Discussion + Developments

- Create a folder of things that work well together already 

- Work on my pieces to make them more consistent with art direction of digital meets print, distorted digital world

- Layering of images, text and noise texture on website will allow the layering of additional videos and GIFs in more digital style to feel consistent 

- Look at WIX and see how the interface works, how far can we go? what UX can we create with what is available in that layout?

- Colours of background collage could change colour as the tone of the stories and articles change, eg. start on satirical sexual tone and move to more emotional personal stories 

Further Collage Experiments 

WIX play arounds

- need the background image to shift in colours and images to ensure there is a sense of journey, and so that the images above feel consistent within the background

- need to make a really long image for background to do this

- works really well with the same aesthetic collage images above it but does not work at all with the more digital pieces 

- looping video transparent background has become black, which is frustrating and this will have to be remade using someone elses laptop 

= Export your video with an alpha channel for wix transparent videos to work 

- Smaller videos of different aesthetics would also work better in the background image

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CONTENT STORIES 

Lockdown love

anecdotes:

5 months into the pandemic, right when we thought things were loosening up a bit, my vagina was doing the opposite. But that was about to change. The first party (medium gathering) I had been in months led me to reconnect with my first serious boyfriend who I was with from the age of 16 to 18. I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in 3 years since the rough breakup back in school, it almost felt like that relationship was in my past life, until it didn’t.  It was clear that the sexual tension between us was still there and I found comfort in the familiarity, then again, I was very horny. One thing led to another and we ended up in a room on our own (classic case), and you know… Anyway, I wasn’t looking for anything serious but that’s when things unintentionally get serious, so very shortly after that we were basically back in a relationship (oops). It was intense from the get-go, he’s just that type but at the time I thought the feeling was reciprocated from my side. I guess I didn’t know what I wanted, and the issue was that unlike me, he was VERY certain. The dick was good tho, naturally major upgrade from the sex life we used to have when we were together the first time, which didn’t help with seeing things clearly either tbh. Once I was back to my semi normal life, being back in uni, I realised that I was stuck. Stuck in a situation where the two of us looked at the relationship from two completely different angles. I have always had this crazy rapid emotional detachment problem, I’m not sure why, and I feel terrible he was another victim of it. I hate having to give the break-up chat, but I had to. It was very uncomfortable and honestly hard to explain my mental process, going from envisioning having a family with him to wanting to go back to being strangers, especially because I didn’t fully understand it myself. I still don’t. I feel like I fucked up by letting myself get back into this with him again and breaking his heart once again. But everything happens for a reason?

So - During lockdown 0.1, I found myself happily single and most definitely enjoying a little bit of me time… I was adamant that nobody was going to distract me from this intense period of isolation. One day I decided to go on a walk round the park (by myself of course). All of a sudden I find myself bumping into an old family friend’s son. This is someone who I have fancied since I was a kid, and admired from a far… We got chatting and ended up having a socially distance convo for about half an hour. FYI - I knew this person had a GF… When I got home and checked my phone, he had slid into my DMs and we started texting. One thing lead to another - he ended up confessing he’s been in love with me for years, he split up with his girlfriend the next day and we also got a private apartment in town where we could have sex during the lockdown… It was fucking wild. We ended up having this whirlwind intense romantic lockdown relationship. The funniest thing about it is that as soon as the lockdown ended; I suddenly got the ick. We are not together anymore. 

Lockdown 1.0 I had just come out of a toxic 3 year relationship, full of lies, cheating, and manipulation. I felt like lockdown could be a good thing, as it would put more distance between us, but because it was such a lonely time I needed some attention and affection and went back to the toxic. But after lots of causal sex, lots of confrontation, lots of mind games, my patience again was worn thin and I swerved that shit. I thought I’d shop around, keep my options open, see exactly what I wanted. It was fun, I had no ties, I could flirt and fuck with who ever  I wanted and leave no questions asked. But after a while that got tedious, I found myself bored of the small talk, bored of nude hints, bored of these boys only after one thing. Lockdown eased and me and the girls decided instead of focusing on the dick we’ll focus on drinking prosec in the park. I made great friendships, great memories, I had nothing but carefree fun. In the midst of all this Prosecco popping, spliff smoking, summertime madness I met someone the brought nothing but positivity and love to my life.

For me, fear has been a theme that has tormented the past year. Fear is the governments only means of control, and they’ve taken no prisoners in using this method to scare people into staying in their bubble. If fear is the opposite of love it seems it would be hard to navigate love in such intense times. I started secretly sleeping with a friend at almost the exact same time that lockdown started. In part, secret so that my friends didn’t judge me for meeting someone beyond my household. But we’ve all seen enough Hollywood films to know that friends with benefits never stays that way. In the intense times we live in, it ended messier than it should have. In the aftermath, a rhetoric that he seemed to relish in was his belief that the past half a year would not have panned out the way it did had Covid not occurred. But the fact of the matter is that it did! I often think this comment was driven by fear too, fear of his own feelings when two people have helped one another in a fearful time. The fear of having feelings for another person is an issue our generation finds hard to grapple with, pandemic or not. I recently asked a friend how things were going in his relationship and he told me in a concerned manner that his mum was calling her his ‘lockdown girlfriend.’ I didn’t see why this was important, but it seemed to bother him. It made me wonder why people have become so scared of what could have been had the pandemic never happened. Are they thinking of the conquests that could have been? Or questioning if their significant other is just someone to lean on in hard times? Surely if something’s meant to be, all the sliding doors would have led there anyway? The idea of people settling in lockdown is a notion I’ve heard circling round. The idea that couples have formed to fight the feelings of loneliness that may be more present in the current climate. As well as meeting up with a partner feeling like meeting up with someone on a less illegal and more guilt-free basis. Social media and social circles seem to gossip that these relationships won’t last, that when everywhere goes back to ‘normal,’ cheating will be rife and as loneliness declines so might the relationship. The gossipers seem to forget that the opposite of fear is love. The world we live in is so absorbed by fear that in the hunt to escape that feeling it’s possible that the stars have aligned for some people. That relationship may not have happened had the pandemic not, but surely that could be a silver lining instead of an escape? In the absence of love, it gave people the courage to go out and find it. Going back to the sliding doors, another of my friends was thinking of ending things with her not yet boyfriend at the time. But Covid gave them the opportunity to isolate together and become the lovely couple they are today. All the expectant mothers of the imminent baby boom might not have been expecting a baby quite so soon, but I bet they’ll love their lockdown baby all the same. Things would be so different had lockdown not happened, but it did. One day life will go back to normal, but love was even hard to navigate back then. 

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TO DO

- Recreate spinning titles with transparent backgrounds 

- Use Joely's PSD files to make my pieces more in the aesthetic

- Look to making a long continuous background image that changes in aesthetic and colours to make it consistent 

- Create content with additional stories and images