Getting Started

I’ve just begun my Digital Media Arts MA course; this is the first blog post.

One week in and already overwhelmed – so many ideas, opportunities, areas to explore! The terminology (a fancy word for fancy words) used in academic writing often flies above my comprehension, but with time I’ll start to get the hang of it. I think what matters is to build understanding throughout reading over the course of the year. I’m on a quest to deconstruct the academic contextual landscape (a dangerous jungle infested with polysyllabic words), until one day I am able to weild mighty weapons such as “postmodernism”, “kitsch” and “ontology” for myself.

I have a tendency to try and pick up all the interesting ideas and take them home to my notebook. There’s the drive to pick up ideas related to what I’m interested in / I’d like to create art around, and there’s also the drive to pick up ideas that are often repeated or stressed as important by academics. I think it’s important to be aware of these ideas, but I’d rather not follow the community formula as to what direction my work should take. Can my work be authentic in the digital era, or is it all reactionary? I suppose if you choose to frame it one way, authentic work is just reactionary work against the concept of reactionary work.

Does every pixel on my monitor, every byte of data transmitted to my web browser, inform my art? All of this and more makes up the context of the artpiece being performed, the shaping of how it is percieved. Could we create art through deliberately setting context in exaggerated forms, so that the content itself is percieved in a new light?