When money is nothing more than its weight

When Money Is Nothing More Than Its Weight
當錢只剩下重量
2012-2013

37 Sets of Vacuum-Packed Ready-Made
37組真空包裝的現成物
Dimensions variable
尺寸依場域而定

“Prediction of Doom” has never fade out as time goes by. Periodically, there would be some people claim that the Earth is hurtling towards its mass extinction based on their religious or scientific beliefs, and then as a reaction to that, the others would build up fortifications, equipped with the defense to natural disaster and the weapon of mass destruction. Those people would cluster within the wall, isolated from the outside, and form communities as a result. Every eve before the claimed-but-yet-to-come doomsday, these communities might overthrow the given resource allocation rules under Capitalism by establishing their own internal regulations for resource-sharing instead. The most distinctive instances would be the invalidation of the existing currency and the readjusted symbolic system correspondingly. It seems that their hysterical conduct near the edge of insanity is demonstrating an effective way of rebelling against the existing society.

This project attempted to establish a brand-new material exchange system within the existing one, and to make people reflect on the symbolic exchange system nowadays. During the project, I bought plastic toy dogs in a grocery store, and melted the amount of New Taiwan Dollars coins equal to each toy dog’s price in order to make their metal copies. Since the specific weights of metal and plastic are different in the first place, these metal toy dogs turned out to be incomplete in shape.

As the end of the project, I measured the weight of coins in equivalent amount to the price of a plastic toy dog, and set the
weight as the price of a metal toy dog. In this exchange game system I invented, I’ve asked the customer who bought the metal dog paying me with another “currency”—any materials at the same weight as the metal dog. In this way, I’ve managed to collect plenty of articles and looking forward to use them as the source material for the next exchange-system-related project.

(This is a rough translation of the original in Chinese)

幾乎每隔一段時間，就會出現新的末日預言，人們以宗教或科學的名義宣稱世界即將面臨毀滅，一些人因此建立起防禦自然災害與大規模毀滅性武器的堡壘，群聚在這個與外界隔離的小社區中。在每一次被宣告即將來臨，但至今不曾來臨的末日前夕，這些小社區透過內部自訂的資源共享規則推翻了資本主義底下的資源分配模式。在這當中最為明顯的例子就是現有貨幣的價值失效，以及因為貨幣的價值失效而重新調整的象徵體系，似乎，這些歇斯底里的作為正在瘋狂邊緣展示一種對於社會系統極有效的抵抗方式。

這個計畫試圖藉由在現有的交換系統之中成立一個新的物質交換系統，來討論今日的象徵交換系統。在這個計畫當中，我到雜貨店買了一個塑膠玩具狗，並且將與塑膠玩具狗價格相等的新台幣硬幣融化，以這些硬幣作為材料，複製出大量的金屬玩具狗雕塑，因為金屬與塑膠比重不同的關係，這些金屬玩具狗雕塑通常都殘缺不全。

最後，我測量了與玩具狗價值相等的硬幣重量，以重量作為金屬玩具狗的價格，出售這些金屬玩具狗，在這場我所開發的交易遊戲當中，我要求顧客必須以與金屬玩具狗相同重量的物質作為報酬進行交換，並且收到了大量交換而來物品，我期待將這些物品作為材料，在下一次與交換相關的計畫當中使用。