For my final project I want to produce some sort of platform that allows for advancement of local, or community-specific, media.
I’m currently playing with two ideas. The first is a site/app called TroFlow that I’ve done some work on in the past. The platform would serve as an event forum in which people could list smaller scale, preferably student-run, arts events in the area. Listings would include but not be limited to open mic, hiking trips, small band gigs, trivia nights, whatever and would hopefully build a community around social, creative arts as an alternative to the drug-fueled party scene.
The second idea is a re-imagining of a Radio/TV show I created with a friend in high school called Jay’s Corner. In high school it was a sort of news show where we’d bring on guests and do interviews about local happenings. Now that we’re all spread out over the world I’m seeing it as an Internet podcast that would air weekly or bi-weekly. The reason I want to do this is because I feel like our communal sense of home is slowly slipping away and becoming irrelevant. We were so close in our childhood and now that we only see each other during the holidays, it’s hard to stay connected to one another and we all feel a distance from that part of our self that is still wrapped up in the moments we all shared.
For both projects I hope to serve a very small, isolated community. My feeling is that “local” cultures, however we begin to define local, should be maintained such that different frames of consciousness may still exist and inform each other across the many worlds we are a part of. Each idea is potentially scalable but I feel that scaling it personally, into communities I’m not an active part of, would completely defeat the purpose.
Floodwatch: I like contributing to research, but this project seemed entirely too removed from the experience of life for me to feel invested in it. I’d rather make art and work towards creating meaning and a better world than put on this tin-foil hat of sorts.
Quantified Self: Mildly interesting, but again, I don’t feel that it’s the role of the Internet to tell us what makes us upset and so forth. The fact that people are looking for answers is good but I feel like raw data is not the place to find the answers to these types of questions.
Freakonomics: Seemed like a weird exercise in absurdity that I didn’t relate to at all. The data they collect could be interesting but I don’t really see too much meaning in it.