Meow Wolf Interactive Art Exhibit, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Author: Moran Ison | Major: Studio Art | Semester: Spring 2024
During the Spring 2024 semester, I researched the communal aspects of online art and how artmaking on the internet promotes community growth, particularly in fandom spaces. My research was done in the Studio Art department under my advisor, Dr. David Fredrick. I met Dr. Fredrick when I took his Game Design class and realized that we had a shared interest in online interactive art and new forms of digital media. I am passionate about digital art/illustration, digital media, and online art projects that are often overlooked by the collegiate academic space. The primary goal of my research was to properly explore and analyze these new forms of art and how they affect the communities they’re created within. Fanzines, a form of collaborative art that has existed for decades, has gone through dramatic changes in form and purpose as the internet has grown in popularity. While pre-internet fanzines do have a sizable amount of research and media preservation efforts dedicated to them, modern fanzines have little to none in academic circles. Through my undergraduate research project, I aimed to shed some light on these modern fanzines, fanart, and other art communities that exist primarily online (such as webtoons, Augmented Reality Games, interactive web art, etc.) I also wanted to explore how fanzines specifically are used to promote community, preserve media, and as tools of social activism all at once. I achieved this via research-based analysis and documenting the process of operating my own collaborative fanzine.
Given that I myself participate in many of these online art spaces, I already knew quite a bit about the social aspects of fandom and formal attributes of collaborative works like fanzines. This knowledge going in was crucial because of the severe lack of academic research on the topic, which was a particular challenge in the researching phase. What ended up being the most helpful tool in the research phase was simply talking to others. Upon gathering a group of online fans for this project’s fanzine, I asked them all about their own experiences with fanzines, collaborative art, and the online fandom experience. Dr. Fredrick was incredibly helpful by coming up with potential questions for contributors and pointing me towards academic sources that would help me research these rather obscure topics more thoroughly. Contributors of my fanzine project helped me format the zine to be visually appealing and helped choose a charity to donate the fanzine’s profits towards, leaning into fanzines’ ability to promote socio political causes. Constant communication between my advisor, my thesis board, and my online contributors proved invaluable over the course of my research period, and I am incredibly grateful to all of them.
Upon the completion of my research and my time as an undergraduate, I hope to further pursue interactive illustration and digital media art. Making artwork for video games, movies, or comics is something I am very passionate about and already have experience in. Newer forms of art that exist primarily in the digital space can appear confusing to those who are not familiar with the medium, leading people to downplay its potential. I hope that my undergraduate research can mitigate this and bring more people to appreciate online art.