Its that time of the semester again. Student Presentations!

The final week is upon us and it is time to present your semester’s worth of completed work. As New Media Art student’s there are so many opportunities at hand! The word “presentation” is a great word in and of itself. It is motivating, inspirational and energetic. Students will aspire to present their class projects in a new way that is impactful and complimentary to the work itself. You want to capture the full attention of your classmates, peers and colleagues and engage them with your visual display!

How will you do this?

Of course we have all seen powerpoint presentation after powerpoint presentation, over and over again. I suppose that you can always default to this platform……bo-ring. In 2018, I have witnessed, if the entire class is expected to present something using powerpoint, the class of viewers usually checks out by presentation number 3… defaulting to their own interests via their mobile devices, and asserting about 40-60% of their attention to the ongoing powerpoint presentations…

Again, how will re-consider this process?

Time and Attention are synonymous. Engagement and the ability to share usable value through out the presentation is a must. You can do this by creating a presentation format that no one else has seen before… 

Suggested platforms for presenting New Media Art works, Social Media!

Chances are, you are already deeply engaged in several social media platforms. Sharing fragments of your life, interests and also re-sharing what inspires you or gets you fired up! You most likely already have a working knowledge of how to use the applications and their tools. Some of you may already integrate your art work and creative projects into your feed of “life stuff”. Some of you may keep it separate. I personally use an 80/20 ratio of sharing my content. I’m transparent about my professional work as a graphic designer, a college art & design professor and an artist. This is a part of my personal brand. I like transparency and encourage you to also explore this.

However, if that does not seem like a good fit for you, you can easily create a new account on any one of these platforms below. You can easily upload your work and add commentary to each piece that gives a description of the project, the concept behind it, the medium used and any other relatedness that you wish. Using one or a hack using two or three as an integration, these platforms below make your work both individually accessible via a URL as well making you and your presentation easy to find on the Internet.

If you put the experimental work into this process it can easily become a wireframe for your new presentation and or online portfolio. Be a leader!

Suggested Social Media platforms:

Create an account specifically for your presentation.

Create an interesting title for your presentation!

Instagram – Use the traditional feed to compose your static images and videos. Mov. and mp4 files will loop (like GIFs do) if they are 3 seconds or longer, a perfect solution for animated work. You may also use their stories option to generate “highlights” or curated works and archive projects specifically – (keep in mind that the stories feature uses a different aspect ratio that is vertical rather than the square format for the traditional feed.) Lots of options here! Instagram is a Mobile app, so all of the content needs to be generated through the app on your smart phone. Instagram makes it easy to link your other social media accounts and cross post content if you wish. The app can be downloaded from google play for android or the app store for apple iOS devices.

Tumblr – Though many say tumblr is dead, I disagree! Context is everything! Creating and using tumblr can be very effective for creating a great portfolio of specific works as well as a means of presentation! There are tons of free themes and it is an open source web platform. You can choose to use the mobile version by downloading the app or by signing up via the desktop platform. (I currently use the desktop platform over the mobile app) Tumblr makes it easy to add audio, video, images, gifs, urls, quotes and a chat feature. There are size restrictions and your content and they will have to be optimized to meet the rules.

Twitter – Twitter is a powerful real-time and archived research and sharing tool (and so much more.) Twitter is now 280 characters per tweet. This forces tweets to be thoughtful, concise and objective! Its great for today’s small bite attentions spans! (We are all guilty!) Twitter is an under used platform for visual presentations but can easily be leveraged into one! Twitter will support images of all kinds, gifs, urls and more. There are size restrictions and your content will have to be optimized to meet the rules. A twitter presentation can be presented, archived and hosted via twitter in actual time via the app or desktop platform. Real-time commentary, discussion and sharing is a great added feature. I encourage you to test its potential!

LinkedIn – Mostly used as business and business networking platform, LinkedIn recently added several new features that have made it more attractive to those who were once on the fence about signing up. Using LinkedIn may be more strategic than you think as you will have the ability to post your content in chronological order (much like any other feed of a content management systems would) as well as publish articles that function much like individual blog posts.

 

Suggested Free Website Building platforms:

WordPress and Wix both offer free versions of their website building platforms. They are easy to work with and offer some really great features! Creating website for your work is necessary, and if the time is allotted, why not make your presentation a website in and of itself!

WordPress – WordPress.com

Wix – Wix.com

Of course you can always do a traditional web search for “presentation tools” online and see what you discover.

In fact, please share your feedback and ideas, links, apps and otherness below in the comments section!