This was tough to share because I normally don’t share my feelings at all, and to talk about my sisters was even more hard because I really don’t like to share anything about them at all in general either. I felt really vulnerable sharing the hard details of growing up with my sisters because most people feel that they are only able to the the good things about having siblings with handicaps but I wanted people to hear the truth and hardships and also the good times. This lets people see not only my childhood, but a little more about a part of my life of that a few select people get to hear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmMRILBV4pY&feature=youtu.be

I spent that past two night trying to attempt to find an example of citizen journalism and failed miserably. I kept my eye out and my phone ready for the opportunity but it never came. I feel like in my life here at Lafayette I will not encounter anything worthy of citizen journalism like you’d see on TV or social media. I am not around fights or police brutality, or anything worthy of reporting besides who hooked up with who that night. But I also felt like citizen journalism is something that you can not be on the lookout for, people end up in the right place at the right time or more like the wrong place at the wrong time. The only example I was really around was the National Championship for men’s basketball and I was not even the first to report it because I was not at the game, only watching the game on TV. I feel like things worthy of reporting are not always happening and for those that catch it, they are extremely lucky and again caught in the right place at the right time. To get an example of citizen journalism, I would need to have more time to find something and be vigilant for the rest of my life.

I chose to work with the option of “creating a narrative of sound without using any text”. I found this option to be the most interesting and I felt like I had more options to of things to use for it. Some of the sounds I used came from my home life and the rest came from the internet. I wanted to make this a personal experience for the audience. I love going home and playing the game Zelda WindWaker for my sister Ashley, she always asks me to play for her and then whenever I play, my dad is always asleep on the couch. I wanted to combine these two sounds to create a narrative of a dream because whenever I play the game a lot, I end up having dreams about the game.

I first posted the audio to a SoundCloud account that I created. This did not create a big response due to the fact that I do not have any followers. I tried to hash-tag things that were relevant to what my sound so that others would be able to find it. I realize now that to find a bigger response, I could have hash-tagged things that were currently trending now so that even if people weren’t looking for it, they would stumble upon it. I then uploaded the SoundCloud file to my twitter, where I have a decent amount of followers, but again, I did not have any response.

For this project I really wanted to play with the idea of what a performance is. Prior to this class I would have really only thought of a concert or a theater performance as a form of performance art. In that line of thinking I wanted to capture in photography a parody of a rock concert. In this series a group of friends are simply playing a video game but when presented in a tweet and given context through the description and hashtags it begins to take a different meaning. Additionally in some of the shots it captures moments not usually seen when playing this game due to the script given to the performers. The script which was essentially “be a rock band, perform with lots of energy” has the gamers step out of that role and into the role of rock star.

The picture above also brings into question the role of an audience. Lighters, or now cellphones, are commonly held up during rock shows. However, in this series there is an audience of one, an appropriate size for the “show” that is being put on but the behavior exhibited is unusual from a spectator of video games. Again the format of the tweet and the hashtags used also give some comedic value to the situation as the tweet would seem completely appropriate if sent out at a real rock concert.

In these two pictures above I tried to capture different angles of the concert for aesthetic purposes. However, considering the audience and platform on which the photos were going to be presented the captions about sneaking backstage had to be fabricated in order to keep the context consistent.

The response was fairly interesting. There were not a lot of replies and the ones that I did receive were mostly from bot accounts which automatically scan for certain words or phrases and respond by retweeting or liking them. This response was received due mostly to the hashtags utilized in the tweets.

I really enjoyed this project because I was able to pretty much do whatever I wanted and perform for the camera. I wanted the chance to recreate the style of pictures you see on muradosmann’s instagram but with a more normal twist of not being in an exotic place. I have always been fascinated by his account since I have started having an insta.

I posted the pictures to my instagram account, every hour, to get a more real reaction since this was my most used account and I surprisingly got a nice amount of likes. I am most surprised about the fast that I lost around 6 followers from doing this project. I did not post any captions with these pictures, so i guess people thought my posts were annoying. When people asked me about the pictures, their questions really consisted of the same thing: “were they taken on different days?” “where are they?” “why did you post so many”. I guess if the timing of the posts were spread out over a few days it would have been less of an annoyance to people. the editing of the pictures are close to the style of muradosmann’s in the sense that they have a deep depth of field and lots of colors. I really enjoyed looking at them after.