creative communities
Creative Communities is the product of my MSc Visual Ethnography. Through it, I introduce the audience to the world of K-pop birthday cafés and discuss the various values that people attach to the goods obtained at these cafés. The original format of the output of this research is a K-pop album - as a way to honour my interlocuters and as an opportunity to lean into the inherent subjectivity of doing (anthropological) research. In this 'K-pop album' I have included a 'behind the scenes' video, as it is typical for K-pop artists to post these types of videos to promote their new album.
In this video part of my output I join Heejung on a day of exploring the streets of Seoul, South Korea, on the lookout for Wonbin birthday cafés.
As with every K-pop album, my output too included a photobook. In this photobook I displayed two photo series. The first introduces the audience to the space of birthday cafés.
In the album itself I arranged the photos in a way that is 'typical' for K-pop albums. However, I feel that the medium of a website lends itself better to display the photos in a gallery format. According to Mjaaland (2013: 57), emphasising that photos are fragments of the photographers point of view, can involve the viewer in filling in their own narrative. So, with this fragmented format I hope to appeal to the imagination of the audience on what birthday cafés could look like. In this way I wish to centralise the common value that all of my interlocuters attached to the birthday cafés and their goods: creativity.
Mjaaland, T.
2013 Traversing Art Practice and Anthropology: Notes on Ambiguity and Epistemological Uncertainty. Anthropology and Art Practice (eds. A. Schneider & C. Wright). pp. 53-62.
The second photo series focuses more on my own experience and creativity - rather than the audiences. In this series I have centralised the goods that people attain the birthday cafes. By arranging the goods myself, I participated in a common 'ritual' seen at birthday cafés. Commonly peope would visit the cafe, order their drink, receive the drink along with the free goods, and then sit down at a table to enjoy it. This seems like an obvious course of action, and it is, but it was the way that people enjoyed the goods that stood out to me. They would arrange them as aesthetically pleasing as possible and have, what to me looked like, an entire photoshoot with these arrangements as the centre piece. It was contagious to watch their joy in doing something creative like this. So, in order to immerse myself, I also started doing this and it became a central part of my research.
When formatting an output in a K-pop album, creating a 'CD' is unavoidable. Luckily, as I continued to have conversations with my interlocuters and continued to dive into their values attached to the fandom community, the birthday cafes, and specifically the goods at the birthday cafes; the idea to use interview snippets as 'tracks' practically shaped itself.
The curation and order of the tracks is based on a logical sequence of perspectives and topics - from a general description of a birthday cafe experience, to company-made versus fan-made goods, to fan-made goods decorated with pictures versus designs and drawings, to the larger context of freebie culture in which these goods circulate.
Inspired by BTS' notebook inclusion with their album series 'Love Yourself' as well as an interlocuters' anecdote about the diary versions of Ateez albums, I decided to add a notebook filled with fieldnotes to my output. This addition gave me the opportunity to illustrate a few of the more evocative examples of how values intertwine and shape the context for each other. I could more easily describe entire networks of values instead of focusing on them one by one - as is the case with the CD and the photobook.
