I'm now roughly halfway through my internship with exactly two weeks to go for the credit portion. The internship itself should go into late August, hopefully with plenty of time to research all of the subjects I set out to cover at the start, and to create original social-media post content concerning the subjects as well as some related artworks.
I've learned quite a bit, one thing I've for certain realized is not to mess with Assyriologists, Egyptologists, or even Archaeologists. If I stick to what I know, they get some of the diversity they need and I get to take more of an independent-study track (I'm bringing a lot of interest in far eastern philosophy, world religions and art history, mostly). I still get feedback on my posts as well as whatever support I require, and they handle all of the problems inherent in internet finds where conspiracy theories and pseudo-science tend to dominate the algorithms.
That's one thing I particularly love about this internship. As I was going into it, there was so much I was realizing needed to be changed in our current museum culture and in our society at large. Especially with the Black Lives Matter protests, and the current pandemic, everyone, including our institutions, now have no other choice than to look inward and realize how oppressive and racist the whole structure is. The way things operated in the past just wasn't sustainable, and it requires a necessary death and rebirth. I was afraid we would be forced to ignore current events in favor of propping up old stories and ideals, but at every Zoom meeting I've had my voiced concerns reciprocated by Pinar, the social media intern team director.
I experienced a similar conundrum on a personal level when I was at the monastery. I began to think, "what good am I doing the world locked up in an old hermitage in the mountains? Don't I need to go out and affect change in order to evolve?" That dichotomy sparked a lot of internal dialogue for me, and to see it on a global scale (and this harkens back to the Empathy book we read last Spring), leads me to believe we really are in the middle of a new Axial Age.
Friday, July 24, 2020
Tuesday, July 7, 2020
Ancient Studies in Virtual Reality
My name is Devin. I'm the only one interning this semester, so these will likely be my musings in solitude. It should be good practice for the creative writing process since I haven't blogged since what I refer to as the 'Xanga times'. When kids were teaching themselves basic html in order to decorate their blog pages like the inside of a locker, replete with music downloaded from Napster and MS Paint doodles.
This all ties together well for me as I'm simultaneously in Library school, struggling with learning the coding my middle school and high school teachers told us would secure us jobs for the future; and writing social media posts for Save Ancient Studies of America where I have been interning for the past month.
I am one of perhaps a dozen interns among a fairly international group. We're beaming in via Zoom from the U.S., Germany, Egypt, and the U.K to name the ones I'm certain of. Our organizers are affiliated with NYU and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but there are others as well working behind the scenes on various other projects. SASA consists of ancient studies and classics scholars, archaeologists, historians, and a few artists and art historians. I fall more into the last two categories.
We are working together on visual branding ideas, hunting for license-free images and writing fun and educational posts for a future social media campaign geared towards high school and college-aged students in the hopes of igniting interest in ancient studies and promoting their re-introduction into schools.
Mainly, I hope to gain useful skills and experience in educational programming using social media and the web in general. I'm excited to lend whatever skills I can to the project as it is actually something I can get behind, and may be where many cultural institutions are heading considering the current state of things. I hope to be able to lend some of my art making skills, my knowledge of art history, as well as any additional skills in education and information science as is seen to fit.
DS
This all ties together well for me as I'm simultaneously in Library school, struggling with learning the coding my middle school and high school teachers told us would secure us jobs for the future; and writing social media posts for Save Ancient Studies of America where I have been interning for the past month.
I am one of perhaps a dozen interns among a fairly international group. We're beaming in via Zoom from the U.S., Germany, Egypt, and the U.K to name the ones I'm certain of. Our organizers are affiliated with NYU and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but there are others as well working behind the scenes on various other projects. SASA consists of ancient studies and classics scholars, archaeologists, historians, and a few artists and art historians. I fall more into the last two categories.
We are working together on visual branding ideas, hunting for license-free images and writing fun and educational posts for a future social media campaign geared towards high school and college-aged students in the hopes of igniting interest in ancient studies and promoting their re-introduction into schools.
Mainly, I hope to gain useful skills and experience in educational programming using social media and the web in general. I'm excited to lend whatever skills I can to the project as it is actually something I can get behind, and may be where many cultural institutions are heading considering the current state of things. I hope to be able to lend some of my art making skills, my knowledge of art history, as well as any additional skills in education and information science as is seen to fit.
DS
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