Remembering MediaTruffle

I remember in middle school being surprised that there even existed options for where to go. I assumed everyone went to their local highschool and figured out the rest when college came around. My sister had applied and entered a magnet highschool in the area, and I wasn't pressured, but I was motivated, to try for the same by my parents.

To apply you had to pick a specialization, something like Theater, Visual Arts, Engineering, etc. I applied for Culinary, with Theater as my second choice (I think), and Engineering as my third. My sister had applied to culinary, and I was at the time really obsessed with Anthony Bourdain, so it felt right. We had grown up around a lot of restaurants because of my dad's work, and my mom worked as a food scientist, so food played a major role in my life. I knew how happy it made me and others, and I felt curious about being able to make people happy through it.

In the future I'll collect and post some of the food projects I've done over the years, but here I wanted to talk about what I did after I no longer wanted to persue culinary as a career.

At first I was entirely at a loss for what to do. I had a few interests, but none seemed great to follow, and I wasn't really good at many of them. One of the things that called to me the most was animation because of how much I had always loved games and animated films. During my junior year I tried really hard to learn to use Maya effectively. We had a visual lab where the Visual Arts students could work on video media, and the teacher helped me get started with the software. I found it overwhelming and struggled to make effective or attractive models given how poorly I could draw. Still, I focused on it through the year and it was one of the few ideas I had for what to do next.

At that time I was also having a lot of fun with photoshop and Adobe after effects. I watched a bunch of Freddie Wong videos on youtube and thought it was really motivating. I spent alot of my nights in the winter glued to adobe tools putting my friends and classmates into videos/photos that I thought were hilarious.

I decided when I was older that I overstepped alot of boundaries here. Putting people's faces into stuff without their consent wasn't great, and then putting it online permanently was worse. At the time it felt like laughing with my friends, but seeing the permanence and abuse of social media now I know it was wrong. It took too long to come to that decision.

Still, looking back my heart feels warm with the memory of what I felt at the time. It felt so crative and open ended. It felt like with enough time I would be able to make really cool things. I was really into Tumblr at the time, and had started going to museums and looking at art online and I felt really inspired.

My media empire was going to start through MediaTruffle, a youtube channel where I would post my funny videos and game play edits. The furthest I got was uploading 4 silly videos, one which I just delisted since it was entirely based on editing my friend's face over an old spice commercial without his consent.

The first couple were "trippy" videos where I used every effect I could find.

The Ch33se video was explicitly motivated by seeing "P.opular S.ky" by Ryan Trecartin at the Moma. It made me feel something so new and I couldn't get the feeling out of my head. What I made basically had nothing to do with it and would be mockery if anything, but I was really in love with what I saw. Last year I watched I-Be Area by Trecartin and was so excited to learn that it was the same artist as "that video I forgot the name of a decade ago but still think about randomly".

The last video was a loving upload of my cat FrenchFry in our old house giving a nice long massage. I was watching spongebob really loudly so I drowned out the sound with some Birocratic which my friend Audrey had shown me at the time. I still listen to Biro and think of Audrey.