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Recently, I've been watching these youtubers TwoSet Violin who make videos about playing classical music and everything that comes with that territory. They aim to bring classical music to the younger generation to keep the genre alive. I was on a watching spree on their channel and came across this video where they act out playing violin for a family member in order to get a red envelope.

The desire for a red envelope was completely unknown to me. The video was made to celebrate the Chinese New Year and made me curious about the customs concerning this red envelope. The more I found out about it, the more curious I got about Chinese New Year because I found out that there's a relation between the two.

inspiration: social practise

For my previous practise cultural diversity, I had to read a text called Decolonization As Care by Uzma Z. Rizvi, which was about becoming aware of the multitude of systems that we are in, in this society. Rizvi explains here that once you become aware of these systems, you can free yourself from them by unlearning behaviours, taking in different standpoints, and learning from the influences you have never been taught to look for or entertain. After the practise was over, I found myself re-reading it because while I was aware of myself being in systems, I really needed to hear someone say "okay so now that you know this, you can step out of it." Of course, it's not all that easy but seeing it confirmed that it can be done really made me reflect and think.

The bits in purple are the parts that struck me the most. Most especially, "The late capitalist model has alienated the human body to such a degree that we no longer are allowed to be human to be considered successful." It was from here that I started to dream up a time in our world where we are alleviated from this experience of the constant drag of work/life that causes people to be unhappy, feel unfulfilled, and stressed for the bigger part of their day.

concept-ing: a bit of world building

Say, if in a hundred years we have worked up to the point that this system has been eradicated and replaced by a system that honours human beings and the human experience for what it is, what would that look like? I mostly wondered how society would handle looking back on their past. I'd like to think that they would celebrate being rid of a system that never honoured them as humans but as profit. This is where the inspiration of the Chinese New Year comes into play. I liked the idea of a season opening up a new time in the year that celebrates wiping away the bad emotions associated with the previous exhaustive system. The celebration would go paired with a ritual wherein these emotions are visualised through the body of a wraith with the use of colours that represent different miseries. Dressing up as a wraith and symbolically getting rid of it through collective meditation, would work as the main ritual.

This was actually part of my research from the first time around doing honours!
It's an evil monster that I found in the manual of monsters for the game Dungeons & Dragons. I found the wraith particularly fitting because it is described as 'an evil undead spirit of a powerful human that seeks to absorb human life energy.'
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execution: first visualisation

I've decided to explore the ritual through a futuristic diary entry of a person who's excited and a little nervous to partake in this ritual for the first time in their life. I (unconsciously) worked a bit backward here because I immediately started to design and visualise this entry as if it were written on some scrap piece of paper that looks old (you get the gist). Which to be fair, could very well happen but considering context awareness, might not be totally in tune with the times. I had a few conversations with Jasper (who has followed the honours course as well) about this. He pointed out to me that I could make the diary entry resonate more if I could present it in a way that visualises the advancement of use of technology of the times.

The scrap paper diary entry
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execution: finished result

While I can't come up with new technology, I can imagine how one could log a diary entry by other means than paper. A lot of people like to read from their e-readers and so I thought it to be interesting if you could store your entries like a book. The great thing about e-readers (or particularly this one) is that you cannot take screenshots on it, so the entries would be kept somewhat safe in regards to sharing.
Also, because of the way it appears, it doesn't immediately look like a diary entry but more book-like.

To create this I converted my word document to an epub document, sent it to a friend who owns an e-reader, and had her take this photo by my directions over Whatsapp.