NEW LENSES: Experimental Capture and Release

This speed project asks you to consider tutorials as a medium for capturing and sharing ideas, inspiration, content and culture online.

Consider the multitude of platforms that host “tutorial” style content online like medium.com, instructables, youtube or instagram lives (to name a few). In our lecture last week we looked at multiple examples of how tutorials can used as a creative medium. Please make an experimental “tutorial” that uses or misuses an online platform as a way of teaching other people how to make something.

Here are some prompts to get you started:

Make a Zine

Share a vibe/aesthetic/skill/or perspective. See K- HOLE. Check out online zines such as Plasma Dolphin, Pop Culture Puke, Cry Baby, and Cherry as a reference. You can collage captured images with found or illustrated diagrams.
The skill can be straightforward and the design of the zine can be approached artfully, (see choking posters designed by artists) or the skill can be conceptual and the design can be straightforward.

Make a how to video

Your video can be a straightforward tutorial teaching people a skill they didnt know they needed (see korean sheet masks and password management for pore refining wins), a video art piece that abstracts the concept of a tutorial (see How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational) or tutorial that dives into a skill you would like to share with people (see Sam Levin’s tutorial on Zoom Escaper)

Write an instruction Manual

see Instructions for a stool by Lingdong Huang. Consider a site like instructables or medium.com for posting your work to an audience. These instructions can be on how to recreate a project you’ve made in the past (see how to make a book that sets itself on fire), they can be instructions as a poetic gesture (see Grapefruit) or they can be instructions for how to “misuse” a platform in a creative way (see how to have a PIZZA SÉANCE).