Lucy Material Alchemy

For my material alchemy project I decided to turn the assignment on its head. I started off thinking about all of the things that I value and that we collectively as a society value and came up with what is probably the obvious dichotomy between the intangible things such as love, family, freedom etc and the tangible things to which we have collectively assigned value. The most obvious of the latter case being money itself: sheets of paper and circles of metal that we agree to treat as quite valuable. I think the intersection between our “true” values (love etc) and the concrete values (money, gold etc) are interesting. The later are so quantifiable, a cent is worth a dollar, a dollar one hundred cents etc where as the former are notoriously difficult to give precise monetary worth or quantified value assignments. Yet there are interplay between the two: what are you willing to pay for love (your dog is being ransomed, what’s the price at which you can’t or don’t find a way to raise the money? $100, $1000, 1 million?) or perhaps a less morbid example (how much time freedom or freedom of choice are you willing to give up to save or make money?) I wondered if there were ways to explore, (warp, stretch, diminish, change, expand) the value we attribute to money. So for my project I explored this by doing things to money. I wanted for suddenly the defined and universally accepted specific value of a penny to be called into question.
At what point would a penny lose its value? At what point would a cashier no longer accept it? Could I make someone accept my money regardless of what I had done to it? Where there things I could do that would make it simultaneously more valuable to me or another person and less valuable as a unit of currency?
This is material alchemy in a different way. It explores the same questions of value, art, perspectives and intentions from a different direction.

my images won't upload right now, (i think they are too big) so i will re take them and put them up later, but you'll see it all in class today anyway!