👀 at my art:

Week 8 (Oct. 26 - Oct. 30)

After the Midterm presentations on Monday I was still left with a difficulty understanding where to go from here. I spoke to someone outside of the academic environment about my concerns regarding my ability to learn and perform, and they gave me some advice on how to try and get out of the groove I seem to have been stuck in.

From there, I met up digitally with Kirsten from my group (I have linked her blog on the side of this page) and we talked about the topics each of us is researching and writing our essay about, since there was some overlap, it turned out. It was also nice to just talk to someone and hear their thoughts and associations, and to get some new perspectives.

During this conversation and based on Julie's remark that she struggled understanding the visualisations and reflecting I'd documented in the media timelines I'd made, I came up with the idea of making a sort of family tree, but instead with the most important pieces of media I've consumed over time. The goal of this was/is to see what the connections between each piece is. I've included it below, but I should note that this is still a work in progress and parts of it might very well change over time.



























I also spoke with the teachers in an individual meeting, about me being stuck and unsure of what to do. We spoke about many things, and there were some things mentioned, especially by Teana, that I hope to discuss with her further during next week's feedback sessions on the drafts of our essays which we handed in this week. I've included some of the notes I took below. Another interesting thing that came up was the suggestion to document more in video format. While analogue media was responsible for establishing my love for certain genres and tropes, it is digital media that has been most important to me during a large part of my life. The teachers suggested I try recreating or further explore both my 'family media tree' or the timeline with characters I've projected upon/coped through (not pictured here, can be found in my folder within the Identity 3 group on Teams), in video format. I was intrigued by this and hope to start work on that either this weekend or at the start of next week.

To refresh, since I've had a dip in progress journal updates: 

The theme established for my essay, and as such I will keep researching further, is 'how my childhood trauma has influenced the way I've consumed and experienced media'. For this I've made some timelines with the pieces of work that were most influential to me, some of which I've included on this page as well.