information, chance, and error intertwine. The constancy of the window contrasts with the volatility of data, turning the daily repetition of code into a quiet ritual of transformation.
DAILY PIPELINE
OCTOBER 2025
“I’m making these windows in a year that feels like a turning point. We live between wars, we still carry the leftovers of the pandemic, and a new language of machines is starting to shape how we see, work, and live. The news moves fast, yet it is not only dark. There are treatments making progress, reefs coming back, laws that protect, the light of peace appearing in brief openings, fires contained, quiet acts of care that never reach the front page. The feeling of the day stays in the room, it sits in the light, it leaves a trace on the glass. Newscapes is my way to keep that trace, one page at a time.
I use technology to shift how we look at this moment, to give hope a clearer shape, and to believe that with these tools we can meet and even surpass the challenges ahead. I think these images will speak more clearly in twenty, thirty years, when the noise is quieter and what remains is the outline of this time, with its wounds, its repairs and its hopes.”
– Giuseppe Lo Schiavo
01.10.2025
WEDNESDAY
US government shuts down after Senate fails to advance both parties’ bills.
source: The Guardian
08.10.2025
WEDNESDAY
EU auto group pushes hybrids,
e-fuels in CO2 emission goal review.
source: Reuters
13.10.2025
MONDAY
Israelis and Palestinians celebrate as truce brings hope of ‘era of peace’.
source: The Guardian
16.10.2025
THURSDAY
ChatGPT update will allow ‘erotica’ for verified adult users.
source: CNN
22.10.2025
WEDNESDAY
Fierce winds stoke fires, bring extreme heat to Australia and New Zealand..
source: Reuters
23.10.2025
THURSDAY
Scientists have just defined five sleep profiles — and some could help spot mental illness.
source: Live Science
30.10.2025
THURSDAY
Trump tells Pentagon to resume testing US nuclear weapons.
source: Reuters
31.10.2025
FRIDAY
Barcelona’s Sagrada Família becomes world’s tallest church.
source: BBC
NEWSCAPES SELECTED FOR THE 2025 ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
BY GUEST CURATOR PETRA CORTRIGHT
Lo Schiavo’s work transforms the daily news cycle into a dynamic visual system, where headlines about climate events, scientific discoveries, and political upheavals are processed through an AI pipeline to create photorealistic “windows.” By combining data structuring, prompt engineering, and image rendering, Lo Schiavo crafts a calendar of daily sceneries that suspends the urgency of current events in a visual metaphor, positioning technology as more than a neutral tool, presenting it as a medium for generating a collective memory of our times.
Untitled Art Fair 2025
NEWSCAPES LIVE
As a physical extension of the project, Newscapes Live presents the system in real time. The installation features two monitors: one displays the continuous RSS feed of global headlines, while the other shows the live generation of Newscapes, producing a new image approximately every hour. Viewers can witness the transformation of information as it occurs—the moment when language becomes image, and data becomes atmosphere.
Unlike the main Newscapes system, Newscapes Live was not trained on my earlier Windowscapes. Here, I chose to leave greater freedom to the model, allowing it to interpret the world with less aesthetic constraint. The result is more unpredictable, less anchored to my own visual vocabulary, and more reflective of the machine’s independent imagination. This version exposes the living core of the project—the dialogue between order and entropy, control and autonomy.
OCTOBER 2025
PUBBLICATION
The project is accompanied by a special edition publication released in November 2025, a ten-copy edition printed and handcrafted in Italy.