UNWIND The Value of Human Life

The Value of Human Life
What is the value of human life? Should you be able to put a price on the life of another? Should you be able to buy, sell, and trade a life? Who gets to decide who's lives are more valuable, who's lives are not, and who gets to live or die? These are all questions that are raised and discussed in "Unwind". In this future, it would seem society doesn't particularly view a human life as valuable, at least not enough to stop people from having the ability to take it away.

Page 23

"You're a good musician, but..."
"As I said, you've reached your potential."
"As far as you can go"
"Perhaps if you had chosen a less competitive course of study"
"Well, that's all water under the bridge"
"Our hands are tied."
"There are unwanted babies born everyday -and not all of them get storked."
"We're obliged to take the ones that don't"
"We have to make room for every new ward."
"Which means cutting 5% of our teenage population."
"You do understand, don't you?"

Page 6

Connor's parents don't know that Connor knows he's being unwound, He wasn't supposed to find out, but Connor has always been good at ferreting out secrets. Three weeks ago, while looking for a stapler in his dad's home office, he found airplane tickets to the Bahamas. They were going on a family vacation over Thanksgiving. One problem, though: There were only three tickets, His mother, his father, his younger brother. Not ticket for him. At first he just figured the ticket was somewhere else, but the more he thought about it, the more it seemed wrong. So Connor went looking a little deeper when his parents were out, and he found it. The Unwind order. 
The date on the order was the day before the Bahamas trip. He was going off to be Unwound, and they were going on vacation to make themselves feel better about it.

UNWIND Legality vs Morality

Legality vs Morality: Utilitarianism
Which is better; harming one person to save many others, or harming many to save one? This concept is referred to in many scenarios. For example, there is a train travelling down a train track. In one direction, someone you know is tied down to the track. In the other, there are five strangers. The train can't stop, and you are in charge of the lever which determines which way the train goes. What do you do? If you let the train go left, you lose that person. But if you switch the lever and the train goes right, five people, of whom you know nothing about, will die.

 Or another example; imagine you're a doctor. You have five patients in desperate need of transplants. One needs a heart, one a lung, another needs a kidney, one needs a pancreas, and the other a liver. In the other room, there is a perfectly healthy man who came in for a checkup. Do you take this innocent mans life in order to save the others, or let the other five die?

Although it seems more logical to harm one to save many rather than harm many to save one, neither option, in my opinion, is ethical. The exception to this of course would be if the one person who would need to be harmed to save the others is willing to sacrifice themselves

Poetry with Apirana Taylor

Apirana Taylor is a New Zealand writer, poet, actor and storyteller. He has won many awards for his work, such as the Te Ha award for poetry, the I.B.M Young Writers Award. Apirana was also runner up for the Pegasus Book Awards, and was even awarded the residency of Writer in Residence at Massey University. Apirana Taylor has travelled around the world, sharing his poetry and stories with people of all ages and backgrounds- we were lucky enough to meet him!

On Wednesday, Apirana Taylor came to Hornby High School and shared with us some of his many poems and stories; Hinemoa's daughter, Kapiti, Whakapapa, and my personal favourite Aroha- a mix between a story and a song of how his guitar got it's name. I quite enjoyed some of Apirana's stories, songs, and poems, and it was interesting to hear about the backstory's of some of his pieces.

Myself and the rest of the students participating in the English Scholarship Pathways also got the privilege of attendingf a workshop with Apirana after his performance, where he gave us some insight into his writing process, and gave us some interesting, valuable information and tips for writing, along with a quote:

'The most essential gift for a writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector'- Ernest Hemingway

I would love to see more performances such as the one Apirana provided for us on Wednesday, and I also really enjoyed the writers workshop we attended late last year, where we heard from some more incredible writers and poets such as Juno Dawson, who gave us a small preview of her book 'Clean', and Hollie Mcnish with her poem about how absolutely f****** delicious her shoulders are :) 

Please note, up until I heard some of her work I didn't really care much for poetry, but she's hilarious. 

UNWIND Hayden's Character Profile

Lino Cutting and Orphism

LO: To develop an understanding of Sonja Terk Delauney, Orphism and colour theory through lino cut print making. We should also be cementing our understanding of leading lines and focal points in completing these.

For the past two weeks in art, we have been working on preparing for lino cut print making. We drew six or more thumb nail sketches, with colour and annotations pointing out it's key features, and from there chose the two which we not only liked the most, but had the most prominent leading lines, a focal point, and the one which resembled the art from the most.

Here are the two final thumbnail sketches I chose

Here is the full page of all my thumbnail sketches

Once we had chosen our two thumbnail sketches, we chose the one which worked best, and thought of ways we could turn the design into two layers in order to split it and put it on two different bits of lino. Then after drawing our two layers onto two different bits of lino, we started cutting.

To begin with, some of my thumbnail sketches didn't have a very definitive focal point, but I managed to change that with the use of colour, and I think it quite closely resembles the art form of Orphism.