The reason why I visited the exhibition is not only that this gallery is at the area where I chose to work on for the postcode project, but also the theme of it really interested me. Nowadays people have strong dependence on the Internet, I remembered when the O2 service broke down one morning, I was literally freaked out, updating my phone and all the social media pages nervously all the time even though there’s no one that I need to contact urgently. I guess I’m one step from what’s said in the title of the exhibition: All I Know Is What’s On The Internet.
And what surprised me are the works about the ban of foreign websites by the Chinese artist Miao Ying.
“The work“LAN Love Poem.gif ” is a series of GIF animation which are made from snapshots of censored websites in China. (such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Instagram) combined with online signatures by Chinese Internet citizens ubiquitous across the Chinese Internet were collected by the artist, translated into “Chinglish”, Displaying certain wisdom and a taking joy in romanticized melancholy, the poems ultimately are representative of the romantic Stockholm syndrome relationship the artist has with the Chinese internet. Each Poem is made with “Taobao 3d animated style”(a Chinese internet style), along with 8bit internet landscapes in the background. ”
I don’t know whether people from outside of China will understand this work though, for they have never experienced how it’s like to pay for the VPN every month and suddenly the VPN breaks down because the developer is caught by the authority, or how it’s like to secretly buy a foreign Apple ID online just to download Instagram. But as a kid who grew up in the country where there’s an Internet “Wall”, I was amused by the way she express all the thoughts in her work while feeling pretty sad.
Other interesting stuffs are exhibited here too, like a robot that can tap and swipe on the phone screen automatically, and interviews of weird CGI people…
The name of the exhibition sounds quite ironic, and a lot of people are worried about the influence that the Internet brings to us, but just like what happened when the television was introduced to people, we’re not going to be destroyed, but somehow develop a new way of living.