Revised Tentative Proposal

Today's discussion was very helpful, brief, but it got me thinking about different issues concerning racial discrimination/stereotypes. In a nutshell I think what I'm trying to imply and to excentuate is the way people treat each other, and how powerful language serves both as a purpose for communication and at the same time as a tool for discrimination. I think that language personally having been brought up in a French emmersion elementary school, and growing up with all caucasian people (all means ALL- I was the only Asian person in the school for eight years), has caused me to believe that I am different, but as long as I spoke without an accent, I could somewhat blend in with the rest of the crowd. Nevertheless I was still treated as an outcast in elementary school, and I've since had better days. Growing up through high school was much better, because I was no longer a minority, but became a majority since immigration opened their doors to a TON of Chinese people in the 90's. Language also served as a purpose for me, because being able to speak Chinese I was assimilated with the new Chinese people, because most of them were ESL students who spoke only Cantonese.

I was talking to Wing Man today, and I asked her, "so what do you think about my project?", and she said, "well, Wynne you are different. You grew up here, and we didn't. We're not the same." I was shocked. Never have I felt that I was different from them, well I knew that physically I'm different, but apprarently I am a totally different species to them. I was compelled by this answer and asked the same question to my roommate Mandy, who is a visa student from Hong Kong, and she said, "yeah, you are different. We're not the same, you're a 'ghost-girl' (another word for white-washed in Chinese). You're a CBC- we dress differently, we eat different types of foods and you seem like you have more confident when you speak to people.. We're just not the same." FINE. So I asked her another question, "Do you ever feel like you're discriminated against when you speak to people?", and she said, "no, not really. the 'ghost-guys' (white people) are pretty nice and patient when they speak to me. Actually I get more discriminated from CBCs (Canadian Born Chinese) than from other people." THAT was very interesting. I never knew that people like Mandy were actually intimated when they spoke to me, and even had that thought that I would discriminate against them. STRANGE.

Therefore it's perhaps not certain types of people who are discriminating against each other, but the human race for one reason or another, perhaps out of fear or embarassment of their own culture decide to treat people differently.

From that I want to develop my project in a different and more suitable direction. I would like to develop a universal language system whereby people would interact with each other in that language only. The purpose of this is to see the reactions and emotions of the people interacting with each other whereby everyone is speaking the same language, and perhaps that would place people from different cultures on the same level and physical differences would not be seen of primary importance.

I want to do research on linguistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics. I will create a program whereby I will use this program and ask people from different backgrounds to interact with each other. I will document this through video, and present my findings in a gallery setting with video streaming, and at the same time have the program available for viewers to try in the gallery setting.

Instead of intensifying my concept through discrimination; perhaps this approach would be more suitable since it is proposing a solution to the problem.

A more detailed proposal will follow shortly.