Final Project: Improbable Mounment

The idea of my improbable monument is to crate a giant heart with a cigarette cutting through in the middle. The idea is to appeal the society that smoking is harmful to human body and there's hardly a part of the human body that's not affected by the chemicals in the cigarettes you smoke. The place I choose to put this monument is Union Square Park in San Francisco. The inspiration of this idea was from the tourists I seen near by the hearts in Union Square. People were taking pictures with the hearts while holding a cigarette. This act stimulates me a thought to replace something with the heart that will have a more realistic meaning than just the history.

Response of "For an art against the cartography of everyday life"

After reading Ryan Griffis’ article “For an art against the cartography of everyday life,” I really feel the importance of how it affects modern human’s life. The best example mentioned in the article was the GPS system. It is the tool that makes people’s commuting easier than never before, and also stimulates the desire of traveling around the country. It is so easy and comfortable to use that people tend to just rely on and choose to not memorize the direction as much as before, which was maybe the downside in some people’s opinion. The lack of the ability to recognize streets and roads has became more common in younger generation, and I feel it is going to be an issue if the satellite or the system went wrong and people would be trapped in one place due to lack of the ability to read maps. In another side, I think “locative media” is very useful for those people who want to explore the world but with the limited funds. It allows them to “virtually” being one place without all the hassles of traveling such as money, documentation, and time.

I think it is a good thing that everyone has the knowledge in using those locative media devices we have today, but some of the old fashion technique should be taught to the younger generation as well. Everything we have now is more toward to a digitally form, and they can only be used in certain environment and people should be aware of that.

Response of " Seeing the Past in Present Tense"

After reading “Seeing the Past in Present Tense” by Paula Levine, I have gained a lot more knowledge of the term “monument.” I thought monument was just something that people create to remember someone’s death and can only be used on a person. The Article taught me that a monument could also used as something like a statue to memorize significant events. After reading the article, I feel a monument is something more than just to let others remember; it is something that supposed to build to exist forever. The article brought the general ideas of monument to its reader in a very interesting way. It started describing with the highway in California to a list of example of different monuments. It also talks about how American monument activity was inherited from Europe, and had become more active and transformed into more social, political aspects instead of the original representational form in 1960s. I have better knowledge of monument after reading the article and really agreed with Paula Levine that monuments are gradually getting forgotten in our everyday life. Instead of using monuments as landmarks, we should think of its significance every time we talk about it.