Tumblr Experiment

I have been making blogs for the past 3 years and I have made them in a number of different ways, each time there is one problem that presents itself, how to present my own work alongside research to best engage with an audience on the internet. This is a problem that has reached its most interesting solution yet in my use of the website www.tumblr.com. Rather than using the blog as a means of storing and archiving my own individually motivated research and exhibiting my own work I have become entangled in a community of sharing and sorting imagery, a sort of collective archiving of a certain aesthetic. I have then started to make content which fits in with that archive in order that it becomes reproduced and becomes part of the wider network of sharing, this way reaching a wider audience that I can keep track of and interact with. This has led to a specific set of symbols, colours and  values that are agreed upon by a group of seemingly disconnected people joined together through the use of this website. This is nothing radical, in fact it is seen by many as a less original form of creative expression than a blog containing only primary research, but making a blog entirely out of secondary research has lead to an experience much more fulfilling in its contained experience, it is something perhaps similar to working in a research group of scientists only with no clear goal to the research other than aesthetic enjoyment. 

But what is this enjoyment based on? What are the motives behind this research? How specific is my experience in comparison to the other members of the research group who I know very little about other than their interests and occasionally their appearance? How does the community function and reenforce itself, could it be threatened? Do online communities in fact fall apart all the time but simply without any physical consequence? 

The community of image sharing which I have chosen to become a part of seems quite localised and is perhaps even a bit of a cult? Something that interests me about tumblr in general, as much as I can gauge of what a generalisation might be, is that the experience of images is very quick and unthoughtful, it is a very empty experience where the communication of images is limited to simple statements, visual jokes or nostalgic memory aids. The experience can be something like that of a collector looking for a particular object to complete a set. People are fans of certain things, they are obsessed by certain aspects of culture and it pleases them to see these characters, images and even colours repeated. But what about something more lasting than that, the things I have seen on tumblr which have actually challenged and provoked me have been images that I have found completely unsettling and disturbing. As well as a culture of positive imagery there is a huge culture of the revolting and uncanny which for the most part I avoid but which inevitably ends up getting mixed in with the content that I am sorting through. What is the use of these images? Is the disturbing and the impression making image the one which is valuable above the endless ocean of appealing colours and retro reminders?