After graduating my beloved high school, I was fortunate enough to spend my first year of post-secondary school at UBC, majoring in Computer Science under the faculty of arts. However, it wasn't Computer Science that interested me in my first year. I was interested in the Media Stream for the Coordinated Arts Program, a program that put the same group of students into the same classes for a year, with the classes being related to media studies; it was exactly what I was looking for. Moving away from graphic design and video editing for two semesters, I found myself engaged in creating meaningful works for mediums that I would eventually see in a new light, with the courses pushing me out of my comfort zone to create works that I ended up loving.
In Creative Writing, as this class was tailored toward media studies, we looked at writing for digital mediums. We began with a heavy look at VR, AR, and MR, and if you recall, this is a technology that I'm extremely passionate about. Eventually, we got into script writing, creating a script for a VR game, with my story revolving around raising a robotic child, implementing VR's capabilities as a medium to create empathy, as well as a script for a podcast, with mine being centered on the ethics of VR. We finished of the semester by writing a series of three short stories and publishing them to a Tumblr blog. Additionally, the Tumblr blog also includes monthly blog posts from my Journalism class, in which we were given prompts or articles to write about, with my pieces being about my connection to print journalism and social movements in the age of the internet. As a book-worm who always dreamed of becoming an author, creative writing became a dream class for me to take, allowing me to be one step closer to that dream.
My Arts Studies class would make the impossible happen: I came to love writing research papers. The class revolved around Marshall McLuhan and Bolter & Grusin's theory of "remediation," defined as taking aspects from one medium to be incorporated or represented in another medium, suggesting that no medium is unique or new, a theory I grew to love and relate with, seeing my old works as forms of remediation. We read Frankenstein, a story told in frame narratives, or remediation, from several different characters and authors, we examined Edgar Allan Poe, perhaps the most remediated author in history, and we took a look at comics as a remediation of life, as well as a being a massively remediated medium due to the success of superhero films. Writing several research papers for this class, my favorites were a paper that examined the effects of remediation in the real world, taking a look at how it affects our psyche and how it may have desensitized us from real events, and my final paper that examines the unique traits of the comic book medium that make it desirable to become to widely remediated, using the character of Captain Marvel as an overarching example, who has remediated herself in the forms of 4 different characters in the comics; Shazam, Mar-Vell, Carol Danvers, and Kamala Khan. While the research process of writing a research paper is long and tedious, due to my deep interest in the topics I got to write about, I heavily enjoyed filling my brain with knowledge I never would have been taught. If I wasn't so into creating works for digital mediums, I might decide to just continue writing research papers for the rest of my life.
Last but not least, by Visual Arts class, of which this online portfolio was created for. This class taught me that while it may not seem like it on the surface, all pieces of art has meaning, even the advertising posters I made! All I needed to do was find it. I created two works for this class, a graphic design piece and a video piece.
Titled Advertisers hate him! Coquitlam man uses this program to block 75 ads per day!, I wanted to show how many ads internet users are barraged with daily, with the layout being this messy clump of information as each ad, specifically designed to attract your eye, fights against other ads to catch your attention. However, this project would look drastically different for each person. Because advertisers target which ads to show you depending on the data they know about you, looking at this project for me is like looking into a mirror. What an ugly face I have.
Titled Language, this was an appropriation project in which I took clips of every swear word featured in Marvel's Cinematic Universe's first phase, wanting to show that while these superheros are supposed to be seen as role model figures, they are often humanized in moments of frustration and anger, suggesting that perhaps they're not as super as we think they are. The project also represents Hollywood setting it's eye's on making movies for more mature audiences, with more and more swear words being featured in these movies after Marvel Studios was purchased by Disney, thus a kid's superhero movie is no longer their's to watch anymore.
From putting my face on trees and making cringey videos to creating advertisement for events and animation's that I'm proud of, I thank you for joining me on this long journey, and am looking forward to an even longer journey to come.