Ahh, online shopping. What a wonderful, miraculous, and fickle thing. While trying to get the garden ready for spring, Hal noticed that his bird bath broke over the winter. He thought he caught a lucky break finding a cheap replacement online… It was only when it arrived that he discovered he’d bought a bird bath for a doll house!
Hal was chagrined, but I had a good laugh about his mistake. I’ve done the same thing before by speeding through an item description. Hal is too stubborn to return this one, so maybe it’ll become a candy dish. Has anyone else ordered something unexpected because they only skimmed the specifications?
If you’re new here, welcome in! Despite his absent mind this week, Hal is, in fact, only a few weeks from getting is U-M diploma. He posts here on Tuesdays to share his experiences, but if you’d like to see the rest of the videos, check out the Study Hal tag!
We are in need of a revolution. No, I’m not talking Bernie Sanders; no, this is a revolution in creativity. To remind ourselves that art is a vital aspect of hope and that we must utilize it if we want to change the way that we view the world.
It seems like every time I open a new webpage these days, I’m flooded with Facebook fights over colors of coffee cups, posts of people taking pictures of their cell phones in dingy bathroom mirrors, presidential candidates talking talking talking without any action, and terrible acts of hatred pockmarking this earth, scarring it, destroying it.
Keep scrolling and it’s a wonder why we’ve all become so cynical of the world. Yes, it’s important to keep a finger on the news, but when we get so bogged down with it, is there any hope of returning from the deep end?
I believe there is, and so I’ve decided to start bringing hope to the world in my own little way. And that way is through art.
At the beginning of the school year, I stumbled upon a few blogs that dedicate themselves to exploring art and other visual cultures, such as photography, design, animation, painting, installation art, architecture, drawing, and street art. These blogs, such as Colossal, My Modern Met, and Laughing Squid to name a few, are already doing what I want to do: they are hunting down all of the amazingly innovative and passionate and beautiful things that people globally are creating and sharing with the world.
I want to bring it closer to home, and share these little nuggets of inspiration and hope with my world. About once a day, I try to share at least one link to Facebook, highlighting anything from:
Throughout the constant scrolling of anger and suffering and irritation at the world, I hope that these posts remind my friends that art can be powerful. It can lift us up, it can bring us together, it can confuse us and spur heated conversations in their own way, it can be magical, it can be an escape. But most of all, it is a way to communicate with the world in a non-violent way. It’s a way to tell people that they have the ability to create beauty, to change people’s thinking, to challenge the way that they see the world. To remind people that among the bad, there is good stuff happening, too.
Take the events that happened Friday night in Paris. Jean Jullien’s simplistic image of the Eiffel Tower holding up a circle of peace went viral within 12 hours.
Peace for Paris – Jean Jullien
In an interview with NPR, Jullien says, “I turned on the French radio. I heard that there was an attack, and my first reaction was to draw. It’s this sort of moment where you don’t necessarily try to understand everything coherently. It’s more of a state of shock and sadness and anger and all these very sort of raw feelings. So for me, it’s just sort of trying to summarize these feelings in one image with my way of reacting,” Jullien says. “I shared it online as a reaction, not really thought through at all.”
What’s interesting is that he didn’t want it to be viral. He felt uncomfortable being in the spotlight as the “creator,” benefitting from exposure during this time of tragedy. But, his reaction achieved the revolution that he had hoped.
Jullien says, “The idea was just for people to have a tool to communicate, and to respond and to share solidarity and peace. It seems that’s what most people got out of it. So in that sense, if it was useful for people to share and communicate their loss and need for peace, then that’s what it was meant to be.”
The takeaway? The size of the action doesn’t matter: it can be a larger-than-life fabric flower that lights up at night; a powerfully minimal black and white peace sign, or a simple Facebook share. All that’s important is that the art brings people together, it makes them notice what’s going on around them, it makes them feel agency in the world, that they can make a difference by doing something. This Earth is amazing, yes in a tragic way that it can be so self-destructive, but mostly, because of the billions of people who have the power to share a little art with the world in any way or form that they can.
P.S. Sharing art is wonderful and definitely can lift people’s spirits and hearts. But, generous donations can also provide resources and necessities that human beings require. Please if you can, support the French Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, or Friends of Fondation de France, Inc. Thank you!
So I opened my Facebook today and got my daily dose of news vis-à-vis my “trending” sidebar (like I always do, what, do I look like I have enough money or time to subscribe to NYT?) and combed through the articles. Of course, a few interesting topics caught my eye including Nick Jonas releasing more new songs (yay?) and some other junk I don’t remember. But then I saw an article about HBO that could change the way television works, quite possibly forever.
Starting in 2015, HBO will be offering a (paid) subscription to their web content (i.e. their TV shows) that is separate from your cable subscription.
Pause. Wait for it. You can watch HBO online, free, without having cable????
As someone who has lived without cable for some time now and has had to rely on, ah, “other” means to consume her favorite television content, this is fantastic news. Now, it still costs money so I mean I’m not screaming into the abyss in joy over this new development. Again, do I look like someone who can afford to pay for HBO? My mom pays for our Netflix and that’s already pushing it.
But for other people who don’t want to pay for the 1000+ (sometimes like 8000??? why????) channels but still want to get their weekly dose of Game of Thrones, this is great. And actually revolutionary.
Netflix was the pioneer, creating a way for TV to be accessible through the internet. Then Hulu decided to step it up, creating a way for people to not only view old seasons of popular TV shows, but for a way to view the current season in case you have that one last discussion Wednesday nights and miss Modern Family every week. And now you have HBO, creating another avenue for you to consume television content on the internet.
This may seem somewhat irrelevant to the topic of art, other than the obvious fact that TV shows are a piece of film art and this relates to TV, but I think that the way that a culture consumes its art is equally important to what it consumes. The internet has been changing the game since it started, and in the past two years we’ve seen an overhaul of how our lives work – we shape our lives around the internet now. It’s not something that I’m saying is bad, but it’s a fact. Just this summer the popular to some show Legend of Korra made the somewhat controversial switch from television to internet. Even though it seems illogical – a made for TV show goes completely digital like it’s a cheap YouTube series – it’s actually the smartest move for the show. Kids weren’t watching Korra like the teens were. Korra, as a sequel series to Avatar: The Last Airbender, was made for the kids who liked Avatar and grew up. Now, they aren’t watching Nick every Saturday morning – they’re on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and watching their shows on Netflix and Hulu between cramming for finals.
And that’s only one example. But now, this huge move for HBO points in that same direction. TV is packing its bags with only one destination in mind: the internet.
Whether that’s a good move is up to you to decide. But like it or not, it’s happening, and the way that we think of television is changing.
On Thursday night at the Michigan Difference Leadership Event there was a portion of the show dedicated to “dying memes and other cultural phenomena.â€
What does this even mean?
It was a montage of Honey Boo Boo–who I luckily avoided on my recent hiatus from tv/internet, the Harlem Shake–aka appropriative white people convulsing to a bastardized song, someone driving a car–sadly not Glozell, Taylor Swift–singing without goats (because that gem will never die), and others. Put to sad music we “mourned†this YouTube video while staring at a screen, in the union, in Ann Arbor: far away from anyone who is connected to these glimpses of “culture.†I felt like I was cheering for a cement wall so I decided to eat more cheese.
But these “cultural†phenomena won’t pass away. There will always be someone getting their own TV show for being “different,†white people will always be awkward and offensive, people will always drive (not me!), Taylor Swift will continue to age but sing for adolescent girls while she simultaneously shames their existence.
Even then, these “2012-2013†memes and videos will live on. Bon Qui Qui and Nyan Cat are still out there, Afrocircus? Still out there. As long as we have Internet we will always have our entertaining distractions.
That’s what fascinates me. Do things ever disappear from the Internet or get destroyed? Or do they stay on the web forever? Will we be able to access these things in years to come? Decades? Centuries?
New forms of art have a lifetime that is infinite and preservable. That awkward vlog you made will outlast you. That offensive tweet I tweeted will stay on twitter till it tweets its dying tweet. My rage toward the world on Facebook will be eternal rage. That’s badass.
So as I write my final papers, study for my last exams, drink pots of coffee, check the weather for NYC (and not Ann Arbor), dress inappropriately for the rain, accidentally leaves bits of clothing everywhere I visit, and eat carrots—that man’s abs I reblog that are “artsy†or that video I favorite will never leave the world. They may leave my vision, or my mind, but they are only a click away.
