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

Role: 
Artist

Methods: 
Glitching
Digital making
Interviews

Can we muddle the spatiality of our data traces through our use of digital artefacts? What do transnational collaborations with human as well as non-human entities listening in? Shùjùxiàn 數據線 “drinking from the data lines” consisted of a set of gif-artworks featured at the Art x Data exhibit at Mozilla Festival, curated by V&A (Victoria & Albert Museum) and Tate in London. I developed the 6 pieces of the series through a set of interviews with makers located across China and the U.K. Over several weeks we exchanged a data grapevine of donated ’stickers’, building a colourful collection of mp4 images and memes commonly shared amongst the 1 billion users of China’s WeChat messaging platform. Our chats were consensually monitored with recording and glitching apps, and then remixed into multimedia artworks using other apps, making their contribution chains difficult to trace. Interrogating what it means to build networked art across digital platforms that may be monitored at any time, Shùjùxiàn reflected on the complex surveillance dynamics of transnational communication, sending web crawlers on a playful tresure hunt through glitched medias.