Be Kind, Reclaim

Meredith, Lauren, and I are gearing up for the OER19 conference in Galway in a couple of weeks, a trip we are all looking very much forward to. In fact, I have a post due quite soon for the OER19 blog, which will hopefully explain why Reclaim feels such a strong sense of kinship with the folks that run the OER conference.*  Anyway, part of what we will be doing this year, unlike last, is actually sponsoring the conference as Reclaim Hosting as opposed to one of out satellite outfits like Reclaim Video or Reclaim Arcade. This is something I did not think we would ever do, but again that is fodder for the other posts I still need to write … dammit!

Anyway, the point of this post is to quickly highlight one of the several bits we will have on display at OER19 that highlights, at least for me, that so much of the work we have done over the years is cumulative. Both Lauren and Meredith are ds106 alumni (not to mention Internet Course survivors—remember TIC104?), so when we started planning the one-page we get for the OER19 program, we approached it as a group project. The idea was to transition from last year’s full blown Reclaim Video performance to a VHS-inspired theme for Reclaim Hosting. So we came up with the idea of using the VHS shelf theme to highlight ideas/themes somehow related to Reclaim Hosting, however loosely.

And while Meredith went through all this in her awesome post and project (more on that at the end of this post), I can’t resist repeating it all here cause I love it so much. It was a fairly simply decision given the organizing image for the conference was a play on E.T. So we used that as our  central VHS tape:

And then riffed on a whole bunch of ideas, such as Tim being inspired by the horror stories from schools supporting WordPress’s transition to Gutenberg :

And by quite basic Rorschachean take on SPLOTs:

At this point there always has to be a ds106 reference, so I just stole Martha Burtis‘s Time cover surrounding the Cult of #4life and turned it into a documentary 🙂

Lauren’s Domains19 VHS cover was on point highlight Ryan Seslow’s awesome artwork for the conference:

And then we simply took the cover of a VHS tape we own DEVO: the Men Who Make the Music to subtly point to our server naming conventions. 

And then we included Michael Branson Smith‘s original VHS cover for the Domains: Your Digital Identity video we premiered at OER18 last year:

And playing on our blank tape splash page for new accounts, we have a blank VHS tape cover with your very own domain name:

All of which is tied together by Reclaim’s newest slogan: Be Kind, Reclaim —can ya dig it? I knew that ya could!

Now, while we had the poster printed and ready to go for the OER19 program:

Meredith, pulling on her impressive ds106 chops, went the extra mile and as you can see in all the individual VHS tapes above systematically animated each and every one. So the final project that we will be looping on a monitor at the conference in Galway will look a bit like this:

Amazing, no? That is Reclaim Hosting at its very best: playful, creative, and going above and beyond. I could not be more thrilled with our marketing campaign for OER19 because like our Reclaim Hosting in general, we know who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. #4life


*But as things go, I need to first write another post to make that post make any sense in my mind. I wish blogging were simpler for me these day .

This entry was posted in digital storytelling, reclaim, Reclaim Video and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

One Response to Be Kind, Reclaim

  1. Pingback: 2019-03-25 15.40.30 – Davey Moloney

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.