The first project for our intro to digital studies class was the creativity module project. Creativity encompasses a wide range of topics, so I wasn’t quite sure what the project I was going to do would look like. And indeed, there were many topics to choose from. Going into the project my main goal was that I wanted to learn something new. I originally wanted to do something with digital art or music, but those topics were already taken. There was a signup sheet for the different topics students could choose, and no one could choose the same project. By the time I went to sign up, art and music had been taken. So, I scrolled down the different topics under the creativity module tab and weird stuff caught my eye. It seemed interesting, so I clicked on it and learned about something called a new aesthetic. A new aesthetic was a new type of aesthetic that sought to reexamine the world through a technological lens. I was familiar with the concept of aesthetics and as a former mechanical engineering major I have an interest in technology. I fully committed to this topic when I scrolled down and saw proposed project ideas. One of the proposed ideas was to make a Tumblr blog and discover and curate an undiscovered new aesthetic. I have been on Tumblr since 2015, so I’m very familiar with the website. This seemed like a very doable project to me because I was already familiar with Tumblr and the concept of aesthetics. I signed up to make a new aesthetic themed project and started my research. I started my project by checking out the blog of James Bridle called the new aesthetic. James Bridle coined the term new aesthetic back in 2012 and runs a blog dedicated to the concept. I checked out his blog to get an idea of what Bridle defined the new aesthetic as. I then read some of the essays and articles linked in weird stuff tab to get a broader understanding of how the idea of the new aesthetic is viewed in general. After doing these readings, I then went to Tumblr and searched the tag new aesthetic to see what kind new aesthetics were present on Tumblr. There were bunch of different new aesthetics like glitchcore or vaporwave, but I wanted to find and curate a relatively unknown and new one. I found the vhscore tag while browsing through the glitchcore tag. It was a less popular tag that seemed to be a subgenre of glitchcore. I then decided to curate the vhscore new aesthetic. The oldest post in the tag I could find on Tumblr dated back to January 3, 2022. People have been actively posting in that tag till this day with the most popular posts getting a couple thousand notes. I designed a Tumblr blog dedicated to the vhscore new aesthetic, and curated posts on it. I presented my blog to the class on Monday September 18. One the questions my classmates asked me after I presented was whether or not the images were shot on actual VHS tapes. I didn’t know the exact answer to question, but I believe most of the images and videos are not shot on VHS and instead have a VHS filter applied to them. The professor asked me if the images and videos could be used as backgrounds or in other projects to which I answered that doing something like that without asking is frowned upon in Tumblr culture. After answering the questions asked my project is now complete.
