Since mid-autumn festival is round the corner, I got to join my Dad at his workplace kitchen (Hua Yu Wee seafood restaurant) to make some traditional Teochew yam mooncake. Below is the documentation on the tools used and the baking process.
Tools used
(Left) Industrial-grade mixer for mixing the mooncake base. (Right) Tools used in the deep frying process.The weighing scale is a very important tool in baking as baking is all about precision.Tools used for preparing and shaping the mooncake base.Sketch of tools used in the entire process.
Worksite documentation
The worksite is a kitchen containing the necessary tools for mooncake making. In any F&B industry, hygiene is of utmost importance, so the worksite has to be kept clean at all times. Chefs also need to wear apron and hat for hygiene purposes.
The worksite
Process documentation
Flour (white) and batter (yellow) mix that my Dad has already prepared beforehand.Shaping the base (part 1)Shaping the base (part 2)Shaping the mooncake (part 1)Shaping the mooncake (part 2)Preparing the food colouring to mark the mooncakes. Those with an orange dot marking means that it contains yam and egg yolk. Those without simply contains yam.Transporting and getting the mooncakes ready for dry frying.Preparing the oil for deep frying the mooncake. The temperature of the oil is paramount.Deep frying mooncakes process
It was interesting to make some traditional Teochew mooncakes with my Dad. Being involved in the process made me realise that because eating is so easy, we tend not to think about the efforts that go into preparing and making them. Making traditional pastries is incredibly challenging and there must be intricate precision in all steps. I got to shape 2 mooncakes and boy, they did not turn out well during the deep frying process.
The 2 mooncakes I shaped “exploded” during the deep frying process because I did not smash the dough hard enough with the chopper to force the air out of the dough. Meanwhile, most of the ones my Dad shaped turned out gorgeous with nice layered flakes.
Pain points
Some of the pain points we experienced during the baking process include the dough turning hard despite it being covered with a wet cloth. This was a huge headache as my Dad made the mooncakes in batches of 10 (a total of 60 mooncakes). When shaping the first few mooncakes of each batch, the dough for the last few mooncakes tend to harden. When the dough hardened, it was difficult to shape the mooncake as cracks formed easily. This will result in the mooncake “exploding” during the deep frying process and compromising on aesthetics. In addition, when kneading the dough with hand or flattening the dough with a rolling pin, parts of the dough will be smeared and stuck onto the table despite a layer of flour coating. It would be nice if there can be solutions to these pain points.
CreativePractice: Fashion Design 5 tools: 1) dress form 2) dressmaker pins 3) drawing pencils & erasers 4) scissors 5) tape measure Wearable version: 1. Tape measure ring 2. Eraser artificial nails Enhanced manipulation allows erasing of the slightest of errors. Also, now you do not need to worry forgetting that eraser or even the pencil with that eraser tip!Prototype of tape measure ring
(Left) Various tools that are required for mirror engraving. (Middle) Main body of the micromotor machine. (Right) A few examples of the different bits that can be put into the handpiece – each achieves a different type of thickness and roughness (for lines to be drawn and to suit a range of different materials)
Sketch of the materials needed as well as a brief description of what they did
Alicia, the mirror engraver, allowed me to engrave my own mirror, while teaching me the basics of how to do so.
Starting with drawing a sketch on the mirror with a water-soluble marker. I decided to draw a chrysanthemum.Video of me engraving the mirror for the first time.After completing the engraving, wipe off the marker lines and the bits of glass that were ‘shaved’ off during the engraving process. In case it gets too cloudy while engraving, wiping off the bits can also be done during the process.Completed! A mask is optional but good to prevent breathing in the small glass shards/powder.
The mirror turned out a lot better than I expected for a first-time engraving. As I was allowed to fully experience the entire process, I had a much better idea of what is needed and various considerations that are needed to make the engraving process run smoothly.
Alicia’s work space (her studio of sorts) was in her own room. She mentioned that she has brought her equipment to other locations (such as art events) as well on several occasions.
CharacterDescriptions: – Angie: old family robot that was beginning to malfunction – Eager: an experimental, goofy-looking robot that was bought to replace Gavin’s old family robot, Angie. He eventually becomes Gavin’s best friend – Gavin: main protagonist of the story; helps Ann to uncover the truth behind the mysterious deaths – Samantha: Gavin’s sister; works alongside Gavin and Ann to solve the crime – Ann: police officer who was put in charge of the recent series of mysterious deaths – SLIK Robots: batch of newer, sleek robots that were rolled out to replace the old batch of family robots.
Relationship Maps:
ImportantTechnology: – AI system that runs the smart robots – Advanced sensory and biometric technologies – Surveillance cameras that were installed inside the SLIK robots
Antecedent Technology:
Smart robots designed to serve families already exist in today’s world, ranging from the Aeolus Robot which is able to move household objects and adapt to changing environments, to Ubtech Robotics’ Walker, which offers a complete “home butler” service. However, these robots can only provide assistance to humans at home.
Equipped with an advanced GPS system and recognition function, the SLIK robots in this storyworld are able to run errands for their owners outside of the house. With highly advanced sensory and biometric technologies, it can also recognise and differentiate between an unlimited number of people, places and items.
Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cor-photos/34571264585 Sketches of Eager (experimental robot) and SLIK robots (more advanced robots)
2. Genre Sci-Fi/ Thriller
3. Story
In the late 22nd century, rising sea levels and natural disasters from global warming have wiped out many coastal cities and the world’s population was tremendously reduced. Due to a severe lack of manpower, robots were created to serve families and take over jobs. In Washington, a new batch of robots called SLIK was rolled out to replace the old batch.
One day, Gavin’s family robot, Angie, starts malfunctioning. Since Gavin’s family is unable to afford a SLIK robot, they decided to get one of the cheaper, experimental robots – Eager. Eager and Gavin quickly became best friends.
Weeks later, Eager and Gavin were watching the news together – there was a series of mysterious deaths in the state. People who opposed the governments started dying mysteriously without any signs of struggle, and the SLIK robots that belonged to the victims were destroyed as well.
Suddenly, Eager started glitching and a vision of his past reappeared, showing the employees from SLIK installing mysterious-looking devices into the SLIK robots. Gavin, Samantha and Ann worked together to uncover the truth behind these mysterious deaths and found out that those mysterious-looking devices were in fact surveillance cameras planted by the government in the SLIK robots, for purposes of “national security”. The government, which only wanted only their supporters to survive, installed the robots with a unique voice recognition function that will alert the government whenever the robots’ owners mention keywords like “hate the government”. Since the government had full control over the SLIK robots, they were able to make the robots self-destruct, while standing beside their owners, killing them as a result. In the end, Ann, Samantha, Gavin and Eager found the main control station that controlled all the robots in the state, and managed to turn off all the robots in the country, including Eager.
This storyworld is based on how we know our world, Earth, today. However, it can be seen as an alternate universe or timeline – it is not a futuristic plot but it does have slightly more advanced technology than what we are used to. It is not set “in the future” from 2018, nor in the past. It exists on its own. In this society, people are born into professions – much like how people in the past were named after their professions (occupational last names such as Mason or Carpenter). The families are also related to one another based on how closely linked their occupations are – for example, the nurse, surgeon and physicist families are “cousin” branches of the main doctoring/medical family. Societal norms are more or less the same. The reputation of these families are based on their competency and value – i.e. doctors have larger roles in saving lives etc as compared to a plumber. However, ‘lower level’ occupations are still able to do well based on their expertise. My main storyworld character is a girl from a family of baristas but wants to invent tools within her field but is met with adversity and judgment from others because it branches out to the capabilities of engineers and inventors. She makes the “latte art stylus” and uses it while working, but it causes problems (like burning her hand or ruining the cup of coffee) because the device acts up.
I have not fully thought of the story progression but I started thinking of this ‘storyworld’ based on the context of this module – the idea of rapid prototyping and creating wearable studios.
In a future world, technology has advanced so much that death has been defeated and people are able to live forever. Humans no longer have to be afraid of dying because when they “die” on Earth (planet 1), their memories and mind are transplanted to a new body on the next planet until they die there again and the cycle continues through the other planets (5 in total). In short, mankind could be recycled over and over again. Each planet they are born into possesses different cultures, languages, and genetics. The only thing that remains constant is their name (there are no same names, everyone has their own unique name). This revolutionary idea was created as a solution to the problem of world overpopulation in the year 3390. To maintain the population at the ideal amount, governments of the world collaborated to enforce the law that no one was allowed to bear children of their own. Instead, the recycled human mind would be implanted into basic, genetically formed baby bodies, and given to their host parents who would then be able to choose how they would want their child to look like using a genetic modifier. Only when the child reaches 18, is he/she given the chance to gain access to the memories from their past lives on other planets so as to help them understand the world they live in.
Characters
Calix (main character)
James and Margot (Calix’s parents)
Nari (Best friend/Love interest)
Method
Movie/ Short series
Story
Calix is born on Venus (Planet 3) and has grown up to be a handsome young man. It has come to the time where everyone his age on the planet has to make the decision whether they want access to all their past memories or not. This decision can only be made one time in their life on this planet, and if they choose to access it, there is no going back. For generations, no one has chosen to access their past memories for fear of going insane or being unable to handle all the different lifetimes. They have witnessed many who took the risk, only to enter a dazed state of identity crisis before going insane after a couple of days and committing suicide (the ultimate end for a human if they do not report to the resurrection building to harvest their mind and memories for the next life).
James, Margot and Calix have talked about this and decided that he will decline access to his past memories. Calix is certain Nari will decline as well and they can continue with their daily lives.
However, on the day of choosing, Nari accepts access to her past memories and true enough disappears in a few days. She leaves behind a note for Calix, saying that she is still alive, but hiding somewhere and has created a copy of her memories from her past lives, so that Calix will understand why she has disappeared.
Calix watches her memories and is shocked to find that it is empty. It seemed someone got to her message before him and deleted the file. Everything seem to be wrong and unravelling. Calix knew he had to find Nari’s memories and then find her. In order to do so, he would have to sneak in to the government and find her files, and perhaps his memories as well. To do so, Calix combines the genetic modifier with the visual record of all the humans on Venus to create a wearable device that allows him to disguise himself as whoever he wanted as well as their data on this planet. With this he was able to blend seamlessly into the government and start his discovery on his missing best friend…..
(Wasn’t sure if we had to post and where – IVLE or here, I posted on IVLE earlier but deleted that – hence a late post!)
Based on Drawing 1 of Week 4 Tools for Creative Practice: Silkscreen Printing,
STORY WORLD:
In the near future, where everything, and everyone is printed, people don specialised, hi-tech screen-printing gowns and conform to a printing constitution written by The Assembly of Silk-Screen printing (ASS): only a specific design of elites and premium technology can be printed. Every individual is marked with unique identification code screen-printed on with permanent ink. Beyond their abilities to communicate verbally, they can communicate across time and space by scribbling on their individual silkscreens with fingers.
Creative Practice: Following a youtube tutorial on How to make and Avocado Milkshake
Tools needed:
knife
blender
ipad for watching cooking tutorial
hands
cutting board
2 Possible Inventions:
The finger knife; Hands play a crucial role in cooking and my idea for these 2 products was what if we had something that could be attached to our hand so that we could do our tasks even more easily and conveniently. The concept of this finger knife was meant for smaller, softer items, making it ideal as a bread knife- cum- spreader.
The handy blendy; Again, the use of hands in all that we do, and replacing it with something else–in this case the knifes.
The finger knife Model
This portable and wearable knife makes it easy and light to carry it around. The idea of using fingers make the entire cutting process easier and more fun. It also works as a finger spreader, a perfect companion for bread.
The possible danger of this is that it might end up cutting my fingers seeing as to how close the serrated edges are to them. The knife can also be used only for soft materials for if it is too unyielding, my finger would not be able to take the hardness.
The story world I’ve been thinking of is borne of the licentious mixing together of ideas from several texts — media theory, philosophy, literature, glitch — perhaps literalising or abstracting concepts, transmorgifying the inane and the disparate into a fibre-optic bouquet of trashy digital waste.
1. Fleshing out the story world:
Characters: The unknown narrator. And the archaeologist, an unfathomable figure who collects media artefacts of the past. The notion of the archaeologist contains rich associations for me:
“Foucault’s contribution to the archaeology of knowledge and culture was to emphasize it as a methodology for excavating conditions of existence. Archaeology here means digging into the background reasons why a certain object, statement, discourse or, for instance in our case, media apparatus or use habit is able to be born and be picked up and sustain itself in a cultural situation. Kittler builds on Foucault’s ideas and has demanded a more media technological understanding of such archaeological work: such conditions of existence not only are discursive, or institutional, but relate to media networks, as well as scientific discoveries. Kittler wanted to look at technical media in the way Foucault was reading archives of books and written documents. What if we start to read media technology in the same way that Foucault exposed cultural practices and discourses to an analysis of how they were born and made possible in certain settings?” Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archeology? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 6.
Important technology/antecedent technology: The world exists in a time not too distant from the present but also steeped heavily in technologies of the past. Important technologies would be antecedent technologies — camera obscuras, magic lanterns, phantasmagorias, panoramas, daguerreotypes, thaumatropcs, anorthoscopes, phenakistoscopes, praxinoscopes, mutoscopes, stereoscopes, screens, cameras, projectors, cathode ray tube televisions, flat screen televisions, monitors, central processing units…
Map:
2. Genre:
Speculative utopic/dystopic cyborg erotica
3. Written story:
Membrana excavatory: The churning of topsoil, unsheathing of earth, I watch helplessly as you prise apart crevices to enter loam, consider the blinding intimacies of striae left gaping-exposed. Screens blackened and dead are lodged within mounds of dirt – obtuse, blocky forms constituting slurried soilscapes, dioramas of asphalt chunks and deflection coils. The cathode ray tubes here no longer hum or crackle: From black box to black box, it is the way of things – the yield of the historical, the amalgamate of frenetic versioning, of in-built obsolescence, of mythic technocultures laid to rest.
The archaeologist bears their head low, the ocularity of the present moment offers nothing to provide comfort or respite. Plastic spires that jut and heave, metallo-oxidized air resting thick within alveoli… Nomenclature is a slippery thing. The garden of digital vastness, the phantom of the analogue cinematic, graveyards for scanlined images that no longer glow. The electronics beg for you to notice the things they have meticulously hidden. [1] Who else will cradle bouquets of cathodes and anodes? Florets of phosphor vibrating, mycelial network of coagulated electromagnetic waves, only the intrepid archeologist pushes their sticky bodies through.
The archaeologist collects, and that afternoon, archival was the only means of mitigating this fever. [2] Nothing so saturated as the constituent cybernetic data bodies intermingling, cloud storage servers scattering across landscapes emptied of message.
[1] “Yet to hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other. Larvatus prodeo: I advance pointing to my mask: I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet ( and wily) finger I designate this mask.” Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 42-43.
[2] “It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed no repetition compulsion, no “mal-de” can arise for a person who is not already, in one way or another, en mal d’archive. Now the principle of the internal division of the Freudian gesture, and thus of the Freudian concept of the archive, is that at the moment when psychoanalysis formalizes the conditions of archive fever and of the archive itself, it repeats the very thing it resists or which it makes its object.” Jacques Derrida, Archive fever: A Freudian impression, (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 57.
A millennium ago, Archania was a land where races such as humans, dwarves, and elves, as well as mythical creatures, coincide peacfully. It was rich with greenery and all races lived in harmony. Then one faithful day, a meteor shower struck the land and wiped out 50% of the population due to unknown radiation that caused living conditions to change entirely. The landscape of Arcania changed due to the radiation causing tectonic plates to shift, wildlife to transform, and food and drinking water became scarce. The survivors of all races adapted to the new environment and was forced to fight over scarce resources to stay alive. This resulted in territorial battles and a series of wars for several centuries. They also inspected the meteorites and found advanced alien technology —dubbed Archanium— to which they utilized to build their empires and weapons. It is now YEAR 1089Z, where the races have built giant kingdoms and empires. While food and water is no longer a problem and war has not broken out in the past century, the kingdoms are keeping to themselves — the hatred built up from several centuries of bloodshed and war still linger and there is an unspoken law within each kingdom that prohibits them from interacting with other races. This is New Arcania.
Story: The city of Youtopia was running low on Archanium supplies, spent mostly on development of weaponry for the Royal Army. Archanium is also used to for farming/food production and more of it would ensure survival of the human race. Captain Mike Straw, King Rupert’s most trusted advisor, was entrusted a mission to go on an excursion for more Archanium mining spots at the Twinklelight Forest within the Human Territories. Twinklelight Forest is located along the perimeters of the Elven Territories and this was a highly dangerous mission. This is the story of a covert mission that was meant to take less than a fortnight that changed the fate of Captain Mike and the land of New Archania.
Method:
Probably will tell it through a movie or a game
Role of the device: To help create sounds for the movie/game
