Monthly Archives: March 2017

Tao Te Ching_Chapter 5

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When I have spare time, I’d like to practice my writing on copybook (for calligraphy). The content of my copybook is Tao Te Ching that is the original book of Taoism, and published in the late 4th century BC. Laozi who is the ideologist of Taoism, in other words, he insisted Naive Dialectic.

The translation in Chapter 5:

Heaven and Earth are impartial;
they treat all of creation as straw dogs.
The Master doesn’t take sides;
she treats everyone like a straw dog.

The space between Heaven and Earth is like a bellows;
it is empty, yet has not lost its power.
The more it is used, the more it produces;
the more you talk of it, the less you comprehend.

It is better not to speak of things you do not understand.

The ancients used to treat the sky as the master of the world, and often endowed with personality and religious meaning. However, Laozi (the ideologist) didn’t believe that, in his opinion, the sky has its own objective mode of operation, there is no mercy. So sage (or politician) doesn’t need to be mercy to public, imitate the nature to do noting to administer a country, society and community.

PS: Seriously, I just agree that the world doesn’t have mercy, but I am not totally agree that politician do noting to the society, let it go as what the society wish. If issues happen, they have to in charge. Regarding to how to administer a community, society or a country, I am more interested in Mohism, its Mohist logic is the first logic system in ancient China, one of the three classical logic systems in the world.

Two questions of studio in wk 3

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What qualities did you notice that matters?

I will say this in two parts, one is about the judgement comment paper, the other one is watching the videos. To be honest, I am not that good at this kind of comment, although I do think there are something need to be improved and changed. But I think that maybe this is the personality they have. Anyway, when we are responsible for the comment paper, we need to be serious to the paper, because they are looking forward this. The second part is about when we are watching videos, keeping quite and no judgement during the watching process. I think we all done very well.

What feedback would you give your own work?

Of course, the thing that disappointed me most is the soundtrack. I can’t hear it clearly either most of my classmates. Because of the low voice, most of them can’t give a current comment. Except this, the next one is about the copyright. I have to say that all the images and videos I used are from the website CC Search. Next time if I gonna use the images, videos or music from this website I will add the resources of those at the end of the video.

Wk3 Studio 1

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Since we started the class, we enjoyed everyone’s video. We have a paper to judge everyone’s video, writing down our comment to help each other to improve.

About my video, I have no idea what is going on with the audio, the soundtrack. When I edited the video in edited room, even with my laptop, the voice is loud enough to hear clearly. Sad, the sound is really low, and many of my classmates did write down on the paper.

I picked two of them. Really appreciate for everyone’s useful and worthy comments.

 

Japanese living in Nanking——a short documentary

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Recently I saw a short documentary named Japanese living in Nanking, made by a Chinese Media company.

This documentary lasts about 14 mins but I think it is very worthy and meaningful. It talks about few Japanese who live in Nanjing where is the city happened Nanking Massacre during the World War two. Only hundreds of Japanese live in that historical city with approximately 8 million Chinese, I think those hundreds of Japanese are really brave. Because of the historical issue Nanking Massacre, many Chinese who live in Nanking hate Japanese, they even don’t care did they kill someone or not. I hate Japanese because you Japanese government and army massacre my city, this kind of emotion and mind actually can’t be moved from their brain.

Those hundreds of Japanese they choose to stay in Nanking, they choose to face to the history and suffer the dander or maybe curse from Chinese stranger. I do think they are warriors.

This documentary wants to tell all the Chinese that not all Japanese doesn’t admit the Nanking Massacre, to those Japanese who want to be friends with us Chinese, who want to live in China to have their new life, we should accept.  Don’t hold the part as a whole. It will take a long time to moderate the relation between China and Japan, but now, to those kind and friendly Japanese, please accept and take care of them.

To make meaningful, worthy and remarkable documentaries, is one of the reason I chose this studio, Ecologies of Noticing. I hope I can learn more than I think in this semester.

Wk2-Studio 2

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At the beginning, Professor Miles asked us to write down questions that we have on how to improve our blog. How to improve for the coming studying? Worked in groups, we wrote down the questions we want to ask, then posted that on the board. After this, everyone has $5 to give questions that they think is worthy to be answered by Professor Miles, $1 for a times.

I recorded some questions that our students chose.

#1. How casual can it be?

A: As casual as we like.

#2. What are we supposed to notice?

A: Anything.

#3. Why five posts a week?

A: In order to form a habit that is noticing.

 

Actually I have some questions that want Professor Miles answer for me:

#1. Usually when I am writing a blog about a subject or a thing, it is hard for me to find out a direction of writing of the subject and the thing. I don’t know what area is worthy to be talked and discussed in my blog. For example, I want to share my understanding and feeling of a movie or documentary after I saw that. However sometimes I can’t control myself to write a long analysis of the movie which includes couples area. It wastes too much my time. What should I do?

#2. I think that blog is more serious than other social media, it is a good platform to gather us for education purpose. Can we reflect our reading questions or studying questions during class or extract time on blog where everyone can see and answer those questions? Because I found out that many students couldn’t exactly and completely share their confusion and questions in class, it makes me awkward to ask questions.

Why I think I should blog?

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Blogging just like writing a diary, but I think there are still some differences that make me think it is worthy to blog.

Blogging help me to notice what happen to my surroundings and what ideas come into my mind suddenly. I noticed my own question that I like to think about many thing but I always forget to record it so those ideas and question come into my mind will be forgotten by me later. Actually I want to form a habit that is taking note when I notice or think out something so I always put a notebook in my bag for in case. But, the truth is, I almost never take it out of my bag when I think out something, I know I am lazy.

I think when blogging has become a mission to me, I will have a pressure to force myself to record. By the way, I think my writing skill will be improved with the time of forming a habit.

minced beef cutlet(3)

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What I wish is, the minced beef cutlet can jump out of a definition of food that will be ate, it is an agency at meanwhile. An agency that links me to my friends.

Food, especially delicious food is a big common subject of a talk in the world so the minced beef cutlet can be the agency to help me to start the talking with friends. If I want to have a conversation with somebody then I can ask him or her that would you like to have a try of this minced beef cutlet? If they answer yes, congratulations! This is a good beginning. After they try the cutlet they will comment on it, then follow the comment to go further talking. If they answer no thanks, don’t worry, I can still keep to ask that what are you going to eat. Of course they would answer me if they don’t hate me or think I am annoying.

Moreover, this cutlet can be an agency between me and my friends to exchange culture. The minced beef cutlet is from the north part of China, it can be a representative of Chinese food, at least, to my friends. For Melbourne, avocado can be chose to be the representative of food. There is no avocado in the cutlet so why don’t we just mix the beef and avocado to make new taste that only sell in Melbourne, Australia. The improved cutlet, we can give it a new name that is the minced beef and avocado cutlet, is an agency that present the mixing culture under the multicultural Melbourne.

From the point of view of teleology, the minced beef cutlet exist for human being’s existence. Personally, I buy the minced beef cutlet because I am hungry, it exists to offer me more energy. For the store, they make and sell it for business benefits. Socially, this minced beef cutlet is a part of contribution of multicultural Melbourne. However, from the point of view of object-oriented ontology, as the author Ian Bogost says in his book, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What it’s like to be a thing, “we need not discount human beings to adopt an object-oriented position —- after all, we ourselves are of the world’s as much as musket buckshot and gypsum and space shuttles. But we can no longer claim that our existence is special as existence.” We all are objects, including living beings and non-living beings, existing equally in this world. The relationships between the minced beef cutlet and other objects are more than the people can figure out.

Story-Narrative-Rushkoff

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In general, story is constituted by three parts: Beginning, high tide and ending. In class, we have a new one.

Story:

-Plot

-Journey

-Events: cause;effect

– characters

-BME, resolutions

 

Story this word, created by human and mainly is full of human actions and experience, human is the center to control it. However, Narrative, to some extent, is well used than story. Story is can be included by narrative but what narrative has is more than story.

“Teleology”: philosophical attempt to describe things in terms of their apparent purpose, directive principle.(definition from WIKI) Go further of this teleology, it can be separated in two parts: extrinsic finality and Intrinsic finality. To be honest, in my opinion, this teleology is a typical form of idealism. People think all the things are teleological to live in the world, and the thinks they figure out are actually depends on those mind, right? I believe that everything on this earth has its own meaning to exit, but I don’t think human can understand all the purpose that they exit. But the teleology I think can be usefully on some areas like story writing.

When we are reading a story or a narrative, we will be attracted by plot and keep reading in order to know what will happen after this? What is the end? What will happen on characters? How is the plot going? In other words, we have teleological purposes when we want to figure out something. However, according to Rushkoff the narrative is collapsing for many reasons such as the growing pop-culture, big story. Then gaming now could be a new direction to save narrative but not the way as Rushkoff says. Why？ Because we don’t know how and what the ending is until the game finished, we can’t jump to the ending directly.

Wk2_studio_1

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In this class, we still emphasize the relations. Whatever relations that are linked us to the objects. Compared to last week, this time we concern on: How does it happen? What does it happen? Then we drew another picture about relations.

This is what I chose, the ballpoint pen. Before I started it, I was confused about where I should go further. To dig the relations between me and the ballpoint pen or the relations between ballpoint pen and the supermarket where I bought the pen from. Anyway, any relations is fine as Professor Miles said. So I chose to talk the relations on the ballpoint pen. I wrote down the manufacturing process of the ballpoint pen but it is too narrow. I should better to wrote down where is the ink comes from, where is the plastic body comes from, moreover I could say the technology that how this pen was invented.

Movie the Kuleshov effect was showed in class. Before this class I actually never hear about it. It was interesting!! Only some pictures combine together, cause people have different feeling. Like me, when I see the soup, my feeling is flat and I was waiting for what going on. Then a someone’s face came out which make me confused, what’s the relations? After this picture, the next one is a girl lye in the coffin, then back to the face just showed. The strongest feeling I get is wired, horrible and sad. I found out that I will subconsciously think what story or case this short video what to express. I think this is where my emotions came out.

 

Three Key words

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Professor Adrian wrote three key words on the board and I think that will be useful one day.

“Materiality”

“Relationality”

“Agency”