Reincarnation?

Last weekend, when I organized my photos in my laptop, I saw a photo that was my grandfather and me played with my first cat Mimi. My grandfather was died 5 years ago, I was just came to US around 4 months at that time. The last several months in his life, I did not stay with him.

Looking at our picture, I suddenly realized that we will all grow old of the passing of each day, and die. One day, I will leave the people I loved as well like my grandfather. I am pretty curious, what will happen after people died?

I have read a book that said, the people that you have met in your life, whether you love them, or hate them, you will never meet them again in the next life time. I don't know it is true or not, but I believe that the world has the reincarnation. Perhaps the soul will bring the memories of us to the next lives. Someday, perhaps we can decipher the depth of our brain, and looking for the past memories that not belong to our lives. The people we loved in our lives might have the inextricably link with our past lives. I am looking forward to know what the past life of myself looks like, what kind of occupation he/she did, and what kind of personality he/she was.

Game addiction

             I’m addicted to one online game like I never did before. It’s like a hurricane that swipes out all my other thoughts and holds all my attention. I started to play this game three month ago, and now I’m almost an upper level player. My primary Shikigami has been upgraded to the top level. This is the only game I ever played that last for so long and have been accomplished so many achievements.

           I would never plan to be addicted to a game, especially at this point, when I’m only one semester away from graduation. When I start to play this game, I never pictured myself still playing it in January 2017, nor pictured me winning any PvP or PvE battle. To master a game or to devote myself into game is never my intention. Game is always for fun, a very leisure kind of fun to me. Besides, I’m very good at being distracted. And now, I doubt my definition for “very leisure kind of fun” and doubt my ability to resist addiction.

           Future has such humble and mysterious character. It won’t show up until we look back to our life. Future is happening every second. Every move we make, each word we speak out, is every fresh beginning of our future. Back to the day I was downloading this game in a sunny day of October, that moment was the beginning of my addiction future. And the reason I can confidently say so is because now I am reviewing my life in the past few months. I couldn’t confidently say for how long it would last and what impact it would brought to me in the future because of thousands of moves I’ve made and about to make. I could imagine thousands of possible futures based on what I am doing and thinking right now, now, now... But none of them is real until after few month I decide to review my life again. Future is imagination before it gets real. When it gets real, it is memory. I’m writing this essay about my addiction to a game, what future would it lead to?

The Future as an Act of Remembrance: Objects

Three months before my grandfather died, I photographed him in his assisted care living facility with my mother’s old Rollieflex. I shot all I could of the roll’s 12 exposures, but mid way through, the central gear inside the camera jammed, I couldn’t advance the film any further. 

I developed the roll nonetheless, to find that the jam had dislodged the receiving film axis and had drawn deep scratches across each frame through the entire length of the film. Initially, this was devastating. He was dying, quickly, and while I understood that, I denied it. In the present, our immediate responsibilities seem so overwhelmingly important. I had papers to write, theory to read, photographs to print, I couldn’t go to his birthday party, his condition worsened, but I had work, I had rent to pay, he’d get better enough for me to see him next week when i could afford to come down. He didn’t. 

The next time I photographed him, he was in a pine casket, being lowered into the earth by latin American laborers at  Jewish Cemetery just West of the Five. My sister placed a bouquet of roses atop the coffin, still wrapped in plastic from Vons.  A young Filipino soldier payed the taps in honor of my grandfather’s service in the Korean War. 

In regards to the future, the only thing we can be absolutely sure of is, at some point, it will end. We are moving irrevocably forward towards something, somewhere, and at some point we will get there, and that will be that.  

This axiom, is the only tenant of existence that I am absolutely sure of. 

The analogue offers a small remedy to this truth. 

The photographs I took of my grandfather are covered with traces, lines that came from a camera, given to me by my mother, who was given to me by my grandfather, and who in turn gave me the last photographs of his life. These traces are anachronistic. The images they are drawn upon contain light that reflected off my grandfathers smile and track jacket, the light that bounced off the television behind him playing highlight from the DNC. The light hit my film, it was there, it is still here, residing permanently in archival fibre paper. The traces, formed by the degeneration of my camera's hardware, were as present at the time of their conception as they are now, and forever will be. 

This contingency is the only defense we have to the inevitably of the future. The photograph a mnemonic device, neither here nor there, something liminal that allows us to oscillates between what we know, and what we don’t. 

Object Page

The future of music, I think about this often, to be more specific I think about the future of “music streaming”. Wouldn’t it be wild if we all were injected with a device that reads our minds and plays songs perfectly fitting our mood? Or when we are trying to remember a song and the device knows exactly which song is it, within 3 seconds of trying to remember? Since the radio and jukebox, to the more personal record player, cassettes, CD’s, to MP3s and files are continuing to get smaller and smaller with how we store and share music. This has all happened within the last century, where will we be in a century from now?

This also concerns live music and performance.  In only the last ten years the cell phone has shaped the way we record and document our experiences and immediate surroundings. Whenever you attend a show or “concert” you are bound to be in a sea of rectangular light boxes filming what is 20-50ft in front of you. The real human experience of attending a live performance has little to no meaning nowadays, and this is only the beginning. I do not know where we will be in thirty to fifty years from now in regards to music streaming and live performances. Holograms and digested devices are most likely in our future.  

Object reading

    Whilst going through the Kant reading, something that really caught my attention was the second thesis in which he talks about how with every generation of human beings, there is a possibility of getting closer to a degree of development that could further the state of evolution of man. The way this happens is by each generation passing on their own, personal seeds of enlightenment to their successor.  However, there could be a number of reasons for which this information would not be effectively transferred. The child could be an orphan and not have parents to pass on this information to him, the child could grow up hating the parents and opposing all of their beliefs in the effort to not be anything like them, maybe the parents were too closed off and not open enough with the child to share their experiences. The point is, what if there was another way to transfer this information in a different, more physical form, as there are a lot of children that grow up without being raised by their parents or being taught any beliefs or ideologies.  Since it is the technological era, it would probably be some sort of computer chip that parents transferred information about their life experiences, lessons, and all their personal knowledge onto. It would be a physical requirement or a natural occurrence that would coincide with the fertilization of the egg in the womb or wherever eggs are fertilized, therefore even if one of the parents abandons the child or did not live to meet the child, the information would still exist, allowing for the progress and evolution of the generation. 

Another Discussion Object for "When Is The Future?" -- This Ad for a Gizmo

I'm going to talk a little bit about the 2014 Magazine Cover project for the tenth anniversary of Africa Is The Future by Nicolas Premier and Patrick Ayamam. You might want to check it out in advance. Africa Is The Future (splash), and the AITF Magazine Cover Project (in particular).

The Results--Alexander Newman

It is not an object that I carry in my possession, but one that I have glimpsed once with the collective excitement of my immediate family. The intergenerational mysteries locked in by the passing of individuals, and the uncertainties of all my family histories were unbound in the moments which we viewed the documents. Unbound, perhaps only temporarily, as there can never be names to match all the ancestral groups. There exist no voices to tell the stories behind the genes carried by those bodies, moving across oceans and continents so many generations ago. All we have are genetic markers, genotypes, pulled from a saliva testing sample, partially SNP genotyped and then posted to an online database for customers to access.

My mother, her father, and my father all submitted samples of their DNA to be sent to the biotechnology company in Mountain View, California. There were no pressing needs for a DNA test to be done; my family, like most others had a handful of hereditary illnesses, but none of which would be deemed to be immediately life-threatening. The price of the genetic test was comparatively low for the extensive knowledge that could be uncovered, with results that contained carrier status reports, ancestry composition reports, wellness reports, and of course reports on genetic traits.

The ancestry of both of my parents was not in itself a complete mystery. They both were raised by their biological parents, and knew certain things about the nature of their ancestral groups. Both had families that went back for at least three or more generations on the island of Jamaica, and both had an understanding that, like most Jamaicans, they had ancestors who were European and African, and possibly East or South Asian as well. Connecting those links was never entirely simple; with colorism and internalized racism being a very visible part of Jamaican culture, there were white passing relatives who would never speak of an a mother or father being of mixed racial origin. With lost histories of bodies, moved across oceans for their potential capital production as slaves, or paid laborers in the colonies, it always seemed to me that there were some parts of my history that I could never fully access. In a certain sense, in that moment I realized I was wrong.

With my maternal and paternal haplogroups analyzed and laid before me with percentages, I could see the traced movements of my ancestors through time. From east Asia, northwest Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa to a singular Atlantic island, and now to my own body. It felt strange to seemingly have the answers to those questions which had been asked so many times before; and yet have no clear details at all. In that sense, I felt as though I was somehow both inside a version of a future reality and looking back through to the past through a murky scope. I was in the position of being able to know all of my traits, risks, and ancestral groups, and would even be able to know them precisely if I were to take the next step and test myself. I was in the place of being able to  know that which those before me couldn’t know; to know where one comes from, not just back a few generations, but spanning all of human history.

But what does it mean to know something like ancestry, aside from genetic risk factors and traits? Being racially ambiguous had always meant something like a constant negotiation for me; a game that is played between subject and viewer. In this game my body is made to be applied to other characteristics of those visual categories of that great system of social constructs-racial categories distinguished by phenotypes. It meant negotiating with others through rituals of both exotification and interrogation. Now, sequenced and laid out before me were the answers everybody had been seeking for the whole time when they asked me where I was really from. I was looking back into the past, but with these percentages there was no ability to discern exactly the truth of the bodies that had made me. Slaves and slave owners, sailors and indentured servants, venture capitalists and bodies that held capital; in truth I know all of those individuals are there somewhere. At the same time, looking so far back into the past made me acutely aware of that moment where I stood; a future where you get to know where you came from, but perhaps not one where you get to know who exactly brought you there.

Future
When is the future? What is present? Ten seconds from now is the future, in which these words being typed will exist in the past. Meaning the present seems to exist only in our minds when we choose to recognize its existence. These ideas can become brain twisters when thought about deeply. The future is perhaps only a time when we are in an imagined space where all thoughts and dreams, both utopic and dystopian, allow themselves to play out simultaneously. This imagined space is often magical, but can also look apocalyptic. It’s the mind immersed in its own fantasy, taken out of a physical reality and into a possible future reality. While our body exists presently, our minds can drift and wander into future realms that are fabrications of the content that has colored our past. We can only ever be inside of a present moment, here and now. With the future being a hypothetical time, our minds can stay immersed in this supposed dream space for significant amounts of the present, which in part does not allow some to exist full mindedly in the here and now. The broad term, “future,” can be just a few minutes from now, but when it comes to the bigger picture of the future, the device of time in many years serves as a space in between now and then, then being the future. This prolonged time allows for believable, possible and already existing changes to occur, which creates an idea for a plausible or even far-fetched future. In most cases, the dystopian future is often a popular subject amongst humans all throughout time. For some the future is when the second coming arrives, when what was prophesized begins to occur, a spiritual space. This second coming can also be seen as an apocalypse, which actually translates to, “a revelation of divine mysteries.” For others, it’s a prediction of the human conditions intensified. Using the present as a jumping off point to predict what the future could hold. In popular culture many speculate as to what our current future may look like. Mankind has seen a handful of those who make predictions and prophesize the future. Popular figures such as Nostradamus and lesser-known Native Shamans from many cultures would predict and discuss the possibly dangerous futures. The doomsday clock that was built in 1947 was built after the atomic bombs created by the U.S. were dropped on Japan. The clock was set to seven minutes until midnight; midnight being the end of days. The clock takes into account the current state of the world and the tensions that exist in the present and how they could become dangerous in the future. The clock has been set forward and back twenty two times since its creation, experiencing the lowest time of two minutes until midnight and the highest time of 19 minutes until midnight. The Cold war and its nuclear tensions brought the clock to the two-minute mark in 1953, the first record low. Now, after 64 years, the clock has gone back down to the two-minute mark. The league of scientists that maintain and monitor the clock said the reason for the clocks startling change is simple: “President” Donald J. Trump. This device, while not entirely being based in reality, is a reminder of our affect on the time that has yet to come, and how what happens in the present has a direct affect on the future.

House Plants- Ben Murray

People have told me that before you have a child you should first get a dog or a cat. Others have told me that before you get a pet you should buy some house plants to take care of for awhile.This is because busy people like us need opportunities to accidentally kill a living thing that depends on us to survive, without punching ourselves in the gut with guilt in the process. In my studio apartment on my little desk is a small plant serving precisely this purpose. I keep it in indirect sunlight and water it exactly once a week. I trim off dead leaves and rotate its pot to counteract its phototropic nature in favor of my OCD. But I feel as though there is more to our attraction to keeping potted plants than just the pragmatic nature of our care for them. Plants are a direct representation of the governing forces in our lives. Frail little things who run from death and strive to live prosperously with the smallest amount of effort. They grow their leaves and branches towards the filtered sunlight, and sink their roots as deep as they can manage to find water.  These are the same tenets that govern our day to day lives.

The future is what is happening next. Everything we do to maintain a prosperous life, or to avoid situations that could lead to uncomfortable life and possible death, are small efforts in shaping our future. It sounds grim, but us intelligent humans live in the same brutal circle as the hawk and the field mouse, or the locust and the crop, we have just needlessly complicated the cycle by creating endless facets that require our constant attention. This cycle and this life are chaotic, and the future is unsure, so we are constantly seeking a sense of control and order. A house plant is a controlled experiment. By taking into our space we put ourselves in control of the variables, of its world. We are in control of everything that has ever mattered to it and everything that ever will matter to it. I decide when it gets light, water and nutrients. I have complete control. Almost. There is still the small possibility of the soil not being quite right, for a disease to take over, or for an infestation to take its life. We seek total control but can only ever get 99%.

The future is the only thing we cannot ever fully predict or control, and it is in this way that these little green housemates represent our real, current and mutable futures; They give us that sense of nurturing and control we so desperately need. They also look great, so where's the harm?

News Update!

I think I have managed to invite everybody to the blog. If you have not received your invite (or if the invitation process went wrong or you decide you want to access the blog via another account or what have you) e-mail me to let me know and I will re-invite you. I'm happy to be seeing short object readings already appearing. Feel free to discuss these with your colleagues respectfully in comments. I have also created a permanent link to our syllabus on the sidebar so you should be able to click for the next assignments however much new content appears on the blog to scroll through. Stay tuned. I mean to post a video and maybe some other links before our next class meeting that we may be discussing together. Hope everybody is having a grand weekend.

Vanilla Energizing Shake Mix - Andrew Boylan

       Yesterday, I received a box in the mail. It contained, among other health-related products, an white plastic jar of vanilla protein powder. About every other month, my mom sends me expensive vitamins with attractive packages from a company based in Pleasanton, California. Don’t get me wrong, I’m truly grateful for what she sends me, but I can’t help but question the extent to which the products from this company are effective. Supposedly, there are plenty of studies to back up their various claims of well-being: improved digestion from probiotics, immune system boosting from fiber, increased energy levels from B6 and B12 vitamins, etcetera. This protein powder actually claims all three of these positive effects that I imagine might be hard to quantitatively measure. 

       This stuff tastes just fine. I’m guessing that it’s being marketed similarly to Soylent, the “open-source” meal-replacement product. I tried Soylent about a year ago, and it was also just fine. Is this the food of the future? I can totally see meal-replacement products gaining popularity as the haunting spectre of late-capitalism demands longer hours from his workers. More time working means less time to cook yourself a meal. I’ve seen Google, Facebook, and other large tech companies try to ameliorate the consequences of increased demand on time by providing constant access to food in the workplace: fully-stocked fridges, and free snacks everywhere. Soylent is like the poor worker’s equivalent to this constant access to food.

       What’s missing here? Self-love. Self-love is the reason Steve Jobs had the signatures of the team who created the original Macintosh computer inscribed on the inside of every unit, where no one would ever see them. Self-love is the reason that having nice industrial design in your house might make you feel more motivated, even if a tea kettle from Target isn’t any more functional than one from Alessi. Self-love is why I might spend my day off looking up a recipe online, shopping for ingredients, cooking with every dish in my kitchenette (granted, I don’t own that many), and eating this home-cooked meal alone without posting a picture of it on social media, rather than mixing two scoops of protein powder with one cup of nonfat milk. 

       Living to experience the intrinsic pleasure of eating: that is the goal. To extrapolate, I could believe that the way a person feeds themselves when in a situation of fiscal stability is greatly indicative of their personality. 

       thai noodles hmu

The Space Souvenir by Caitlin Moore

            My mom gave me one Christmas a silver glass glitter object, reaching towards the sky like an alien creation. It is round on bottom, though empty; on top of the roundness is another, smaller, round glass bubble. It has Van Gogh swirls of glitter. On top of it is a large frozen teardrop, like Alice's only made of glass, big like her giant self after eating the cookie. The object is on my peeling distressed white and pink drawers. But its original intention was to be a Christmas tree ornament -- ruling on top of the tree, pointing north, being festive. But it doesn't say that to me. It sings about the future, like David Bowie.

            David Bowie is an alien. Certainly this object is alien, too. Silver is the color of the future and space. Aliens can time travel. Aliens have to do with the approaching because in the coming world there will be aliens. We will have discovered them or vice versa. Bowie writes about glimpsing an alien in the sky as a teenager. "Don't tell your papa or he'll get us locked up in fright." This shows a fear of the future but a willingness for the younger generation to have open minds towards new things like aliens. There is a fate left up to the young ones' imaginations.

            He writes of our future fate. Bowie's lines go, "Gotta make way for the Homo Superior." This has to do with a new race of people, superior, with also a gay wink with "homo," as glam rock artists were wont to do. Bowie is a magician of time and space. He dressed in tight leotards with spiky hot red hair. He will be forever in the skies. He died a year ago, though people on the internet say that he found a new dimension and is slowly picking celebrities to die and come live with him in this new universe.            

            Bowie is about the future. As a teenager, it helps to listen to David Bowie. He sings to you, "You're too old to lose it, too young to choose it." He brings you from your childhood into a state of adulthood -- your upcoming life. Bowie reminds me of a coming of age -- being a young man performing for the first time. "The boy in the bright blue jeans jumped up on the stage and Lady Stardust sang his songs of darkness and disgrace." Performing is a way of solidifying your created identity: Lady Stardust is the boy… the boy is Lady Stardust. The future is one of gender blur. I can tell because all the transgender people are coming out of the woodwork. I think in our future this will be more accepted.

            It’s nice to have an alien object, sparkling and pointing to the heavens, like a futuristic creature, its glitter reflecting rainbows and its emptiness and swirled outside holding it together like a hard jellyfish. It is like ice, like one of Jupiter’s moons. It sings like David Bowie, my hero.