NOW & THEN: A COLLECTION OF UNDERGRADUATE HOME MOVIES, 2020
We tend to think of the archive as a repository of memories, things, and documents from the past. A technique that arrests the present into a past. What would happen if the bounds of the archive were further blurred or bent?
Through home movies, I studied the archive’s relationship to private memory, and how inclusions of such private memories, in the form of digital home movies, could further liberate the archive, while simultaneously creating a more inclusive and varied narrativization of the past and centering media that is heavily re-mediated and lo-fi. Though I originally planned to dedicate the entirety of my thesis to an original theory and practice of a deep-fried media, COVID-19 and the need for remote learning pushed me to re-think how the marginalization and exclusion of media that is deep fried (that includes food, hair, and images/memes) has affected how we orient ourselves towards what is intimate & remote, what is private and public, what is kept secret and what is revealed & shared. Taking cue from the MoMA’s recent exhibition dedicated to amateur film and home movie, Private Lives Public Spaces, I set out to create a series of home movies that served as both video diary and testament to my time at Vassar. To read more click here.
This project was completed in satisfaction of Vassar College’s Media Studies Senior Thesis requirements.