The Billionaire’s Heritage
Xiangjun Dong
According to the previous research on the street including history, crowd environment and other factors, I began to pay attention to and speculate on the reasons why different shops continue to operate in this street. This reminds me of Adam Smith’s theory of the visible and invisible hand in “The Wealth of Nations”, and the existence of monopoly, competition, etc. in the free market, which cannot be separated from the control of these two hands. So whether these invisible and visible hands also tear people’s lives, as complicated as the economic market.
After the investigation of the street, I used my invisible hand to symbolize my self-feeling of the street, and extracted consumerism as the object of my thinking. I wanted to use a fake event, the legacy of millionaires, as a starting point as an element of the design, which also reminded me of Monopoly. I think of the Monopoly game, because monopoly was originally invented to let people discover and guard against the monopoly of capital; In the Monopoly game, the pace of people’s walking is controlled by dice, which feels like being controlled by invisible hands.
Monopoly is based on the landlord game invented in 1903 by Liz Marge, an American left-wing feminist. The goal of the game is to show that an economic system that rewards individual effort is superior to one that monopolizes wealth. It also aims to promote the economic theories of Henry George, especially his ideas about taxation. The existence of dice as a rule in the game is like an invisible hand controlling the pace of people. When I imagine the dice as invisible hands in the game, I can also understand many parts of Monopoly as a disguised form of consumption and capital, such as the purchase and rent of houses, and the influence of money in the game. In contrast to the current situation of the site, there are a lot of rented, closed, idle shops, like a game of Monopoly, the invisible hand and the visible hand tug each other. So I’m decided to run a few Monopoly games as an experiment to find more changes in people’s behavior or emotions.
If the whole space is designed as a chessboard, the rolling process of the dice on the chessboard can be regarded as the rotation of the square. People through each square space in this space can play some games and interact with the invisible hand. The player will interact with the installation in five spaces, preparing for the final entry into the secret space and obtaining the legacy.
The task controls the player’s actions as if by an invisible hand, and eventually in the secret room, when given the power to control the AI, the keywords entered will be different. Players who tour on their own will get a lot of stories about the neighborhood through the interactive device, so the keywords they type into the AI in the secret room will be more objectively appropriate.
