Going into High Muck a Muck, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing. Though, once I started navigating the website, I sort of understood just from a few clicks in. My first click, along the pathway of the posterior view of the human body, was at topmost blue dot, or the neck. This brought me to a video of an older man which slowly zoomed in until his eye takes up most of the screen. Then, his eye transforms into a baby’s eye, which then zooms out. What I understand from this is that when you are older, the world seems to have come at you already, and you have a chance to reflect on what you have done while you await the end. When the video transforms to the baby’s eye and zooms out, I understood this to be the world is awaiting this new person, and there is so much at their feet already for them to explore. From here, I recognized transformation as a theme as I continued to navigate the website.
Staying with the topic of videos, I found the video containing the strips of “Made in ____” to be very intriguing and also emotional. Strips of tags with “Made in China”, “Made in Japan”, “Made in Indonesia”, and several others make their way across the screen in many ways. First, only a few strips trek from the left side to the right side. Then, these strips make shapes such as stars and circles, leading up to the wave of strips encompassing the whole page. At this point, two ships make their way against the grain of the strips, with one ship floating on top of the strips, and one making its way through the middle. Then, the strips fade into the background. The video ends with an image of people seemingly in an airport, with the window view being the earth. I thought this was a very intentional way of describing immigration, specifically from Asian countries. We constantly see these labels on products we use everyday, yet we never consider the process the product goes through to eventually find its way into our hands. The same idea applies to immigrants: they are constantly moving through a process and its ramifications that a native citizen does not grapple with. There are obstacles that overpower immigrants, and push them back, as the boats may represent. Even when the immigrant arrives in the new place, they still may feel they are othered, and from an otherwise otherworldly place that has soon become unfathomable, as possibly represented by the aerial view of Earth.
Another aspect of the literature I really enjoyed was “Canada”. Moving from the Pacific Rim section into this one, it allows the reader to consider the themes of Pacific Rim, leaving a place of comfortability, in a more urgent manner, as Canada brings in the idea of family. At the far-most right point, the text appears, “Like a family / Are these trees / Abundant, / dense.” By bringing family into the equation, the interactor (I didn’t want to say reader because I didn’t feel like a reader in this moment) can understand the movement across the screen, of the close proximity of the strips, to be members of a family: parts of a whole meant to stay planted together like a hoard of trees.
“Richmond” really brought these aspects together for me. Between the mentioning of immigrating to another country for the sake of family and future generations truly hits home for me as a First Generation American. The imagery of the people, whether it be a man with his children, two people holding tools, or even a plane in the sky, it shows the massively different purposes of people who choose to leave their home country for a perceived better life. As remarked in “Victoria” by the man in the lower left corner smoking, many immigrants must “fake it”, as we commonly know to “fake it till you make it”, to be somewhat successful in a land in which they know nothing of, and continuously have to learn about for the rest of their time there.
