Unit 10 – Brief 1: Rest in Pixels – Intention
This project has been really difficult to start with. I base this upon the fact that it is really open and that means I have to put my own kind on spin on it, there is no straight forward route as the topic is too large. Therefore as always I struggle with narrowing down on what I want to do.
Since Thursday, I have been going two steps forward and one step back. I’ve been researching in-depth about death and how people mourning. But I have discovered today that any solutions that I wish to explore have really been done before or they are incredibly difficult to visualise. Also when dealing with thing such as mourning, people be have differently therefore how can you make a system if there is set way of behaving!?
So after a morning of struggling I decided to go back again, to the beginning of the project and look at what I was mostly interested in. Initially my intention was to help people cope with mourning online. This was a silly intention as this has been done, and people cope the way they feel comfortable not the way someone tells them to.
I have changed my intention to – Visualising / explaining / investigating the impact that the internet has had on traditional methods of coping with death.
This intention is a lot more flexible because it doesn’t focus on helping people, it is just bringing into focus how the internet has changed tradition (for better or worse).
One thing that lead me towards this intention is the fact of how many websites there already are online that focus on remembering people who have died. Either separate memorial pages, twitter hash tags of RIP, or Facebook memorial profiles. There is a vast amount of these online. This way of mourning has only been possible because of the internet, where else in physical life could you write messages, review photos, and have a constant connection to the deceased?
I also find this theme of memorial interesting because of how people seem so keen not to forget, as one of the quotes from the previous post said – We hang on to the dead however we can”. Because of this human trait, it must be why the internet and social networks seem so popular when remembering the dead.
This project, especially within the brief was more so about how much we contribute online as the living, but I think it is much more interesting to see how much we contribute online about the people who are no longer with us. It seems that what people add after we have gone which continues our legacy and not what we leave behind.
Summary:
NEW INTENTION: To explore how the internet allows a new way of mourning and how this outlet has prolonged our online presence/legacy after death.
SOLUTION 1: Using the mass amount of memorial content to explain the internets use of mourning.
SOLUTION 2: … unsure…
Lizhamburger 