Item Re-interpretations

http://mith.umd.edu/arguing/admin/items/show/46

Although the photo is indicated to merely consist of the participants, some friends, holding a coconut and posing like the Breakfast Club, viewing the photo like that would be seeing it as you want to see it: in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. The picture is the chronicle of an incredible journey of self-discovery, transcending the boundaries of social hierarchy and preconceived notions. The subjects in the picture have spent the few hours prior to the photo dodging authority, forging new friendships, and growing as people. They obtained an illicit coconut that served as the symbolic vessel for all their innate potential, their desires for the future, and the expectations the adult world had placed upon them. The picture captures a ragtag bunch of misfits at the very prime of youth, on the edge of unknown adulthood, the precarious days of exploration, bravado, and confusion. In the end, despite their differences, they found out that each of them was a sorority girl, a computer engineer, a short person, a juice lover, a bus driver, and an awkward director of photoshoots. Does that answer your question as to what this item is really about?

http://mith.umd.edu/arguing/admin/items/show/55

This item might seem like an artistically altered image of Alexander McQueen on the front of a book, but the image is actually a photograph of the world’s first cyborg, a Mr. Paisley Donovan, so named because he was in fact a clone of the late Alexander McQueen developed in the late 2170s from preserved genetic material and the scientist involved was keenly aware of Mr. McQueen’s tempestuous relationship with the paisley pattern and wished to make an ironic statement. Mr. Donovan was in a car accident in his early thirties that resulted in injuries so severe that he became a second major medical technology breakthrough: a living cyborg. Numerous surgeries resulted in facial reconstruction, neural repair, cardiothoracic reconstruction, and gastrointestinal augmentations of cybernetic nature. Mr. Donovan was offered more natural-looking facial prosthetics but rejected them in favor of the more radical metallic look in honor of the aesthetic sensibilities of his genetic “father.”

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