The project “wave” tries to simulate both the sound and the form of ocean waves by using a crank mechanism to make each paper move up and down. With multiple mechanisms in display (ideally >12), the whole system will simulate an area of ocean.
Intention:
The intention of this project is to simulate both the sound and the form of ocean waves to recreate the soothing moment when one looks at the sea and listens to its sound.
Motion:
The basic motion of the wave is that each individual “wave” (the piece of paper) would move up and down because of the crank mechanism. With certain offset among each sheet of paper, the system as a whole would form a cosine-like wave, which looks like actual ocean wave in a sense.
Besides the shape of the wave, the up-and -down movement also allows the paper to flip concavely and convexly, which creates the sound the is similar to the ocean.
Research:
Technical: what kinds of mechanism would create the up-and-down movement with minimum volume
Formal: what do waves actually looks like
The “Airy wave theory”, which is a linear theory for the propagation of waves on the surface of a potential flow and above a horizontal bottom, rough illustrates what the gravity waves usually looks like, which is something similar to the cosine waves. Thus, because of the characteristic of paper, which allows it to be in concave or convex form like the cosine wave, I would be able to simulate the form of the wave using paper.
This is a motor mount I created for the tt DC motor. It consists of 2 parts, the stand that mounts the motor and a screw that stabilizes the motor on the motor mount. The screw also has a screw on one of its sides to lock the motor on both sides.
This project intends to showcase the “onlooker mentality” in contemporary China and aims to intrigue viewers’ reflections on this phenomenon.
The “onlooker mentality” is a term that is translated from one of the most critical topics in the literature of Lu Xun (鲁迅), one of the most famous writers and thinkers in modern China. It is used to describe a phenomenon in the 1900s’ China when people are very numb and indifferent about what the people around them are suffering from and how badly the country has been invaded. Because of some recent incidents where people act as onlookers, I feel like this phenomenon that was issued nearly a century is still happening now. Thus, I would like to research this issue and try to display this nearly forgotten but concerning national mentality.
Therefore, after doing some research on this topic and reading Lu Xun’s original texts, I centered this project around the following 2 aspects: 1) how the “onlooker mentality” evolves, changes, and sustains over time; 2). what the monstrous relationship looks like between the onlookers and the people that are being looked at. And by focusing on these two aspects of the “onlooker mentality”, I hope to arouse viewers’ attention to reflecting on why it has been about a decade after the Lu Xun’s time, but people’s indifference and numbness never changed much; and simultaneously, reflecting on how the behavior of being an “onlooker” itself would do harm to the others.
Supporting information
The following are the references that inspired me and helped me narrow the project concept.
Literature 1: Is Contemporary Chinese Society Inhumane? What Mencius and Empirical Psychology Have to Say, Zhao, Wenqing.
This essay stated that like what Mencius says, people can be and might genuinely be altruistic, but “empathic concern for others is a fragile feeling that can be easily crushed by environmental factors (Zhao 359)”. Zhao also thinks that this kind of incident where people indifferently look at as passers-by constantly happen in contemporary China indicates that the cold, indifferent “onlooker mentality” is deeply rooted in Chinese society. And the continuation of this phenomenon “is a sign of failed moral education over past decades, and a result of current Chinese juridical monstrosities (Zhao 359)”.
This essay inspired me to look at the issue across time: the “onlookers mentality” remains stable and harmful to society after about a decade after Lu Xun’s time. By displaying the fact that the “onlookers mentality” is quite the same between a hundred years ago and now, I think the issuing of this problem would be more surprising and appealing.
Literature 2: Onlooker: Metaphor with Tragic Life–‘Onlooker’s’ Life Understands to Lu Xun， Wang, Xueqian.
This essay gives a comprehensive interpretation of what “onlookers” really mean in Lu Xun’s literature and how Lu Xun developed such an analysis of Chinese society. Its specific focus on the concept of the “onlookers mentality” by issuing it based on Lu Xun’s original texts and from different perspectives helped me clearly identify the concept of the “onlooker”: the people who lack faith and view others’ pain and sufferings as pleasure. This definition given by the text strengthened my understanding of the topic and back the whole research up with the exact definition by the original author.
Literature 3: Publicly Expose (示众), Lu, Xun.
This short story written by Lu Xun illustrated a scenario where a criminal is being exposed to the public in a street. In the short story, Lu Xun downplays all the details of the story, timeline, and logic of the whole scene, but only focuses on the onlookers’ acts of “looking”. In the story, everyone on the street is looking at something, be it the whole exposing the criminal to the public scenario, or just looking at others looking. The story also displayed an interesting yet provoking phenomenon that when the criminal looks back at the onlookers, the onlooker would look away. This could be summarized as “everyone is an onlooker, but no one dares to be looked at”.
I think this short story inspires me the most, especially in how to specifically display the “onlooker mentality” by simply displaying “the onlooker” and “the looked”. This tension between the two parties and the subtle emotion shown by shifting their places around is really worth exploring.
Artwork 1: Untitled, Maurizio Cattelan
MAURIZIO CATTELAN. UNTITLED, 2001. WAX FIGURE, NATURAL HAIRS, COTTON. 150 X 50 X 32 CM
Untitled by Maurizio Cattelan is a wax sculpture of the artist himself peaking into the museum from a hole in the museum floor. The hole has fuzzy edges, indicating that the statue “broke in” the museum like a thief; and together with the statue’s curious look, this artwork tries to deliver the artist’s interest in issuing the art system that the museums built.
This interesting artwork inspires me to think about placing the viewers as the people being looked at by “the onlookers”, which I think might work well and trigger the subtle emotion when people are “the looked” instead of the onlookers.
Artwork 2: Earth, Yinka Shonibare
Earth, by Yinka Shonibare.Credit…Stephen White/Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
In this artwork “Earth”, Yinika Shonibare combined objects from different cultural backgrounds and different time periods, to bring the objects a different context.
Though it’s not so closely related to my concept, Shonibare’s idea of combing seemingly different things and concepts through material culture is a great idea that I could adopt. Because I plan to showcase the “onlooker mentality” in different times of China within one piece, I could, like what Shonibare has done, use materials from the different time periods (such as clothes, hairstyles, and objects) to indicate the changes in time while the “onlooker mentality” remains unchanged.
Sketches & Technical Methods
Sketch
Idea
The design mainly intends to arouse viewers’ attention to reflecting on the unchanged “onlooker mentality” even after a decade after Lu Xun’s time; and simultaneously, reflecting on how the behavior of being an “onlooker” itself would do harm to the others.
To achieve the time concept, I decided to use human figures with iconic dressings of different time periods to indicate the mixture of different time periods in this project. To show the latter concept, I wanted to reverse the viewers’ experience of looking at works (the onlooker in this context) and make them the people that are being looked at by the human figures.
The project works as follows. When the project is in the normal state, the human figures would walk randomly and at different, but relatively low speeds in the semi-circle without bumping into each other. The postures of the human figures now are just walking. But when the sound in the space exceeds a certain volume or a viewer is standing inside the semi-circle for over 1 min, the human figures will quickly gather around where the sound is the loudest and where the viewer is. The postures of the human figures also changed to as if they are looking and observing something: standing leaning towards one side and crossing the hands, covering the mouth with one hand as if whispering to the people around it, or even holding out its phone as if recording a video… And simultaneously, sounds of audios that are subtracted from social media videos are layered onto each other and played in a loud volume. These videos are those taken by people who act as “onlookers” and used their phones to record certain incidents or others’ misery other than helping others.
Material
The most important material choice here would be the human figures. I plan to use plain wood sculptures in a medium tone of wood because I think wood has itself a sense of numbness inside, both in its raw nature and its metaphorical meaning. This numbness well-serves the “onlookers” idea.
Technical Methods:
a sound sensor that detects the environment sound, and triggers the movements of the human figures when the volume is over a certain value
a light sensor that detects where a viewer is standing in front of the project and how long have they stood there, and also triggers the movements of the human figures
a motor that moves each human figure along the tracks
an algorithm that manages to keep every human figures moving randomly and do not bump into each other
If there is more than one person standing in front of the project for a long time or there are loud noises happening at the same time, the human figures will move to another stimulater accordingly. That is if one person was standing in front of the project for a long time and didn’t move, and then someone suddenly made a loud noise, 50% of the human figures would move as a group to where the sound was. Then after about 10 seconds, another 50% of the group left, and ultimately all went to where the noise was.
This project intends to showcase the “onlooker mentality” in contemporary China and aims to intrigue viewers’ reflections on this phenomenon.
The “onlooker mentality” is a term that is translated from one of the most critical topics in Lu Xun (鲁迅), one of the most famous writers and thinkers in modern China. It is used to describe a phenomenon in modern China where people are very numb and indifferent about what the people around them are suffering from and how badly the country has been invaded. Because of some recent incidents where people act as onlookers, I feel like this phenomenon that was issued nearly a century is still happening now. Thus, I would like to research this issue and try to display this nearly forgotten but concerning national mentality.
Supporting information
Literature 1: Is Contemporary Chinese Society Inhumane? What Mencius and Empirical Psychology Have to Say, Zhao, Wenqing.
This essay stated that like what Mencius says, people can be and might genuinely be altruistic, but “empathic concern for others is a fragile feeling that can be easily crushed by environmental factors (Zhao 359)”. Zhao also thinks that this kind of incident where people indifferently look at as passers-by constantly happen in contemporary China indicates that the cold, indifferent “onlooker mentality” is deeply rooted in Chinese society. And the continuation of this phenomenon “is a sign of failed moral education over past decades, and a result of current Chinese juridical monstrosities (Zhao 359)”.
This essay inspired me to look at the issue across time: the “onlookers mentality” remains stable and harmful to society after about a decade after Lu Xun’s time. By displaying the fact that the “onlookers mentality” is quite the same between a hundred years ago and now, I think the issuing of this problem would be more surprising and appealing.
Literature 2: Onlookr: Metaphor with Tragic Life–‘Onlooker’s’ Life Understands to Lu Xun， Wang, Xueqian.
This essay gives a comprehensive interpretation of what “onlookers” really mean in Lu Xun’s literature and how Lu Xun developed such an analysis of Chinese society. Its specific focus on the concept of the “onlookers mentality” by issuing it based on Lu Xun’s original texts and from different perspectives helped me clearly identify the concept of the “onlooker”: the people who lack faith and view others’ pain and sufferings as pleasure. This definition given by the text strengthened my understanding of the topic and back the whole research up with the exact definition by the original author.
Literature 3: Publicly Expose (示众), Lu, Xun.
This short story written by Lu Xun illustrated a scenario where a criminal is being exposed to the public in a street. In the short story, Lu Xun downplays all the details of the story, timeline, and logic of the whole scene, but only focuses on the onlookers’ acts of “looking”. In the story, everyone on the street is looking at something, be it the whole exposing the criminal to the public scenario, or just looking at others looking. The story also displayed an interesting yet provoking phenomenon that when the criminal looks back at the onlookers, the onlooker would look away. This could be summarized as “everyone is an onlooker, but no one dares to be looked at”.
I think this short story inspires me the most, especially in how to specifically display the “onlooker mentality” by simply displaying “the onlooker” and “the looked”. This tension between the two parties and the subtle emotion shown by shifting their places around is really worth exploring.
Artwork 1: Untitled, Maurizio Cattelan
Untitled by Maurizio Cattelan is a wax sculpture of the artist himself peaking into the museum from a hole in the museum floor. The hole has fuzzy edges, indicating that the statue “broke in” the museum like a thief; and together with the statue’s curious look, this artwork tries to deliver the artist’s interest in issuing the art system that the museums built.
This interesting artwork inspires me to think about placing the viewers as the people being looked at by “the onlookers”, which I think might work well and trigger the subtle emotion when people are “the looked” instead of the onlookers.
Sketches & Technical Methods
Sketch 1
How it works:
The design mainly consists of 2 parts: 1). Human figures made by cardboards/iron wires, and 2). the rings where the human figures stand, which serve as the track for the human figures on top of each ring to move along the ring.
When the environment sound is at a relatively low range, the human figures are distributed randomly along the track. And then when the sound reaches a certain volume, the human figures will all crowd in one place which orientation is where the loudest sound is (I’m not sure if it’s possible for a sensor to sense where the direction of the sound is).
Technical Methods:
a sound sensor that detects the environment sound, and triggers the movements of the human figures when the volume is over a certain value
a motor that moves each human figure along the tracks
Sketch 2
How it works:
The design mainly has two parts as well: 1). a human-sized figure that is made out of reflective materials but also possible to project videos on/in it, and 2). video projectors that project videos. These videos would be those videos on social media that someone films others being hit by a car / being bullied…etc. but didn’t help and just stand there watching, filming.
Technical Methods:
Find a suitable material for the human figure
Project the videos inside the figure (transparent material) or outside the figure
I’m not sure if adding on videos could be considered as “digital” in this sense.
The idea of this “Performative Sculpture” project is to create an “ocean” using paper and mechanisms. The project mainly focuses on both the movement of the wave and the sound that is created by the paper.
Because of the characteristics of the paper, I would build a mechanism that only moves up and down in a fair amount of distance and with a certain acceleration, so that the paper could concave up and down and create sounds.
Process
Designing mechanisms
Since I’m only doing a reciprocating mechanism that only moves up and down, I searched online to find what would be a better solution to building this mechanism.
Because I don’t know how to 3D model and also to prevent failure caused by a too complicated mechanism, I gave up on the two gear mechanisms.
And also, since I what to create a wave, which requires a certain fluctuation in height, I gave up on using the CAM mechanism because to create a fluctuation of about 20cm, the egg-shaped cam has to be more than 25cm, which is too big for a project that only requires such simple motion.
Thus, I found a crank-like mechanism (“spray painting robot”) that could fluctuate at a certain height but still keep the whole system relatively small. Simultaneously, led by a rotating motion, the vertical mechanism moves with a certain acceleration when it reaches the top and the bottom, which works well in creating the paper sound.
Also, a little surprise for choosing this mechanism is that this mechanism is relatively pretty and elegant in its structure, compared to the other ones. Thus, besides the paper waves, the mechanism itself becomes a part of the project and is interesting to look at.
The Lack of Calculation
One of the major issues that I ran into is that there wasn’t enough calculation before making the mechanism so the moving parts of the mechanism always stuck at a certain point.
Because of the lack of experience in working with 3D things, I only calculated one perspective of the mechanism, which is the height of the bar that is moving vertically and the size of the circle that is spinning. I neglected the fact that the horizontal plane also needs calculation. Thus, the lack of calculation in the horizontal plane resulted in the moving parts not aligning in the same plane, and always stuck in some places.
Thus, to solve this issue, I added some washers to the joints that are not high enough and added something to block the moving parts from falling out.
Neglection of the bar’s weight
Because I neglected the fact that the bar is too long and eventually it would fall out, I wasn’t aware that there needs to be something that blocks the bar from falling out (both to the left/right and front/back).
I later added a block at the top to prevent it from falling out. However, the bar would still slightly tilt to the back, which makes the mechanism stuck sometimes. In the class, I learned that I could extend the bar and add another block at the bottom of the bar to prevent it from tilting to the back.
Conclusion
Overall, the project is a kind of success in creating the movement and learning how to use the laser cutter while making it. There’s still more to adjust in terms of solving the tilting back problem and how to make the stand more reasonable.
Maurizio Cattelan. Untitled, 2001. Wax figure, natural hairs, cotton. 150 x 50 x 32 cm
Untitled by Maurizio Cattelan is a wax sculpture of the artist himself peaking into the museum from a hole in the museum floor. The hole has fuzzy edges, indicating that the statue “broke in” the museum like a thief; and together with the statue’s curious look, this artwork tries to deliver the artist’s interest in issuing the art system that the museums built.
Cattelan used wax, natural hairs to make the sculpture. I think it’s very successful of him to do so because the wax is often used to make statues that look really like humans and is often placed in museums. Together with natural hairs, the statue is like another him, and thus his idea of putting himself into this narrative really works.
Simultaneously, I think the most successful part of this sculpture and also what I could learn from is how he positioned the artwork. By putting the sculpture in a hole in the floor and only showing the head and the hands, he flipped the position of “the viewer” and “the viewed”. Now it’s not the visitors in the museum that are the viewer, but the sculpture who are viewing what is going on in the museum. The visitors are positioned in an unconventional position, and that’s what intriguing about this artwork in my opinion. This transformation of the status is quite useful in inspiring me to consider how to position “the onlooker” and “the looked” in my research.
Rhythm 0, Marina Abramović
Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0, 1974
Rhythm 0 by Marina Abramović is a performance art piece where she displays herself as an object and lets the visitors do anything to her. As time goes by, the visitors began to treat Abramović more and more violently. As Abramović said herself: “What I learned was that … if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you … It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.” Her own reasoning, and I assume is what she is trying to express through this piece, speaks directly to what Lu Xun illustrated in his literature (which is the artwork that I’m going to discuss). It’s precisely what the “onlookers” do: they view others’ pain as pleasure and immediately cowers when being confronted (or becomes “the looked”).
Abramović chooses to use the form of performance art to bring this usually hidden mentality of people up front. By giving the viewers the authority to do anything to her body and giving them various objects that represent both pain and pleasure, people’s hidden desire is stimulated, and the antithesis of active “perpetrator” and the passive “victim” is displayed.
Publicly Expose (示众), Lu Xun
“Publicly Expose” is a short story written by Lu Xun that illustrated a scenario where a criminal is being exposed to the public in a street. In the short story, Lu Xun downplays all the details of the story, timeline, and logic of the whole scene, but only focuses on the onlookers’ acts of “looking”. In the story, everyone on the street is looking at something, be it the whole exposing the criminal to the public scenario, or just looking at others looking. There’s also a scene where the criminal looks back at the onlookers, the onlooker would look away, as if denying that he is look, which resonates what Abramović said about her artwork Rhythm 0.
Lu Xun made it explicit about how the “onlookers” look at others and how universal and ridiculous this action is. And in the process when the “onlookers” are being looked at, the formerly “being looked” people becomes the “looking”, and a wierd “onlookers” felt different.
The fact that Lu Xun downplays all the other factors that constitutes a story actually made this story very successful in showing the onlookers. By ignoring all the other factors, readers would only focus on the action of “look”, and his idea in appealing the “onlokers’ mentality” is displayed clearly.
Topic: The Contemporary “Onlooker Mentality” (“看客心理”) in China
The “onlooker mentality” is a term that is translated from one of the most critical topics in Lu Xun (鲁迅), one of the most famous writers and thinkers in modern China. It is used to describe a phenomenon in modern China where people are very numb and indifferent about what the people around them are suffering from and how badly the country has been invaded. Because of some recent incidents where people act as onlookers, I feel like this phenomenon that was issued nearly a century is still happening now. Thus, I would like to look into this question further.
Reading 1: Is Contemporary Chinese Society Inhumane? What Mencius and Empirical Psychology Have to Say
This article is derived from an incident in 2014 where a toddler was hit by a car, and no one came to help the kid, and eventually, she died. The author Wenqing Zhao analyzed contemporary Chinese society by referring to Mencius’s ethical philosophy and modern moral psychology studies. Zhao landed on the conclusion that, like what Mencius says, people can be and might genuinely be altruistic, but “empathic concern for others is a fragile feeling that can be easily crushed by environmental factors (Zhao 359)”. Zhao also thinks that this kind of incident where people indifferently look at as passers-by constantly happen in contemporary China indicates that the cold, indifferent “onlooker mentality” is deeply rooted in Chinese society. And the continuation of this phenomenon “is a sign of failed moral education over past decades, and a result of current Chinese juridical monstrosities (Zhao 359)”.
I think this article convincingly outlined the fact that the “onlooker mentality” is an actual issue in contemporary China. More importantly, Zhao graphed the philosophical origin of empirical psychology in China (too ideal to work) and how the PRC has tried to forward social ethics and failed.
This path of the history of morality Zhao drew, as well as the contrast between the ideal society where everyone is pro-social in their very essence and their act of indifference in real-world scenarios gives my research more specific yet various aspects to think about.
Reading 2: Onlooker: Metaphor with Tragic Life (看客：生命悲剧的隐喻)
This essay gives a comprehensive interpretation of what “onlookers” really mean in Lu Xun’s literature and how Lu Xun developed such an analysis of Chinese society. The author Wang Xueqian mentioned the influences that foreign philosophers such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard had on Lu Xun in developing this analysis on Chinese society. The fact that Lu Xun developed this concept by having influences from western philosophers, we can say that this is actually a universal problem.
From this essay, I developed a deeper understanding of the concept of the “onlooker”: the people who lack faith and view others’ pain and sufferings as pleasure. And there are a few quotes that inspired me a lot.
When speaking of what Lu Xun said about the pioneers who fought wars and sacrificed, Wang quoted Lu Xun
“It’s just that the comfort of this sacrifice belongs to oneself, and it has nothing to do with the so-called socialism of the lofty ideals (Lu Xun 416)”.
只是这牺牲的适意是属于自己的，与志士们之所谓为社会这无涉。
It’s very sad that the pioneers are sacrificing for those “onlookers” who take all this blood and lives for granted. When viewing all this numbness and indifference, how extremely altruistic does a person has to be to put him/herself out and make this world a better place? How big of power and motivation does a social movement have to have in order to push such a society filled with onlookers forward?
Here’s another quote from Lu Xun about education:
The current so-called education, no matter which country in the world, is actually nothing more than a method of making many machines adapted to the environment (Lu 19).
现在的所谓教育，世界上无论哪一国，其实都不过是制造许多适应环境的机器的方法罢了。
This quote makes me wonder if the education is considered as more “advanced”, why then people are not getting better morally and might even be getting worse with such education? How is education in China now different then what it used to be in feudal times?
Conclusion
Based on both Zhao and Wang’s essays, I’ve made my research topic more specific: given the concept brought up by Lu Xun about a century ago, how much of the society has changed?
Or more specifically, there seems to have been a dramatic shift in society from the feudal society to a modern communist country. No matter it’s in technology or politics, economic, various aspects of people’s lives, everything is much more modernized, not to say that China has become now one of the most powerful countries in the world. However, in terms of the dark side of society, the “onlooker mentality” in this case, how much have we evolved? With so much praising and bragging about how powerful our country is, how many problems in society have we solved? Do people dare to look straight into these issues?
Overall, the contrast and relationship between the superficially shown “changed” and the underlying “unchanged” are what I would like to explore for this research.
Work Cited
Zhao, Wenqing. “Is Contemporary Chinese Society Inhumane? What Mencius and Empirical Psychology Have to Say.”Springer Science + Business Media Dordrecht. 2014.
Wang, Xueqian. “Kanke: Shengming Beiju De Yinyu–Dui Lu Xun ‘Kanke’ De Shengming Jiedu [Onlookr: Metaphor with Tragic Life–‘Onlooker’s’ Life Understands to Lu Xun].” Journal of Inner Mongolia University for Nationalities (Social Sciences). 2004.
Lu, Xun. Lu Xun Quanji [Lu Xun Collected Works]. The People’s Literature Publishing House. 1991.
Through this project, I want to indicate that we are often passively shaped by society, the culture, and even the people around us, into what is considered as “normal”. Simultaneously, no matter how we try to escape from these constrain, we always find ourselves trapped inside the cage constructed by society, culture, and the environment.
Changes Made
The project consists of two parts, a 40x40cm wooden cube frame and a yellow balloon (maximum size 75cm). The frame is placed slightly leaning to one side because it’s being lifted by the blown balloon. The balloon is blown within the wooden frame and extrudes more from one side of the frame as if escaping from that side of the frame but couldn’t. This is intended because when blowing from the center of the frame, the balloon will extrude evenly from all sides of the frame, which looks too cute for the concept. Thus, by making the balloon extrude more from one side of the frame, a better indication of being shaped by the society is shown and another meaning of the “person” constrained within the frame is trying to escape is added to the project.
For project 2, I would like to use a wooden puppet hand (the one used to practice drawing), which gears will control, and a pull-back car to create an uncomfortable feeling of having expected something to happen but didn’t.
In my imagination, the puppet’s hand will pull back the car and then move slightly forward (as if it’s going to let go of the car) but still holding the car. And then, the whole system will continue to work repeatedly.
Concept
The motion of bringing the car back and forth, instead of letting it go as it’s supposed to, is intended to highlight the absence of the expected motion, that is, the motion of the pull-back car being released and moving forward.
Simultaneously, I also wanted to indicate a personal experience. Whenever I talked to my father about my future career, he always wanted me to take the more secure jobs because I’m a girl, despite the education and the other supports that give me so much potential in taking on other careers that interest me more. And all the education and support that give me more choices in future careers is provided by my parents.
Thus, taking an abstract form, I feel like I am the car in this scenario where I’m given the “power” to “run”, but am ultimately constrained by the thing that initially empowered me.
