It’s the latest version of an old idea.
The medium is the message: that we are now past the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and into the question of authenticity in the age of perfect reconstruction.
Pages and ideas like this have circulated in joke books and humour magazines for years, the creation of a pastiche of an already iconic pages (such as TV Guides, newspapers, et al) but what’s really interesting about this piece is that it’s based on an electronic, web-based original.
On non-web based media, the source material and the output are inter-related; there is no output without access to the sources. If I want to make a newspaper page, I need newsprint, news inks, access to printing presses and whatever hardware is used these days to transfer the ink onto the page. I need the same tools and software that is used to mark the page up. Without these things, the page will always be an imitation of the original. A copy of the Guardian printed on an inkjet printer, or using comic sans, just isn’t the Guardian, even if it contains the same text as the original.
The web is a medium where content is decoupled from it’s physical rendering; we are used to accessing the same web page on a CRT, an LCD, your laptop, or your phone. The colour is slightly different, the resolution changes, but the same site seen on each device will be understood as equivalent. Beyond this, however, it also encapsulates it’s own production process; that is, the document is not a ‘baked’ final version, as a printed page is; the output document can be accessed or viewed as the elements of the mechanism that produced it. “View Source” grants access to this; it’s the only medium I’m aware of that is so self-documenting.
As a result, authenticity is defenestrated. Authenticity is not an aspect of the final document, nor can it ever be; authenticity is instead implied by source (the URL the page is accessed from, as every paypal scammer knows) or simply the look; unlike television, radio, or the press, there is no feel to the medium itself that separates an amateur from a professional, no cost barriers (such as owning a printing press or radio transmitter and studio) to divide the two.
This is what is so uncanny about this page; it is an exact reproduction of a page that doesn’t exist, but at the same time (apart from the URL) is sensorially perfect; if Google news generated this page, this is exactly how it would appear, down to the byte. I had never stopped to give pause as to how important domain names were as our only layer of verifiability. Anyone can perfectly imitate anyone else in this medium.
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