<aside> 💡 Assignment: adderall sux

</aside>

• Working on packaging my presentation lmao
  • I will be presenting my thesis as a tour guide, guiding people through this new “Vietnam”
  • Met with Tom, Sara Raza, Mimi and Sue! notes below
    • Tom:
      • I should walk through my process and the tech I used, and why it was important to do this project here at ITP, since I often skimmed the process and made it look very effortless/seamless —> should highlight how I utilise my education at ITP to make these projects possible
      • Apocalypse Now is horrible and I should be nice to myself & go see a therapist after lol
      • I can do half-tour, half-credit where I walk through the projects
      • set boundaries on what I’m willing to discuss/explore and where do I draw the line
      • “there are no universal understanding”
      • “there are no humour without pain”
    • Sue:
      • no to live demo hahaha
      • the projects can feel disjointed, would help to use similar visual languages across the deck to connect them
    • Sara Raza:
    • Mimi:
      • Vietnam is a deep-cut wound in America’s psyche, and the media (that I examined) are the scabs. my projects are picking at the scabs, but do I want to address the wound?
• Filling out the archive (+ grant proposals and all that) make me think a lot about how to succinctly communicate my project within a limited word count
• I have been calling my thesis Finding “Vietnam” for the longest time and I’m kind of content with it being the official title. It was supposed to be a riff off of “Finding Neverland”, in which the description of Neverland reads as:
  • Neverland is a fictional island featured in the works of J. M. Barrie and those based on them. It is an imaginary faraway place where Peter Pan, Tinker Bell, Captain Hook, the Lost Boys, and some other imaginary beings and creatures live. Although not all people who come to Neverland cease to age, its best-known resident famously refused to grow up. Thus, the term is often used as a metaphor for eternal childhood (and childishness), as well as immortality and escapism
  • which in my project would read as ↓
  • “Vietnam” is a fictional land featured in the American imagination and those based on them. It is an imaginary faraway place where Charlies, gooks, and some other imaginary beings and creatures live. Although not all people who come to Vietnam ceased to die, its best-known resident famously all died. Thus, the term is often used as a metaphor for eternal doom, as well as mortality and escapism.
• I think about the term hijacking frequently these days, since I am hijacking lots of existing media with new meanings. I also realized that all of my projects are named after famous US movies (‘Good Morning, Vietnam!’, named based on the movie of the same name) or sitcoms (’The One where they Vietnam’, named based on Friends’ naming convention) or songs (’Loving Him is Red’, named after Taylor Swift’s Red and ‘Vietnam, Viet Nam’, named after Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York). Again, US media = pervasive.
  • ‘Vietnam, Viet Nam’: A digital archive of Vietnam references in American popular media
  • ‘The One where they Vietnam’: An interactive, text-based sitcom episode made up of exclusively “Vietnam” references
  • ‘Good Morning, Vietnam!’: A voice assistant (Google Home) that renders positive information to “America”, and negative information to “Vietnam”
  • ‘Loving him is Red’: A desktop performance, which examines the one-way, para-social relationship I have with Ho Chi Minh, a well-known Vietnamese communist leader, and the experience of growing up enshrouded in propaganda
  • ‘Finding “Vietnam”’: A tour guide booklet to fictional “Vietnam” around the World

Misc Readings:

The Unspeakable Language of Life and Death in Michael Herr's  Dispatches

War as Metaphor

Subverting Autobiography: War, Narrative, and Ethics in Michael Herr's  Dispatches

• To do list:
  • [x] Write script for performance
    • [x] Need to take a bus tour + take note of the guide tour language used
    • [x] Setup more phrases for Google Home to support the performance
      • [x] Dialogflow deprecated a function so rip live demo lmao
  • [x] Watch Apocalypse Now + Fog of War 🤣
  • [x] Make a presentation slide deck
  • [x] Submit archive text + bio + description
    • [x] What to do with My Lai??? Live Web + Scrapism?
  • [x] Wrap up Twine
  • [x] Design the booklet (scrape Lonely Planet language?)
    • [x] Print 10 copies? nah
  • [x] Document all projects
  • [x] Where are the videos gonna live??? (probably Instagram for now)
    • [x] Figma it!