Arc of Total Eclipse by Sarah Charlesworth is a series of prints that show the front-page prints of major newspapers around the United States on February 26th, 1979.
The headline story of the day being the total solar eclipse that was visible throughout the United States. These prints have edited out all text information except for the newspapers' logo, date, edition, and weather information and has kept only the images of the solar eclipse while also maintaining the newspapers proportions. The result is a print of a mostly empty newspaper edition with repeating images of the solar eclipse as witnessed by different locations throughout the United States.
Ode to Arc of Total Eclipse is an homage piece by Hector Leiva that replicates the same process by Sarah Charlesworth. The process is modified to take into account the move from physical print to the virtual representation of the front-page newspaper which is that newspaper's homepage online.
The process encompasses the following changes:
- The isolation of a single, nationally wide covered incident or event (does not have to be focused on a solar eclipse).
- The newspaper's internet home-page is now what was previously the newspapers' printed front-page.
- The end result will be a digital copy with hard-coded dimensions of the newspaper's largest possible representation of their internet home-page.
- This method in which these digital copies will be generated, will be completely automated by a custom computer program.