Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Spectacles sketch


and how it might look like in the monitor.

Sketch of exhibition room and virtual space plan

Exhibition roomVirtual Space Plan
(from Left-bottom room and following clockwise: While dinner time, a intruding clown distracts the whole family, meanwhile, his partner steals the food on the table, little by little; A fancy dining party with servant; A left-over collecting factory, the left-over is boxed and relabeled here; A old hospital room, one man is feeding another thin and week man with spoon, beside them, two skinny male bodied lied on the beds, already dried out; A crop storehouse, where a huge amount of crop stock are stored; A indoor farm. The seeds look like marbles and the soil is dried. The farmer cries with anger and grieve; The audience in the surveillance control room.)

Introduction

Motivation

I was raised in a place with a food-obsessing culture. People in this culture are taught to cherish the complexity of food and cooking, treat dining as the greatest pleasure in no matter normal or special days, and never waste the food, because every rice is brought to our table from hard-working farmers.1Since the time that I remember things, the famine in Africa has never been demised, while in the other side, the obesity in USA has never been reduced. Few years ago, I learned the term “food crisis”, at first it claimed that the problem was the shortage of production, that all human being on this planet will finish food one day, I had no special doubt about this explanation until I started a part-time job in a bread production factory in 2009. My job was to throw the “bad” bread away, meaning the “not perfect” ones. The bread that I throw can be eaten without causing any illness, they are thrown just because they are not perfectly round. Few hours during working, the “bad” bread could be as much as 100kg. I began to wonder maybe the world really can produce enough food feed all population, but it's just manipulated and owned by a group of people. After collecting information about food security and related events. I was shocked by the facts and surprised that many people, including me, were also not aware of those facts.I believe that everyone is living in a big food chain, even though each one is just a human being. This food chain can be balance only if every knot plays its role correctly, and one person one of the knots, it is just not known yet.

I eat, therefore I am

“I think, therefore I am”, Descartes emphasized “think” as the proof of one's existence.2 He defines “thought” as “what happens in man such that man is immediately conscious of it.”3 In this manner, “eat” is also the proof that one exists. It fulfills a basic need of a living, moving functions of a body to sense, to think. Beyond that, it is an action with consciousness. Man eats, therefore man exists, continues to exist. This principle is applicable to any single human, without controversy.
Everyone is brought to this world without a choice, equally having no power of deciding which kind of lives that one will be born into. There is no options for anyone, of geography locations, global and local policies, cultural traditions, to choose from, the decision has been made when one is brought to the earth. Sartre said in Existentialism and Human Emotions:“First of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.4” The Man defines himself slowly with his will in the circumstances, where resources, knowledges and restrictions are given, and then he made who he wants to be. The word “will” here means a conscious decision.5 The “will” has to be put into action, out of mind, in order to accomplish a conscious decision and make a man to be something. I am here not trying to put my definition of a human being following existentialism, but generally telling an essential fact, of the equality that everyone owns while he begins in the world and the situation afterwards. As time goes by, after numerous decisions, people become who people are, facing the tasks ahead everyday and living the lives that seems normal and right. The occupied minds can't deal with anything that seems unrelated to the basis of life. Who is hungry, who is full, if who has nothing to do with oneself, doesn't really matter. Celebration and suffering from countless individuals are played on TV all the time. Most of the people simply receive them as fictions and see them as spontaneous unrelated events happening simultaneously. Ignoring or reacting merely as what the people in the common lifeworld react, without understanding that everyone all came from nothing, without knowing the causes and effects, without understanding what the circumstances had and hadn't provided to make what one has in present.
The freedom of will, however, is not equal, since the circumstances that one is given is not equal. The definition of free will is historically controversial, the argument includes from “so free that can never be constrained”6 to the completely impossibility of free will7 No matter what argument is, the main concept of free will begins with: being able to do otherwise and being ultimate source of one's will.8 I believe, the ability of doing otherwise requires not only the thinking, but also a range of possibility that allows the thinking to take place into action, this ability is restricted by the provided external options. If action fails to happen, a conscious decision can not be made, meaning one's will has to be framed in an external source, instead of one's own. Freedom only exists in the choice of options. The options that the rich can choose from are never the same as the poor. Yet the rich is never rich in one day, neither is the poor. Any success or failure is caused by a chain, sometimes a web of events, those events involves numerous people and elements, numerous other success and failure. All the events seems distant, unrelated, but if they are traced back, they are all bounded closely, shaping one and another, enlarge or reduce the freedom in between. Today on the media, it broadcasts food riots, farmer suicides, eight percent of meat in hamburgers, more than fifteen brands of chips in supermarkets all happen in the same day, is it only coincident or it happens for reasons? What is the reason that the people involved do not “do the otherwise”? Is everyone the ultimate source of his daily decisions about eating?
It's all about food, and everything starts with food. And then flourishing, pleasure, desire, manipulation and power come. No matter how individuals in separated lifeworlds could be so different from place to place, culture to culture, there is one thing that everyone fights for during the whole life time, that is, food. The value of food in daily life could be varied, however, it's an essential element of maintaining a life basis. Eating is a fundamental human activity, an activity that is both necessary for survival and inextricably connected with social function. Recent psychoanalytic theory suggests that eating practices are essential to self-identity and are instrumental in defining family, class, and even ethnic identity9. The need of solving hunger affects the maintenance and composition of society, education, workability and everything composed or used by human. Food flourishes civilization, enriches culture, and divorces the world into polars of wealthiness and poverty, feast and famine. In 2008, acute of food crisis occurred which caused billions of people suffering from hunger world wide(more than the population of USA, Canada and EU)10, 40 million undernourished people increases due to higher food price11 in historical term and volatile.12 Climate change, higher oil price, diversion to biofuel, importing dependancy and market speculations were claimed to be the main reasons13. It was clear that the problem was poverty, instead of increasing productivity, employment and the range of market in rural area, like the rich countries tends to propose. The solution was supposed to redistribute the load of food and promote the income of peasants. The problem was never “the world doesn't have enough food”, and the solution was never “the industries need to produce more.”14 This might still sound like that this has really nothing to do with anyone, most of the people, in the rich countries especially, are not directing hiring the poor people and deciding their income anyways. But, in fact, everyone has something to do with this. Now go to Starbucks. They sell a cup of coffee for about £2. It contains, maybe, a quarter of an ounce of coffee. If the person who grew the coffee gets between 30p and 59p per pound, that’s between about ½p and 1p per cup. Now suppose that the person serving the coffee takes 1-2 minutes to pour the coffee, take the money and give back the change, etc. At the minimum wage, that’s between about 7p and 14p, £0.34 and £0.67 per cup.Is this fair? Have we ever think about how much the people in the bottom of food production process has to sacrifice and left for no cash to buy their own food, when we choose a cheaper price or a bigger brand? Meanwhile, in contrary, one billion people on this planet who are overweight. When the poor part of the world is suffering from hunger, the supermarkets in the rich world is always full. The rich part simply likes and is used to better and plenty of options. That's why the industry need to provide the perfect-looking donuts, that's why there are always half a dozen varieties of apples in supermarkets: Fuji, Bareburn, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious and a couple of others, because this part of the world simple 'needs' to choose the best ones from them in a blink of time. People want to have the cheapest, the most tasty, the biggest variety of food to choose from. As result, markets provide, and people are more than happy to take them, putting all of them in their mouths extravagantly. My thoughts, reaction and action to all of these, are expressed by this work. This paper will include documentation of video installation and theory base related to global food security policy and power relation within space, which will explain the choice of contents and the design of this video installation.

Notes

1. A well-known poem “Sympathy for the Peasants” from Li Shen, a poet of Tang Dynasty, influences how people think about food in Taiwan, also is included in official textbooks and taught in elementary education.

2. René Descartes. 1637. Discourse on the Method and Relative Writings. Translated by Desmond M. Clarke. 1999. Penguine Classes. Part. 4: 55.

3. René Descartes. 1644. Principles of Philosophy. Translated by John Veitch. 1983. Part. 1: 5

4. Jean-Paul Sartre. 1957. Existentialism and Human Emotions. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. 1985. Carol Pub. Group:15

5. Ibid.: 16

6. René Descartes. 1649. Passions of the Soul from The

Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff. 1985. Cambridge University Press: 343

7. Hard Determinism, read G. Strawson 1986, or S. Smilansky 2000, if interested.

8. O’ Connor 2005

9. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg Lawrence J. Trudeau.

2006. Food in Literature - Introduction. Twentieth- Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 114. Gale Cengage, 2006. eNotes.com.

10. FAO News Release. 19 June, 2009.

11. FAO News Release. 9 December, 2008.

12. G8 Summit 2009. “L’ Aquila” Joint Statement on

Global Food Security(AFSI). 10 July 2009.

13. Aljazeera 19 April, 2009.

14. The detail will be explained in “World Food Security

Issue” section.

15. Rosemary Ekosso. Available at (Last Access: April

30, 2010): http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com/ view.aspx?index=48