make a fill in the space with new associations rather than let the media tell you what to think
let the material speaks
“everyone wants to be funny”
not an anomaly, but a pattern
reproducing the problem with another place
collect more ridiculous newsbot, silos, TripAdvisor – make different editions (i.e, sitcom editions, etc.)
reframing it as a book
beware of recirculating memes, “there’s a case for it to be shareable”, “how to be funny but not mean”
generate substitute, a new myth, make a new “place”
Allison Parrish:
the absurdity of the smart speaker works can expand more
maybe consider looking into how American sitcoms depict America? (i.e, there are many jokes about Alabama or the South —> build a baseline to make comparisons on OR find how Vietnamese media represents America) “American media is a propaganda machine”
“an unpopular war”
the goal of creating speculative design is to highlight the absurdity of reality, don’t always have to make it
“a space where everything is “Vietnam” “
maybe scrape sitcom dialogues and list the Vietnam references in alphabetical order
often when the media refer to “Vietnam”, they meant the war as a mistake, not the country
is there a new way to say this without bringing “Vietnam” in?
“Vietnam” is frequently mentioned due to its past relationship with America, making it one of the more recognizable countries to an American audience
the format or grammatical structure of “Vietnam” punchlines
This book pretty much confirmed my thesis statement, which makes me happy 🥺
In this light, the massacre at My Lai can be considered an American tragedy precisely because “My Lai” was an American place. It was also a made-up place. It never existed. Usually rendered as My Lai 4 or My Lai (4) in the U.S. sources to designate the specific sub-hamlet where the vast majority of the killings were perpetrated, the place was actually one of several settlements constituting the village of Son My, in Quang Ngai Province. Another sub-hamlet of Son My where civilians were killed in large numbers by Americans (though by a different company) on March 16, 1968, was My Khe (4), and the entire incident conventionally referred to as My Lai in the United States is indeed known in Vietnam as the Son My massacre. Both names— My Lai (4) and My Khe (4)—were artificial U.S. military designations. The actual Vietnamese name for My Lai (4) was Xom Lang, and it belonged to the hamlet (an administrative district within the village) of Tu Cung; My Khe (4)’s actual name was My Hoi, in Co Luy hamlet.
Like most people, I have always known and referred to this even as “My Lai” massacre (Vietnamese media refer to it as both “My Lai” or “Son My”, with the former much more well-known). The way it was named suggests that it’s a massacre that happened in a place called “My Lai” ... so it was shocking to learn that it’s actually an Americanised codename. It’s bizarre to mourn over one of the most horrific war crimes committed by American troops & continue to be memorialised under a name invented and popularised by Americans.
Events like Tet and My Lai— and the Vietnam War as a whole— did not easily fit within established mythological structures. My Lai, Sidey reported, was simply “not within the [American] national experience” (1969, 4). Myths remain purposeful only when new experiences can be fitted into their explanatory framework. Kapell, Matthew Wilhelm. Exploring the Next Frontier : Vietnam, NASA, Star Trek and Utopia in 1960s and 70s American Myth and History, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.
Pretty much everything I like and has been trying to do in term of building databases & the aesthetic of repetition + ties strongly to the process of mythologization 🥺 It also introduced me to more found footage-related work like Julian Palacz
“The supercut, by revealing that pattern of recycling and re-articulation, offers crucial hints as to how myths circulate. When structuralists say that all meaning is contextual, they’re referring to this dense web of paradigmatic association, quotation, ideology, and myth.”