Author Archives: fanzhang

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”

 

Relations_graph

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In this Thursday class, we practice to think about the relations between ourselves and a subject.

The blue writing is the relations between me and my families and classmate Jialu Cheng.

The orange writing is the relations between me and my laptop.

This is a good practice that let us to think more about details between two subjects. For example, between my mom and me, not only the relation that mother and daughter we have, my mom is also my teacher to educate me lots of knowledge. I will help my mom to take care of my sister and brother. Mom will drive me to anywhere if she like to before I have my own driving license and car.

More deeply to dig details and we will get the details we usually we ignore.

The minced beef cutlet(2)

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First of all, before the minced beef cutlet is the minced beef cutlet, in other words, when there was no minced beef cutlet but many materials. All the materials which will be made in minced beef cutlet were in the kitchen of the store. Those cook must get up early to arrive the kitchen in order to offer fresh and hot minced beef cutlet and other products. The main materials of the minced beef cutlet are the beef and wheat flour. Then, for good taste, the beef cannot be produced for a long time or bought for a long time so that probably was bought yesterday or in today morning. This purchase process is responsible to the buyers ordered by manager.

Normally, delicious food is particularly focus on materials so they would choose a good shop that they always go. Talking about the meat shop that they choose, in the market, a great part of meat shop they don’t have their own factory or company to do the beginning process that is breeding livestock. Their responsibilities are choosing healthy, safe and good cattle, pigs and others from factory and pasture, then transport those livestock to the shop to handle and pack. Turn to the factory or pasture, they have their own area to feed and breed livestock. What they need to keep the livestock to grow up in expectant safe and eligible environment in order to be healthy and popular, are especial feeding mode and well forage that might be the grass on the pasture or produced by forage factory. Finally the grass and other materials that can be made in forage are coming out from the nature, more specifically, the soil. Moreover the soil will consume canker from other places.

Finished the above part that is about relations before the minced beef cutlet is the minced beef cutlet. Now I will talk about the relations after the minced beef cutlet has became the minced beef cutlet, in other words, the cutlet is a product sold by the store. The more cutlet bought by customers the more money and business benefit they can have. Moreover, the cutlet has tax, the more minced beef cutlet sold by the store, the more tax government can get from the store and food. Furthermore, the government receipts will be used in fundamental infrastructure, social welfare, salary of government officers, and so on. The money will go through lots of way then finally back to public’s hands, like me. Then I use the money I have to buy another minced beef cutlet. This is a circle relations actually don’t have a beginning and end.

 

Media_3 The minced beef cutlet(1)

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Subject: Minced beef cutlet

 

It is circle, delicious and hot when I bought it. The size of the cutlet just like a hamburger, it’s convenient to be took away and enjoyed. When you see that, you don’t know there is beef inside, just like you buy a box of chocolate and you don’t know what’s the flavor. Under the frugal exterior, there is a strong and colorful soul. and the soft inside and chewy flatbread make a clear contrast and ideal taste. Be careful, when you bite it. The oil and beef juice will come out suddenly, don’t make yourself look bad.

How fresh it is. I believe that the cook must waked up early to buy the best materials from market in order to get ready to make it. The cook prudentially cut the beef into small pieces so that the taste will not be affected. All the condiment are prepared to mixed with the small pieces beef, mixed and mixed, let the flavor and smell get into the beef. Except the beef, the other important part of this cutlet is the flatbread which enwrap the beef. It is not a successful minced beef cutlet if the flatbread is soft or too hard. Chewy, is the best adjective to describe a good flatbread. To make a good flatbread, time and temperature must be controlled perfectly. Moreover, how the cook use power to knead the dough affects the taste to a large extent. Only the cook has a good ability to knead the dough can make sure the flatbread will completely enwrap the beef during frying, keeping the beef and juice inside. After all, look after the fire when it is fried, or not the flatbread will be scorched and the beef is still raw.

Don’t you want to have one?