Artists Statement
For this project, we bounced around several ideas while trying to decide what prompt to post on social media. Our main goals were to ask a question that excited not only ourselves but our friends and family as well. We knew that interaction is often very dependent on passion and we wanted a lot of responses from a variety of people. Some early thoughts included prompts about family and personal interactions with media such as dressing up as favorite characters. Finally, we decided to post a prompt about “nostalgic media” as we were hoping a connection to childhood and fond memories would help people be willing to share and contribute to our project. The result was far better than we had expected, and we were thrilled to see how many different stories we received. Our class has discussed how fans often “own” media, attaching their meaning and experience to what they see and watch. The submissions we received exemplify this idea, showing how each person has a unique relationship to the media they loved based on their perspectives. This also keyed into what we read about in the learning and literacy reading which talked about how new media can foster connected learning through “expanding social supports for interests” and “fostering engagement and self-expression” (Ito, et al). We saw this in the huge number of responses we received. As a result, we were also excited to see a huge variety in the project, not just across different media but across different generations as well. It was fascinating seeing how the passage of time has had an impact on our interactions with media and that people of all ages have nostalgia attached to media, even if those attachments were formed in different ways. We wanted to emphasize this variety in the project so we decided Tumblr’s format would serve us the best. We considered ordering the posts based on release dates of the respective media, but we decided that giving the site’s visitors the opportunity to see media from different eras all at once was more important. We also had a variety when it came to form, as our submissions varied from gifs to photos to videos to songs. Once again, Tumblr offered us the freedom to share all of these different forms, so that the submissions the audience sees match the way that they were submitted to us. In all, this project helped open our eyes to how important media is to people, despite the differences in ages and experiences. We’ve gotten to assemble a beautiful collage of nostalgia and memory and we appreciate all of those who were willing to share their experiences with us.
Works Cited:
Ito, Mizuko, et. Al. 2013. Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design. Irvine, CA: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub.