Wholesome Gals

YouTube Sculpting

My project, entitled "Wholesome," is an exploration of YouTube-based depictions of what, exactly, "Wholesome" means to people. What began as a search for definition turned quickly into an analysis of wholesome femininity as portrayed through popular opinion. Popular opinion, in this case, is represented almost exclusively by male YouTubers. 

Working with community opinions and ideas means that content is restricted to what other people share with the world, and that shared content tends to come from  a vocal, media-savvy population subset. In the case of "Wholesome," the only information available on wholesome girls was posted by males.  The videos in "Wholesome" range from subtle--advertising tween underwear from 'noslutwear.com'-- and not-so-subtle--YouTuber nigahiga describing the modest dress and body standards required for a wholesome gal. Additional segments include a Julie Andrews "wholesome test," a strange cultish video about burning witches, and a drunken man stating he needs a loving girl, and an acerbic rap about public opinion of Miley Cyrus. The resulting conglomerate of videos describes the subjective, amorphous definition of wholesome femininity found online.

YouTube sculpting allows for a beautiful, subtle social commentary on prevalent issues. Since the content already comes from digital media, the integration of the issue in pop culture/opinion is irrefutable. There are, however, downsides to this brand of appropriation art: The message can be too subtle. The artist has no aesthetic control. Being pointed and/or concise is difficult. Appropriation art sacrifices a great deal of artistic constructivity, which proved a little difficult for me. Although I was able to create a project of sorts, "Wholesome" feels more like a supercut than video art or social critique. I found most of my meaning when I painstakingly cut the video together, and I'm afraid it doesn't quite make sense without an unreasonable level of engagement by the viewer. 

YouTube appropriation art is an extraordinary opportunity to work with community opinions and ideas. Content is entirely restricted to the videos that others share with the world and how the owners tag that media, and meaning is restricted to the author's ability to find cohesion in the conglomerate. This brand of appropriation art allows for realistic explorations of vocalized opinions and personal engagement with social issues, although it tips precariously close to mastercuts and compilations.

Avatar Activism: Utilizing Colloquial Canon

The incredible capitalistic power of Hollywood and other mass entertainment generators have punctured social, physical, and relational boundaries with its content. As a result, fan culture has become the world's new common mythology. Presented under a proper guise of apolitical fiction, each international film or book series holds a unique didactic power over the hearts of consumers. Instead of writing metaphors from classic literature, long-dead philosophers, and ancient political theorists, fan activists draw their inspiration from more colloquial, more accessible mediums of mass entertainment. This phenomenon has encouraged (with varying degrees of success) a shift in attitude toward political participation and involvement; instead of formal methods of engagement (like protesting as a human, or associated human identity), people can unironically participate as fantastical creatures fighting for an ideology portrayed in popular media. 

This fannish participation captures the public's attention and passion in a unique way; instead of attracting attention via communication of valid social concerns, fan activism's initial draw comes from the popular media it appropriates. The "Hunger is Not a Game" initiative serves as an example. This campaign was intended to encourage fans of Suzanne Collins's popular "Hunger Games" series to learn about and mobilize against world hunger. The initiative's graphics relied heavily on the pop-culture tie, drawing in people who were already involved with and/or passionate about Collins's franchise. 
The Avatar incident discussed in Jenkin's article relies on a similar issues engagement--people involved in the Bil'in situation drew ties with a contemporary social canon and drew the interest of a world similarly interested in Cameron's film. 

This fantastical approach to public action and discourse begs attention from every individual that engages with media. International entertainment or fan cultures may not inspire political action by themselves, but they do make those actions understandable and attractive to popular consumers.

Learning To Write: An Exploration of the Benefits of Digital Community Education

Traditional learning settings such as classrooms and job trainings allow students to learn constructive social interaction, fulfilling baseline work formats and standards, receiving a necessary (though often painful (I’m looking at you, memorization-based history courses)) rounded exposure to varied subject disciplines, and receiving standards-based feedback on performance. There are, however, a few all-important aspects that are almost entirely missing from (my) institutionalized learning engagement: unlimited interactions with internally legitimized teacher figures, access to large amounts of bizarrely specific niche-mates, and engagement with a more organic learning process.

In an almost subconscious search for supplemental learning engagements, my peers and I turned to forms of new media. One specific internet site provided me with the quintessential connected learning experience: AO3.com.

AO3.com is a fan-based community literature site that attracts every type of writer. From bored, vampire-obsessed 12-year-olds to published authors who like appropriating crime/drama characters in their free time, the website accepts anybody. Nobody wrote for profit. Nobody wrote for publication. AO3 is a vast digital gathering ground for self-motivated social artistry. And everybody has their niche. Where else am I going to find a larger group of people who’s as interested in moderately gay fanfiction about a teenage werewolf and his gangly human sidekick? Who else am I going to show my story about demon!sherlock to without intense fear of social rejection? Answer: nowhere.

The learning on AO3 is based on a unique, role-liquid student/teacher interface focused on improvement, encouragement, and the occasional humbling “your story gave me cancer” feedback. Everybody came to AO3 with common interests. Grammatical elements and writing proficiency often didn’t matter; instead, the community focused on emotional narrative, proper characterization, effective reflection on and/or misappropriation of the canon, and an accurate understanding of the target audience. Advanced-level writing concepts learned organically through community interactions on a grandly anonymous scale.

New media engagement fosters immersion with interests not accessible by traditional, analog means of connected learning. Although I had received formal writing training for years in school, I never truly developed a fictional voice until I found AO3 and related sites. Traditional education and new media connected learning buffered and built off of one another to round-off my education, to show me interesting ways to involve both critically and intuitively. Modern day learning is not complete without the benefits of new media community engagement.

Twine Poetry

interTwine'd

InterTwine'd is a Twine-based poem grappling with different forms of expression to process the complicated experience of memory repression. My own limited understanding of the Twine platform directed InterTwine'd's aesthetic into a very unique world; I could control pacing. The timing of the piece--the poetry breaks, the highlighted words, and the direction of the hyperlinks--created InterTwine'd's main aesthetic experience.

The poem starts faster; the frames are as glancing to the player as the thoughts are to the poem's consciousness. The content may be dark and somewhat disturbing, but the words aren't given any special attention. They exist in their own stilted reality. The player can read them in moments and move on to the next frame of the story without engaging, experiencing, or truly understanding their meaning.

And then the pacing changes.

The player gets stuck in a contemplation of the words "Repetitive growls." At first, the words seem as darkly inconsequential as the preceding phrases, and yet the consciousness sticks to it. Mulls on it. Warps it. Strips the words of the softness of vowels, leaving only cold percussive consonants.

The next frame is the largest block of text in the poem, with three potential links. Each link leads to a different surrealist representation of the female body. The player sits stuck in the frame until they have clicked all the options, forcing the player to engage with the information in the frame. and then all the options again. The second time around, the pictures are different. Warped. Inverted, blurred, made terrifying and indistinct. And yet the player is stuck with the images. with the text. with the memories made vibrant by a new air of violation. This pacing aesthetic forces the player to revisit unsettling imagery until the consciousness's memory has run its course, and an escape route presents itself.

And then the player faces Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory warping herself into a facsimile of normal. The piece returns to the glancing treatment of text, accompanied by a new blatantly modified copse of images. Shaking fragments of dream flicker over a visceral representation of more warped memories. A non-confrontational banana held gingerly in front of a woman's onesie. A pair of identical faces repeated but distorted. A woman's torso, arm, and leg thinned out. Wrong, somehow, with a clumsy black swipe across sexualizing features. Once more, the reader is stuck in contemplation. Coming out of the vortex of varied memories, the reader sees this one photo repeated. Again. And again. Replaced by black, and then disappeared all together.

In retrospect, I should have utilized Twine's hyperlink function more cohesively into the narrative. The process of memory suppression is complicated and cyclical enough to work well with complex hyperlink paths, but I didn't take advantage of that in the narrative. Additionally, Audio would have contributed to the piece more effectively than the pirated photos I used. My knowledge of photo imbedding outweighed my knowledge of audio integration, however, so I stuck with the photos. Using an unfamiliar medium to create an immersive user experience proved more difficult than imagined, but the pacing and visual aesthetic elements of Twine helped me translate my piece more effectively.