Final Project: Improbable Mounment proposal

            The improbable monument I created is a United State shape of statue that has a Chinese character on it. The meaning of the Chinese character is love and peace. The idea of this monument is to honor the Chinese’s contributions to the world, especially to the United States. After the independent war, the United States was in debt from borrowing too much fund from France to fight the war. The United States was just an immature country that still relies on other countries’ aid. Then Chinese traders discovered the fertilized American Ginseng in America, which was favored by the ancient Chinese. China’s appetite for the American ginseng helped to pay off America’s debts to France. This created great opportunities for many Americans on the Appalachians and those seeking for wealth and a better life. Many Chinese art and pottery were being brought to America decades later. Chinese also helped a lot of construction works in the United States. The transcontinental railroad was one of the most significant constructions among all. The transcontinental railroad was the main economic income during that period, but hardly anyone know that most of the effort was from the Chinese workers, which is kind of unfair to those hard working Chinese people. Another contribution from the ancient Chinese was the gold mining business. The miners’ fixation on gold changed California’s entire economy. On the other hand, the ways that Chinese contributed to the economic development are paid the heavy tax and provided the cheap labor. Both mining and railroad construction dominated the economics of America in the past centuries. Even in nowadays, all the major life essential products that contributed over the world are still made in china. However, those contributions were not mentioned much in history. So I decided to make a monument to memorial the early Chinese immigrant workers in America as well as all the Chinese contributors in the world. I hope this monument can remind people the significant works that Chinese have done such as the railroad. I place the railroad horizontally from west coast to east coast to represent the influence of Chinese throughout the America. The material I am going to use is rice. Rice is easy to be changed to any shape, and is cheap and convenient to carry around. Rice became very hard and solid when it is dry, and only the appearance looks tough, the body is still not as concrete as it seemed. This is like a reflection of the Chinese products; the resource is easy and cheap to obtained, but the quality are always not as good as it seemed. I plan to place this monument at the San Francisco international airport, because the airplane is the fastest way to transporting now; but train was the first efficient transportation that stimulated the economy of America, and they would not finished it without the help from Chinese.the People who first visit the United Stated will also recognize the important influence of the railroad when they arrived at the airport.

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.

Google Earth: Cross Border Collaboration

The idea of our google earth project is to make it look like we traded spaces with each other. We are going to use photoshop to fit each other into the other's landmarks, such as showing us going to the airports and switch each other into other's airport.  From that, we will think how people can easily change the truth by using these softwares, and pointing out that the google earth is nothing more than a media.

- Overall - what worked/what was a challenge

Everything worked out very well and our schedules were all pretty flexible so the communication was very successful. We used the idea from Vancouver group, which we were agreed all with and thought the idea was interesting. The challenge was probably the lack of Photoshop knowledge. I had to do some researches and played around with the Photoshop to get the effects I want.

- how your group managed the "cross-border logistics" of communication, exchange of ideas, coming up with an idea, coordinating project parts?

We used skype and exchanged emails.

- Suggestions on how to address some of the challenges and ways to strengthen the collaboration

The limitation of times sort of holding us back from making it more elaborate.

- What you gained?

I became more comfortable to work with others as a group, also gained more geographical knowledge of the city of Vancouver.

-If you were to do it again, what would you do differently

I would probably suggest some ideas that we can all have a chance to work together; because what we did this time was to assign different tasks to each other and combined them after we finish them separately.

The Extend Body Project

My idea of this extend body project is to modify my hand and turn it into a military weapon. I removed the index finger and added a pistol on it. Next to the index finger is a blade that is hidden inside of my hand and can be slide out when needed. The third feature is another blade built inside of my waist; it is also folded inside of the waist and can slide out when needed. All the features are connected to a microcomputer located on the waist that is also a GPS and shows the amount of ammo in the pistol. All the weapons are connected to the nerves, and are triggered through nerves so only the owner itself can active the weapons. I can now attack enemy without alarmed them as much as using the regular weapons because the weapons are now build in my hand. I think the military would be really benefited if human really developed a system that has weapons build inside of the body. They would have dominated more campaigns with less injury. The only down side would probably be the authorization of this system; crimes would be a lot more armored if they obtained this system and it’s going to be hard to fight with them. In order to install this system, an individual will have to remove its fingers and this will change the appearance of its hand. The social relationship is also going to change because it will make people started to thinking what is the reason for this person to sacrifice his hand and turn it into a deadly weapon.

LOGO PROJECT

Microsoft's window system was one of the most popular and most common computer systems that have dominated computer market in the past decade, but Apple’s mactonish system has been gradually accepted by most of people. I decided to make this image that shows the computer competition of the current trend.