Bridge 4 – Project Proposal

      The stereotype I want to critique is that all the kids and teens who play video games would be labelled as “bad” kids who don’t pay a lot of efforts on study, reach puberty with rebellious behaviors, are additive to a virtual world and deny the reality, tend to violence and have lost their innocence. However, I have a period of time when video games are fascinated to me so much and that was the second year of me studying in the U.S., living with my host family. I’m a person who would never say that I had a homesickness, but I did, in the behavior of seeking video games almost as my mental support and motivation every day. Since I stepped into school, my mother had warned me about how harmful playing video games is. I had no interest in any types of video games beforehand and I clearly knew the fact that they would distract me a lot from academics. But as I lived without my parents around me, I started to gradually know this new “friend” and deep inside my mind, I actually hope that my mother would suddenly appear and educate me to stop playing video games as she always did. Therefore, I did not lack the self-control from temptation of virtual fantasies; instead, I missed and yearned for the companionship.

     

      I believe that much more kids out in the world who found fresh feelings when playing video games and being addictive to them should not be simply labelled with stereotypes. Instead, they should be given the recognition of their true needs and compensation of the needs in real life such as community, family, opportunities of proving self-values, encouragements, releasing of pressure, fulfillment of freedom and intuitions. The medium I’m considering to use is sculpture. For this project, I expect my work to be on the street in the form of either 3D installations or wearable arts and to face the public as audience who might have prejudice on kids suffering from addictions to video games.

      The artist that inspires me is Bruce Nauman who has created art and forms to convey moral hazards and practice the thrill of being alive. Below is his work “One Hundred Live and Die” from the recent exhibit Called Disappearing Acts at MoMA. In this installation, he used neon tubing with clear glass tubing on metal. One “Live and Die” would flash every second and this moment of all the words shining with neon lights were caught after multiple individual “Live and Die” flashed. I am inspired by the way he examined the experience of “Live and Die” without cliché. Instead, in a creative way for people to read through everyone, he made the installation with empathy on all the people who would experience everything presented.