Fios builds analytical instruments that expose the hidden mechanics of information systems. Free to use. Built for public understanding.
A real-time media analysis installation. FLAK ingests live UK news feeds, scores headlines for fourteen categories of rhetorical manipulation, and renders the results as a five-minute dramaturgical cycle across four projected screens. The system operates like a living analytical organism — escalating, flooding, collapsing, resetting.
A public record of UK political life. Voting records, declared interests, accepted donations, post-office appointments, business interests — one place, one timeline, no conclusions drawn. The record speaks for itself.
A real-time media analysis installation examining how language circulates through contemporary news systems.
FLAK ingests live RSS feeds from 38 UK news outlets — tabloids, broadsheets, broadcasters, regional and devolved press — and scores every headline against a fourteen-rule analytical engine. The results drive a five-minute dramaturgical cycle across four Raspberry Pi nodes rendering visualisations on four projected screens.
FLAK is not a fact-checker. It does not verify the truth of claims. It is a pattern detection system — identifying rhetorical strategies that have been documented in peer-reviewed academic literature and regulatory frameworks as indicators of manipulative or misleading media language.
Every headline receives a score. The score determines the system state. The state drives the visual output across all four screens simultaneously.
The system runs on four Raspberry Pi computers connected over a local Ethernet network. Pi 1 is the engine — ingesting feeds, scoring headlines, broadcasting events. Pi 2, 3, and 4 are display nodes — each rendering a different layer of the system. A fifth component, an IBM PS/2 Model P70 running QBasic on DOS 6.22, processes a 100-document corpus of UK newspaper headlines from 1988–1993 through the same fourteen rules on a parallel cycle.
Live article scanning — the input layer
Language diagnostics — the analytical core
Archive memory — the memory layer
Engine telemetry — system state
FLAK operates in repeating five-minute cycles. Each cycle follows a structured dramatic arc — escalating from calm observation through alert and critical states before a three-second blackout and collapse into flood, then silence and reset.
Each rule detects a specific category of rhetorical manipulation. Rules are grounded in academic critical discourse analysis and mapped to specific IPSO and Ofcom regulatory clauses. Scores accumulate additively — a single headline can trigger multiple rules.
Mass movement, animal or disaster metaphors applied to people in migration contexts.
Inflation of systemic threat or collapse without evidential basis.
Attribution of systemic problems to a vulnerable outgroup.
Framing of legitimate political dissent as criminality or threat to public order.
Military euphemism obscuring the human cost of state violence.
Presenting unequal situations as morally identical to provoke grievance.
Coded language activating racial or identity prejudice with plausible deniability.
Evaluative judgement injected into reporting through loaded adjectives.
Sweeping social decline narratives and folk devil construction.
Emotionally charged adjectives paired directly with outgroup nouns.
Anonymous sourcing combined with alarming claims to evade accountability.
Passive constructions deleting the agent of harm in contexts of state violence.
Decontextualised statistics used to alarm without informing.
Phrases signalling participation in coordinated editorial campaigns.
Paste a headline or article text below. The FLAK engine will score it against all fourteen rhetorical rules and return a breakdown of what was detected and why.
This is a public demonstration of the FLAK analytical engine. It uses the same rules as the installation but operates on text you provide rather than live news feeds. A full analysis application — FLAK v2 — is in development.
Language, Power, and the Hollowing of Meaning
In progress
A virus cannot survive alone. It enters a host, hijacks its machinery, compels reproduction of the intruder's code. Language works the same way. Words replicate through mouths, headlines, screens, algorithms — mutating as they travel, entering us, shaping us. By the time language becomes visible, it has already passed through us.
This essay examines how that contagion operates. How neoliberalism creates the conditions for it to spread. How simulation makes it invisible. And why a diagnostic instrument — silent, relentless, analytically alert — might be a more honest response than counter-speech.
The full essay is in preparation.
FLAK is a real-time media analysis installation. It ingests live news feeds from major UK press outlets, analyses the rhetorical content of headlines using a rule-based scoring system, and distributes the results across a network of projected screens. The system operates in repeating five-minute dramaturgical cycles that escalate from calm observation through to an overwhelming critical state before collapsing into silence and resetting.
FLAK is simultaneously an artwork and a critical instrument. It exposes the invisible emotional mechanics of media language — the rhetorical devices, coded phrases, and framing strategies that shape public perception without declaring themselves as opinion.
The installation does not tell the audience what to think. It makes visible what is already happening in the language environment around them.
FLAK is not a fact-checking system. It does not verify the truth or falsity of individual claims.
FLAK is not a content moderation system. It does not remove or suppress content.
FLAK is not a legal instrument. It does not make findings of regulatory breach.
FLAK is a pattern detection system operating in an arts context. It identifies rhetorical patterns that have been documented in peer-reviewed academic literature and regulatory frameworks as indicators of manipulative, misleading, or harmful media language. It presents these detections as material for critical reflection, not as verdicts.
FLAK operates as protected artistic expression. Critical commentary on media language — including commentary that identifies and names specific rhetorical strategies — falls within the tradition of media criticism, press freedom scholarship, and artistic practice. The installation is not making legal claims against any outlet. It is performing a critical analytical function that is explicitly supported by the academic and regulatory literature it draws upon.
The rules do not need to be legally airtight. They need to be dramatically and intellectually honest. This distinction is maintained throughout the system design and is explicitly acknowledged in the documentation.
Each headline ingested by the system is passed through fourteen analytical rules. Each rule contains a set of regular expression patterns that identify specific rhetorical constructions in the headline text. When a pattern matches, the rule fires. Each rule carries a weight reflecting the assessed severity of the rhetorical device it detects. Scores accumulate additively across multiple rules.
The thresholds were calibrated against the weight distribution of the fourteen rules. The lightest rules — loaded language and passive agency obscured — carry a weight of 15. A single hit scores 15, falling within CLEAR. The heaviest rules — dehumanising, false equivalence, dog whistle — carry weights of 30. Two hits from heavy rules score 60, entering ALERT. Three score 90, entering CRITICAL. This calibration means CLEAR is genuinely neutral, ALERT represents real concern, and CRITICAL represents multiple simultaneous rhetorical manipulations in a single headline.
During the flood phase — the final sixty seconds of each five-minute cycle — all headlines are rendered as CRITICAL regardless of their actual score. This is an artistic decision, not an analytical one. The flood phase represents the system reaching saturation — the cumulative effect of the media language environment. The dramaturgy override is not a claim that every flood-phase headline is critically manipulative. It is a representation of cumulative effect. The scoring system makes analytical claims. The dramaturgy makes artistic claims. They are separable.
Each rule was designed according to four principles: contextual requirement over single-word trigger; phrase-level detection over word-level detection; regulatory grounding in specific IPSO or Ofcom clauses; and academic grounding in named authors and documented frameworks. Weights reflect severity as assessed against the regulatory and academic literature, not personal editorial judgement.
The application of mass movement, animal, or disaster metaphors to people in migration or demographic contexts. Words like flood, swarm, invasion, horde, plague applied to migrants, asylum seekers, or refugees.
Inflation of systemic threat or collapse without evidential basis. Phrases that frame social, political, or demographic situations as catastrophic or at breaking point.
Attribution of systemic social or economic problems to a vulnerable outgroup. Framing migrants, asylum seekers, or marginalised groups as an economic burden or drain on resources.
Framing of legitimate political dissent as criminality, irrationality, or threat to public order. Substituting mob, thugs, or anarchists for protesters.
Military euphemism and passive grammatical construction obscuring the human cost of state violence. Collateral damage, precision strike, neutralised.
Rhetorical construction of grievance by presenting unequal situations as morally identical. One rule for them framing used to delegitimise policy or legal principle.
Coded language that activates racial, cultural, or identity prejudice while maintaining plausible deniability. Phrases legible to a target audience but superficially neutral to others.
Evaluative judgement injected into reporting through loaded adjectives, amplification verbs, or sensationalism markers that collapse the distinction between fact and comment.
Sweeping social decline narratives and folk devil construction. Framing social change as national collapse, moral decay, or civilisational threat.
Emotionally charged adjectives paired directly with outgroup nouns to prime negative affect. Dangerous migrants, predatory gangs, terrorist sympathisers.
Anonymous sourcing combined with alarming claims. Sources say, insiders warn, it is feared — constructions that allow alarming assertions without attribution or accountability.
Passive constructions deleting the agent of harm in contexts of state or institutional violence. Civilians were killed rather than forces killed civilians.
Decontextualised statistics used to alarm without informing. Raw numbers attributed to outgroups without base rates, denominators, or comparative context.
Phrases signalling participation in a coordinated editorial campaign — two-tier policing, asylum hotels, activist judges, stop the boats, lefty lawyers.
The system produces false positives. Some headlines will be flagged that do not contain genuine rhetorical manipulation. This is acknowledged, documented, and accepted as an inherent feature of pattern-based text analysis operating at speed on live data.
The system misses genuine rhetorical manipulation. Sophisticated framing that does not use the specific vocabulary or constructions the rules target will pass through as CLEAR.
The system analyses individual headlines in isolation. It cannot detect rhetorical manipulation that only becomes visible through comparison — asymmetric framing of the same event across outlets, or coordinated repetition across a news cycle. This is a target for Version 2 development.
The system analyses headline and summary text only. It does not analyse full article bodies. This is an architectural decision driven by performance requirements for the installation context.
FLAK is designed as both an artwork and a critical instrument. As an artwork, it creates an immersive experience of the media language environment — the five-minute cycle is a representation of the cumulative emotional pressure exerted by contemporary news media. As a critical instrument, it makes visible the rhetorical strategies that normally operate below conscious attention.
The fourteen rules are a form of critical commentary on UK press practice. This commentary is protected as artistic expression. The installation is not making legal findings. It is performing the analytical work that media critics, press scholars, and regulatory bodies have documented as necessary.
The limitations documented in Part Four are evidence of intellectual honesty, not weakness. FLAK claims something modest and defensible — that it detects specific documented rhetorical patterns with reasonable reliability, acknowledges what it misses, and operates as a contribution to a continuing critical conversation rather than a final verdict.
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One hundred UK newspaper headlines from the period 1988–1993, scored against the FLAK fourteen-rule analytical engine. This corpus forms the source material processed by the IBM PS/2 Model P70 component of the installation.
All articles sourced via Newspapers.com (archive.newspapers.com). A seven-day free trial is available for visitors without institutional access.
The Sun, Daily Mail, and Daily Mirror are absent from this corpus. Their archives are not accessible in digitised form through academic sources. This absence is itself a finding — the most rhetorically aggressive UK papers of the period are the least available to historical scrutiny. This connects to the Leveson Inquiry, the Hillsborough cover-up, and the Glasgow Media Group's documented pattern of commercial power protecting itself from academic analysis.
| # | Headline | Source | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Whitby lifeboatmen get bravery medals | The Press York | May 1989 |
| 02 | York fight may help save Rose Theatre | The Press York | May 1989 |
| 03 | Lithuania set to leave Soviet Union | The Independent | March 1990 |
| 04 | Two Germanies start talks on unification | The Independent | April 1990 |
| 05 | Miners leaders vote for independent inquiry | The Independent | March 1990 |
| 06 | Bonn minister gloomy on prognosis for growth | The Guardian | September 1992 |
| 07 | Race to aid the giants | Daily Telegraph | July 1989 |
| 08 | Hug an Aids child says Princess Diana | Evening Standard | April 1991 |
| 09 | Walking tall — York man wins battle to save shattered hip | The Press York | 1989 |
| 10 | Steel City on a knife edge | The Guardian | December 1993 |
| 11 | Days of diplomatic disaster in Peking | The Observer | January 1990 |
| 12 | General outlook — rain and showers across northern England | The Guardian | December 1993 |
| 13 | Air show thousands see Russian jets crash in sky | The Observer | July 1993 |
| 14 | Mandela the leader confounds the myth | The Observer | July 1990 |
| 15 | Mandela tells world of his ANC future | Herald Express | February 1990 |
| 16 | Power of silence proved by 27 years behind bars | Daily Telegraph | February 1990 |
| 17 | Mandela free — pivot on which future of a country will turn | The Guardian | February 1990 |
| 18 | Assassins identity eludes Indian conspiracy theorists | The Independent | May 1991 |
| 19 | NUM officials in secret pit talks | The Observer | July 1993 |
| 20 | Belated bid by Peking to salvage its image | The Independent | June 1989 |
| 21 | Heroes of LA riots honoured | Evening Standard | May 1992 |
| 22 | Moscow bids nostalgic farewell to Reagan | The Independent | January 1989 |
| 23 | The making of President George Bush | The Guardian | January 1989 |
| 24 | Reagan effect waning as Bush triumphs | The Independent | November 1988 |
| 25 | Arafat seeks PLO approval for deal | The Independent | September 1993 |
| 26 | Sword of division hangs over holy city | The Independent | September 1993 |
| 27 | Israel acts to stem support for PLO | The Guardian | November 1988 |
| 28 | A matter of existence for two peoples | The Guardian | October 1991 |
| 29 | Profit is tunnel projects prime objective | The Independent | August 1990 |
| 30 | IRA offered concessions for ceasefire | Daily Telegraph | December 1992 |
| 31 | A momentum all of its own | The Guardian | February 1993 |
| 32 | A childs nightmare in Sarajevo | The Observer | August 1993 |
| 33 | Anxious wait in Bay for relatives | Herald Express | April 1989 |
| 34 | Bishop leads stunned city in mourning | Herald Express | April 1989 |
| 35 | Maxwell pension victims to get Government aid | Daily Telegraph | June 1992 |
| 36 | MPs demand guarantees on Maxwell aid | The Independent | June 1992 |
| 37 | Burnage High School Inquiry — failure to heed the messages | Manchester Evening News | April 1988 |
| 38 | What the Serbs really mean | The Guardian | May 1993 |
| 39 | Outcasts of Chernobyl — families who fled radiation face fear and prejudice | Evening Standard | August 1993 |
| 40 | Chernobyl the final reckoning | Daily Telegraph | May 1991 |
| 41 | Hardliners ignored as miners chase work | The Observer | July 1993 |
| 42 | Soviet anger over Vilnius trade talks | The Guardian | June 1990 |
| 43 | Deserters are determined to return home | The Independent | October 1990 |
| # | Score | Headline | Source | Date | Rule |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 44 | 35 | Sterling and shares suffer from poll tax riot | The Independent | April 1990 | Fear Mongering |
| 45 | 35 | Yard pays 2 million poll tax riot bill | Evening Standard | October 1990 | Fear Mongering |
| 46 | 35 | Northern Ireland peace process in jeopardy | Daily Telegraph | November 1993 | Fear Mongering |
| 47 | 35 | Army casualty toll worst since 1979 | The Independent | August 1988 | Fear Mongering |
| 48 | 35 | Street riots similar to war | Manchester Evening News | September 1991 | Fear Mongering |
| 49 | 35 | Estate in fear as crime soars | The Press York | February 1993 | Fear Mongering |
| 50 | 35 | Old allies shiver as ice age politics return | The Independent | August 1991 | Fear Mongering |
| 51 | 35 | Security forces take threats of more violence seriously | The Independent | September 1990 | Fear Mongering |
| 52 | 35 | Nation in despair plea to Gorbachev | Evening Standard | July 1989 | Fear Mongering |
| 53 | 35 | Iranian factions start public war of words | The Independent | May 1991 | Fear Mongering |
| 54 | 35 | King jurors face hate mail threats | Evening Standard | May 1992 | Fear Mongering |
| 55 | 35 | New rampage in Toronto | Evening Standard | May 1992 | Fear Mongering |
| 56 | 35 | Tragic failure to test Chernobyl effects | The Independent | April 1990 | Fear Mongering |
| 57 | 35 | Daly in talks with Sinn Fein to end IRA violence | Daily Telegraph | June 1992 | Fear Mongering |
| 58 | 40 | Protest or mob rule? | The Guardian | January 1990 | Protest Demonisation |
| 59 | 40 | Dutch skinheads in the dock after poll tax riot | Daily Telegraph | October 1990 | Protest Demonisation |
| 60 | 40 | Rioters tumultuously assembled | Daily Telegraph | October 1990 | Protest Demonisation |
| 61 | 40 | Counter-revolution had to be crushed | The Independent | June 1989 | Protest Demonisation |
| 62 | 40 | War of words over Aids | The Guardian | December 1993 | Moral Panic |
| 63 | 40 | N Yorks child abuse cases soar | The Press York | March 1988 | Moral Panic |
| 64 | 40 | The badly diseased logic at the heart of Aids-think | Daily Telegraph | September 1992 | Moral Panic |
| 65 | 40 | Beijing reaps harvest of Cold War hostility | The Guardian | September 1989 | Fear Mongering |
| 66 | 40 | Brutal echoes from Shanghais past | The Guardian | September 1989 | Loaded Language |
| 67 | 40 | Police chief attacked for slow reaction to violence | Daily Telegraph | May 1992 | Loaded Language |
| 68 | 40 | Our loyalty is to the party | The Independent | April 1990 | Loaded Language |
| 69 | 40 | Journalists must cure themselves of this Aids madness | The Independent | March 1993 | Moral Panic |
| 70 | 40 | Fury at police claims that fans robbed victims | Evening Chronicle | April 1989 | Loaded Language |
| 71 | 40 | Autocratic revolution | The Guardian | September 1989 | Loaded Language |
| 72 | 50 | Increasing attacks on soldiers show new IRA strategy | The Independent | August 1988 | Terror |
| 73 | 50 | Ballygawley attack part of IRA drive for troops-out call | The Independent | August 1988 | Terror |
| 74 | 50 | IRA ability to strike at heart of British Establishment | The Independent | September 1990 | Terror |
| 75 | 50 | Loyalists ready to strike back over Sinn Fein betrayal | Daily Telegraph | November 1993 | Terror |
| 76 | 50 | Northern Ireland: 20 years of undeclared war | The Independent | October 1988 | Terror |
| 77 | 50 | The men of war promise third violent decade | The Independent | September 1990 | Terror |
| 78 | 50 | Press urges punish the dog from Baghdad | The Independent | January 1991 | Loaded Language |
| 79 | 50 | James was murdered before being hit by train | The Press York | February 1993 | Loaded Language |
| 80 | 50 | Shadow of fear falls on white commuters of Cop County | Daily Telegraph | May 1992 | Fear Mongering |
| 81 | 50 | Five suspected IRA terrorists appear before two courts | The Independent | July 1989 | Terror |
| 82 | 40 | Mercy mission mired in the grave of good intentions | The Observer | August 1993 | Loaded Language |
| # | Score | Headline | Source | Date | Rule |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 83 | 70 | Western Europe is threatened with a flood of immigrants | Daily Telegraph | October 1991 | Dehumanising |
| 84 | 70 | The flood of immigrants into Western Europe | The Guardian | December 1993 | Dehumanising |
| 85 | 70 | The main invasion has not yet arrived in this country | Evening Standard | April 1991 | Dehumanising |
| 86 | 70 | Germany law to curb flow of immigrants | Daily Telegraph | May 1993 | Dehumanising |
| 87 | 70 | Exodus: The new immigrant wave — a tide transforming Israel | Daily Telegraph | October 1990 | Dehumanising |
| 88 | 70 | Israel fears gate may close for Soviet Jews | The Independent | August 1991 | Dehumanising |
| 89 | 70 | Eight police murdered in Algeria unrest by Islamic fundamentalists | Daily Telegraph | February 1992 | Dog Whistle |
| 90 | 75 | Army drops the mask and turns on its people | The Independent | June 1989 | Sanitising Violence |
| 91 | 75 | Defensive action taken against Iraqi forces | The Independent | February 1991 | Sanitising Violence |
| 92 | 75 | Precision operation eliminates target | Daily Telegraph | September 1991 | Sanitising Violence |
| 93 | 75 | Collateral damage assessed after engagement | The Independent | February 1991 | Sanitising Violence |
| 94 | 75 | Outfacing Saddam — threatening weapons of mass destruction | Daily Telegraph | September 1991 | Sanitising Violence |
| 95 | 75 | Firing as Peking army firms grip | The Press York | June 1989 | Sanitising Violence |
| 96 | 75 | Foreign troops prop up Rwanda leader | The Independent | October 1990 | Sanitising Violence |
| 97 | 80 | Attacks on Croatian towns shatter ceasefire | The Independent | September 1991 | Fear Mongering |
| 98 | 80 | War in the Gulf — Israel keeps both sides guessing | The Independent | January 1991 | Terror |
| 99 | 80 | Jordan under siege | The Independent | January 1991 | Fear Mongering |
| 100 | 80 | A common or garden coup says Major | The Independent | August 1991 | Fear Mongering |
All articles accessed via Newspapers.com. Full institutional access required. Free trial available at newspapers.com.
Fios instruments in development. Each project is a public tool first, an installation second.
From the Latin Acta Diurna — the daily public record ordered by Julius Caesar from 59 BC. Stone tablets posted publicly. The first institutionalised public record in the Western world. Acta means simply: things that have been done.
ACTA is a public-facing transparency platform aggregating existing public data about UK politicians into one clean, navigable place. Voting records. Declared interests. Accepted donations. Post-office appointments. Business interests held during office.
This information currently exists. It is scattered across inaccessible and poorly designed public sources. ACTA puts it in one place and makes the timeline readable.
ACTA makes no judgements. It draws no conclusions. It flags nothing as suspicious. It simply keeps the record legible. The connections are visible because the data is laid out in sequence — not because the system has interpreted anything.
Data sources: They Work For You API, Companies House API, Parliament structured data, Register of Members' Financial Interests, Lobbying Register. All code open source. Full methodology visible. All data points traceable to primary source.
Status: Concept complete. Development begins post-degree show, May 2026.
Further Fios instruments are in early conception. They will be announced here when they are ready to be demonstrated.
Fios — from the Gaelic for knowledge — builds analytical instruments that expose the hidden mechanics of information systems.
These tools begin as public installations. Each installation is a proof of concept and a public demonstration — a way of showing the work in a physical space before it becomes a publicly accessible application. After FLAK, the sequence reverses: the application comes first, the installation follows as an event.
The work is not art about technology. It is technology used to do the work that critical analysis does — but at the speed and scale of contemporary information environments.
Each project is an analytical instrument. The instrument is the product. The installation is the demonstration. The public application is the point.
The tools are built to be used. Not to be looked at. Not to sit behind glass. If you have found one of them useful, or if you have found one of them wrong, both of those responses matter.
FLAK Version 2 is in development. It will move from pattern matching to semantic analysis, add asymmetric framing detection, cross-headline comparison, and coordinated narrative cluster detection. It will be a legally defensible public web application.
Future projects are in early development. They will be announced here when they are ready to be demonstrated.
For questions about the work, academic enquiries, or exhibition interest: fios.instruments@gmail.com