Monday, March 16, 2015

I have no Yik and I must Yak

Having been influenced by the rediscovery of Wayne White, I knew that I wanted to work somehow with text on images. I thought of the various places that I could take text from: my journals, tumblr posts, quotes… And then I landed on Yik Yak, the app in which you post text anonymously and then vote on each other’s thoughts.

The premise of Yik Yak

A handful of Yik Yak posts are actually funny or relatable, but most of what is posted is mean/pointless/trolling/etc. Posting on Yik Yak is much like (to take a McLuhan quote completely out of context): “complaining to a hot dog vendor at a ballpark about how badly your favorite team is playing” (142). What is the point?

Yik Yak is meant for college campuses, so I thought it might be a fun idea to continue taking random candid photographs on campus, and pair the photos with random posts from Yik Yak. I toyed with the idea of making the pairings completely random, as people post many different things on Yik Yak in all types of situations, but I ended up deciding it would be funnier and make more sense for the viewer if I paired them to make at least a little bit of sense. I screenshotted the "Yaks" I liked and overlaid them with the photos in PhotoShop.

You can view the series on my flickr.

6 comments:

  1. Sweet! I can totally see the way you channeled Wayne White into this, but still made a unique project. I like the idea of assigning anonymous quotes to random faces, and Yik Yak was the perfect tool for that. I also dig the way we automatically assume the Yaks relate to images we are seeing!

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  2. The way that random anonymous messages can pretty much be attributed to anyone in the community is very interesting as a thought experiment, and the added humor makes an interesting mix.

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  3. I really liked this combination, especially knowing a lot of the photos were from the 100 days party. There was a good mix of really appropriately connected words and photos and then equally as good images with yaks that make no sense. I appreciated that.

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  4. I really like how you executed this. The overlaying of images on people created some great imaginary associations. Great choice of text.

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  5. The combination of anonymous quotes with blocked out faces was really cool. I'm not sure if it was your intention, but some of the images were heavier than I anticipated them to be based on what you had shown us in class- but I actually really appreciated the variety of humorous and reflective.

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  6. This is a clever project that makes us think about the anonymity of the internet breaking down when the community gets small. And how stupid we all can be when we have an easy opportunity to express our true nature.

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What?