Hello! My name is Erin, and I am the creator and author of “Mediums Matter: Dance as an Artistic Medium.” This project was one that I really enjoyed creating. I created it for a class called Digital Writing: Theory and Practice. We had a lot of freedom in this project which I really enjoyed because it gave me the opportunity to really dive into something that I was interested in and had sort of been thinking about just in the back of my brain as inspired by other conversations in classes. It really gave me the chance to consider that with actual research rather than just making assumptions. 

So in this project, I questioned how dance can be categorized as a medium, as a piece of art, and originally, I was questioning if dance could be considered a piece of literature. Because I’ve always been involved in dance my entire life and I’ve always been very into reading and writing and just literature in general, I really wanted to explore these and compare them just because more recently I had, you know, really been fascinated by the things that we do consider literature, and I wanted to see if those two were the same. 

My gut instinct when I first started considering this was, “Yes! Of course dance is a medium of literature!” But the more that I researched, the more I began questioning myself. So during this project, I really had to force myself to set my ego aside and say, “Hey, maybe I was wrong.” Maybe this information is leading me to a different path than I want it to, and I shouldn’t be fighting it so hard to try to force it to fit in the boxes that I want it to just because of an original instinct and an original opinion. I really had to force myself to admit that I was wrong and kind of rediscover what it was that I was writing about. 

Another big challenge that I faced while I was creating this piece was the platform and the medium of using Adobe Spark. I’d never used it before, but I’ve been learning a lot the Adobe Suite these past couple of years, and I really wanted to push myself to try to use something new and explore what that could mean. However, as I was creating it, I felt that some of the design decisions that I wanted to make were simply not possible in using that specific platform. So, unfortunately, I had to be a little creative and try new ways to express myself using those design techniques and ensure that it was still engaging and easy to follow, easy to read, even if it wasn’t the design decisions I might have chosen to use in another platform.  

But overall, I really was able to dive in this topic than I ever expected to, and I learned a lot about the topic and what art is, what literature is, what dance it. But more so, I learned about the process of exploring a thesis and allowing yourself to be wrong and to adapt based on the information that you find during that research process – you know, pushing down that ego and admitting and moving past that, and really creating something beautiful, even if it’s not what you originally thought it was.  

So I really did enjoy my time working with Jump+ and working with this specific project. I hope you enjoy and learn a little something from it, just like I did. Thank you.