The relationship between the terms “IRL” (in real life) and “AFK” (away from keyboard) captured my attention since we were first introduced to them in this course. Prior to Internet Art Cultures, I was familiar with IRL, but not AFK. It is fascinating because I have associated IRL with contexts that technically do not exist in real life. In other words, I would use this expression when something perhaps fictional had parallels to my real life. For example, my siblings and I would be playing with twigs in our backyard and call it “Harry Potter IKR”. When applying this understanding to art, it seems to me that this term is somewhat skewed because when art exists in person rather than online, the art is not all of a sudden “real”. Legacy Russell’s manifesto recognizes this relationship and dives deep into how these two terms differ in important ways Art online is just as real as art in person. This is why I was so drawn to the term AFK. Away from the keyboard more accurately explains the different forms and contexts art can exist. AFK does not challenge the validity of the art, rather it just explains where the art may occur.
Molly Soda is an artist I was recently introduced to whose experimentation with these terms and philosophies inspired my work for this final project. Molly Soda’s work focuses on how emotion is perceived via digital cultures, and how that might differ from cultures that are away from the keyboard. She uses her room as an expression of this world away from the keyboard and draws parallels between her digital life and online community. With this being said, I wanted to go into this final project with the intentions of connecting my personal environments as well. I wanted to connect my DU community with my Neocities online webpage.
Having the tools and and ability to display art both digitally and AFK is a powerful instrument. Similarly to Noah Phillip’s RPG project, this project was a great outlet for me to project a message that I care deeply about in a creative way. In my eyes, AFK means outside of the house, outside of the classroom, outside of any building and ultimately, in nature. To make my project meaningful, I decided to focus the message about the dangers we pose as humans to earth’s environmental wellbeing. Global warming, climate change, loss of biodiversity, carbon footprints, and the greenhouse gas effect are all things I believe should harness a lot of our attention. This website has an incredible amount of information regarding this subject that has inspired and educated me prior to my creative work here. This subject matter should be taught throughout all levels of education all around the world with massive calls to action. Initiatives to push back against this damage and fight for clean energy policy through appropriate leadership is important to me. I was able to put these thoughts and emotions eloquently into art form and share it with not only visitors of my website, but students simply walking through DU’s campus.
I decided to create a gif of planet earth being set on fire, and then being saved with a bucket of water. To me, this indicates human destruction but also the hope of human restoration. If we have the power to diminish the resources on earth, we have equal power to reserve these damages. I have imported this gif onto my website, but I also printed out each individual frame and taped them outside all around DU campus. I then photographed each poster and created another gif. This second gif consists of the same exact frames, but in “AFK” contexts. Although the technical frames are exactly the same, the second gif seems more powerful.
With backgrounds of nature and sunny compositions, the second gif makes the overall message more personal. It almost has a message more like, “look how beautiful our earth is, save it!” rather than just “save our earth!”. The second gif show cases what we should preserve rather than just depicting a cartoon version of it. I realized that when students, staff, and faculty see the individual frames alone in nature, the message will be awfully skewed and incorrect (i.e. just seeing a picture of a match burning the earth), so I decided to put a QR code on the poster that takes the viewer straight to the online version of the gif. Overall, this process was very unique and opened up a whole new understanding of where art can take me. Art can be depicted in so many shapes, forms, and contexts and I feel fortunate to experiment with these adjustments while actively standing up for a cause I believe so strongly in.
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