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Nostalgia Toward Electricity/
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The Sims/
The Mutation of a Message/
Midnight Telephone Interview/
I Love Hate Money/
2002
instructor: Paul Elliman
A Chinese pop song called "Cannot Forget" starts like this (Tung):
"Time flies like electricity..."
Shouldn't we be nostalgic about electricity? It has been part of our lives for more than a century. Cannot we forget all those lonely nights lit by electricity?
Is sans serif modern? Does masculinity represent weakness? Can an electricity bill be poetic?
I'd like to make an electricity bill poetic, but who cares?
However, I might be able to make an electricity bill look like a monthly calendar. Receiving an electricity bill every month and collecting twelve electricity bills every year can be a way of recording the passage of time. Besides, some people do pin up their bills in their kitchen, quite like a calendar.
We once observed the shift of the day by the rise and fall of the sun. But now the city is lit by electricity almost everywhere, twenty-four hours a day. We once recognized the flow of four seasons by the gradual temperature change. But now electricity cools the house in summer and warms it during the winter. Electricity has blurred the boundaries of day and night, and the four seasons.
In a way, people in the city have become insensitive to natural conditions that often inspired classic poetry. But the sensibilities are not lost, and the artificial environment can be as evocative.
Electricity is a good example. It's everywhere. Electrical energy flows like water. The term "electric current" has the poetic analogy between electricity and water.
The writing above is based on the text from my book Nostalgia Toward Electricity made in spring 2002. The book is actually a side project to supplement the calendar bill project.
The other day, almost a year after I completed the project, when I was working on this thesis book, those images of lights suddenly reminded me of "HAL 9000" in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
+works cited+
2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. United Artists, 1968.
Tung, Angus. "Cannot Forget." The Classical Songs Of Universal. Universal Music, 2001.
