Amely Koenig's Blog and Art

Prototyping is a tricky activity to do, and visualising how your content is going to affect your audience is no easy task. For my Instagram DA, I have been trying some different approaches than usual, such as posting lifestyle content on my stories about what I do in my everyday life, and I use it as a journal of sorts, so that people can connect more with me as a person, rather than me just posting artwork, and building up an image.

Existing users on Instagram already post ‘journal-like’ stories, and do many things, like art trades (where one person draws the others original character and both post on their own accounts while tagging the other person) which is basically a way for artists to get more of a following from other circles. I have been doing this in a different format, by doing #DTIYS (which was explained in my previous blog post) as well as straight up drawing things for other people as gifts, and they usually share it on their own stories to show them to their audience as a form of gratitude, which I think has worked well.

I also played around with drawing memes for the Twitter Uni crowd for fun, and even get some exposure for my DA there. So far, it has gained a bit of interaction, but not much, and at this point is only up there to serve as a mark for online interaction and consistency for an audience to see my work.

However, I joined two other DAs (A zine @PineZine and a magazine @ChaeMagazine) for my art for two reasons- I would have more content for my DA in general, as I post it there after my pieces are done, and I can potentially generate a new audience through these DA’s that I entered, however small.

As part of prototyping, I also had to accept that maybe my reach through Instagram wasn’t enough, even thought that is a site most artists use, and I posted a drawing to Reddit to hopefully raise some perception of who I am. There hasn’t been much attention drawn to it, but it was a good venture.

My reach with followers isn’t much, but every time someone comments on my post, I make sure to respond.  I also take the time to respond to other peoples stories and interact with them. My goal is to try and interact with the community and make my circle bigger so I can share artwork and just have a communal interest where we can talk with each other.

I will note that the type of artwork you draw, whether it be realistic, anime, cartoonish; humans or animals, each have their own social circles, and people tend to follow artists with similar styles that they have or look up to. I don’t feel that I have a defined ‘style’ to attract followers of that subset. On the other hand, there is also the question of skill, and how people can box themselves into drawing only one thing and not being able to draw anything else very well, and then as a result they can’t diversify or improve their skill level. Its a personal dilemma that I have very little answers to and will keep searching for.

From the beginning Ideating stages I had an idea of what to do for my Digital Artefact. Prior to this subject, I had an digital art account on Instagram for around 4 years, and even though I never amassed a big following, I have always managed to post regularly and have drawings posted once every week or so. Since it was already part of my posting routine, it is easy to get used to.

This subject gives me a chance to brush up on what makes Instagram tick, and what people want to see from my profile. This DA is about curating my art profile even further, and make it a platform where I and my art are seen as accessible for a certain group of people. My art as it stands now is not curated enough to appeal to a specific demographic.

My goals for this project are-

To establish regular communication between me and my followers, such as regularly posting, responding to comments, making Instagram stories posting on Twitter etc.. I also asked for their input on drawings that I created and what they ‘liked’ better.

Another goal of mine is to curate my feed, so I polled my followers on what they thought and what drawings they liked the best.

I also had a discussion about monetization with a tutor (@UnicornDispatch) on Twitter, and the questions it raised about followers and ability to monetize were interesting. I had only considered a narrow perspective of monetization, and that was that people only monetized their content when they had a lot of followers to back it up (Like a few thousand). However, a tutor proved me wrong, saying that they had sold things without the thousands of followers that I thought you needed to have, and commented that you might as well “get paid for doing homework” and even $2 dollars extra is better than nothing at all.

Requirements-

To be able to do that, I need to do things such as post drawings regularly, and stories too. This means that to be able to post, I have to take the time to draw a few days of the week. I also have to respond to comments and any DM’s that I get, and respond to it in a professional manner. I also put tags on the bottom of every post that I make to try to get more exposure. I have also interacted with the art community by doing a #DTIYS (Draw This In Your Style) which is a popular challenge for large artist accounts to do, who notice your work and can possibly ‘share’ it to their followers.

Pros-

What I like about this DA is that Digital Art is what I like doing, and uses minimal resources + no cost. And I don’t have to vlog.

Cons-

This DA can be hard if its the ‘post everyday’ type, since it is hard to put out artwork every day. Some people post sketches on their Instagram, but most people want to see finished works. So this project isn’t entirely #FIST friendly, and I have to spread out posts evenly since I can’t do every day.

I feel like I am successfully exploring ideas for my concept and getting engaged with my audience well enough to get a good start on the next modules, Prototyping and Making!

Cultural appropriation is a very nuanced issue and not one to be taken lightly. Today I will be talking about cultural appropriation in K-pop, and how groups over there were ignorant of the cultural strife of the west and used it as a fashionable dress sense.

Lets start from the beginning and understand the cultural context. South Korea is situated on a peninsula, in the middle of Asia, and is considered to be a very homogenous culture, being 99% Korean in contrast to America, which has more diversity. It is rare to see foreigners as a part of this culture, as Koreans inside Korea keep close to their ‘family’ both in a literal sense and a cultural sense. It is a very ingrained sense of community that only awoke to the influences of the US after the effects of the Korean War in 1950 and when both nations began to gradually rise as superpowers and have a global impact, and in Koreas case, it was the Hallyu.

Korean culture grew, and in the 1990’s they started a new genre to export, influenced by the movements of America, called K-pop. In the beginning it was very sparse, but the group that kicked it off, Seo Taji and the Boys, incorporated rap into their pop songs. This started with their hit song in Korea, called Nan Arayo (I know), and popularized the hybrid mish mash of musical styles that kpop would come to be.

Now onto the appropriation part. Over the years, many kpop groups have come under fire for imitating a ‘gangster’ style of wearing clothes, hair and rapping, which they got mostly from African-Americans. While this in itself might still be considered fine, it becomes cultural appropriation when they unknowingly borrow concepts from African American culture that have cultural importance to them. African-Americans more than likely do not want it to be used as a set piece in a Korean music video with little cultural meaning behind it except that ‘it looks good’.

Some specific examples are Korean Idols wearing Box braids or any other braid that is very distinctively used in African American culture. These hairstyles are cultural appropriation because they were used in the African-American entertainment scene for them, while in reality, many of these African-American kids at schools were being told that they looked ‘dirty’ with it, or that they were in ‘gangs’ because of this hairstyle, and being shunned out of society because of it. The braids that African-Americans is an important part of African Culture and symbol of their heritage. Kpop idols simply wear this now because ‘it looks good’ on them, when no one said that those hairstyles were ‘cool and fashionable’ when an African-American wore them.

Here are some specific examples, starting with hairstyles (They are all 100% Korean by the way) –

And there are probably many more examples that I have missed. Now here’s a photo of a group concept that BTS had at debut, that many people groan at when they look at BTS’ past.

To be fair, BTS were a rap-focused group in the beginning but slowly transitioned to standard kpop fare that they showcase today. Though that doesn’t excuse the clear cultural appropriation that is seen in those photos above. It is understandable why South Koreans would not understand the importance of cultural appropriation or even see it as an issue at all, but still need to realise that it is an issue.

I have to admit, being an Australian myself, and being raised in a very white area, when I’m first exposed to this, I think ‘Why something like this is cultural appropriation?’ in a genuinely confused manner. Like the hairstyles, since I haven’t met many African-Americans, if any, and only through reading about it and seeing other people’s cultural experiences can I understand the impact.

What do you think about cultural appropriation?

–Academic Article Reference

Grays, J. (2019). The blurred lines of Cultural Appropriation. City University of New York (CUNY), [online] Fall 12-16-2016, p.Page 2. Available at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1193&context=gj_etds [Accessed 23 Aug. 2019]

–Academic Article Reference 2

Dal, Y. (2019). The Korean Wave: Retrospect and Prospect. International Journal of Communication USC, [online] 11(2241). Available at: https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6296/2047 [Accessed 25 Aug. 2019].