Shùjùxiàn 數據線
Art + Data Exhibit
Mozilla Festival
London, 2018

Role: 
Design residency

Methods: 
Glitching
Digital making
Ethnographic interviewing

Shùjùxiàn 數據線, or “drinking from the data lines”, was a gif-based digital installation that was featured at the annual MozEx Art x Data exhibit at Mozilla Festival, curated by the V&A and Tate in London. I developed the 6 pieces of the series through a set of interviews with Chinese makers located across China and the U.K. Over several weeks we exchanged a data grapevine of donated ’stickers’ on China’s messaging platform WeChat, to lure the non-human entities of platform crawlers that inhabited the Great Firewall of China as our ‘listeners’, building a colourful collection of memes together. I then remixed our chat contents across glitching apps, making their contribution chains difficult to trace. Interrogating what it meant to build networked art under extreme conditions, Shùjùxiàn explored the potentials to hack surveillance infrastructures, by sending web crawlers on a playful treasure hunt through glitched medias. You can read more about it in the chapter ‘Placeless making? Reframing the power-geometries of digital platforms in China through tactical co-creation‘ in The Critical Makers Reader (Institute of Networked Cultures, 2019).