 Is it working? OK, I'm very excited to be here because often this idea that you don't actually know what's going on is a frustration for when I try to explain things. So I've decided that I'm going to start by actually allowing you to experience surfing the web in China. So I've done some screenshots before I came. First, I'm going to start. The first part is with a VPN on, so you can get the idea of how slow connections are and how frustrating it is. And I'll sort of talk through this experience with you. And actually, before I start, let me just say, so my goal here is for you guys to really get an idea of what it feels like to be on the Chinese internet. So I'm going to really, like, over sense, like, throw a lot of things at you, OK? So just be prepared. Let's hope this works. So it looks here. I'm trying to get on Facebook. So this is Baidu, which is a Chinese search engine. It's not really loading very well with my VPN on, as you can see. Yahoo! Usually works without a VPN. But for some reason, today it's not, because sometimes it's a little sketchy, little weird. And looking up Tumblr, yeah, Tumblr is usually not blocked also. But as you notice with my VPN, like, it's very slow. Don't have a lot coming in. Yelp is barely loading. Facebook, Google, none of these seem to be really working for me. This is very frustrating, as you can imagine, especially when you're trying to do things and stay connected to the West. So for some reason, New York Times seems to load OK. And luckily, this is a GIF animation, so we don't have any streaming issues, which I'll talk about later also. Now I've decided I'm going to turn it on and off. Oh, I'm going to turn it off. So I'm going to see if I can see any of these pages. And now I'm going to search the Chinese internet. And we're going to see actually how fast it loads without using a VPN. Look at that. It's pretty efficient, actually, when you're not trying to get outside. These are some Baidu's the search engine. Doban is actually kind of like a music site. Taobao is the shopping site. As you can see, this is the Chinese internet. So now I'm going to take you through Taobao a little bit. Just pay really close attention also to the aesthetics of this page. Lots of things like blinging at you. Right now I'm looking at movies. Now I'm going to look up cell phones. You can see how fast. You can see my options. You can see advertisement aesthetics on the side. OK, so now I'm actually just looking at men. And I want to pause it right here. So actually what I typed in was actually just the word for man. And as you can see, I've got some really interesting products for men. The thing is that in terms of how you can find even things you need, like certain products, if there are products like this, you can't just type in dildo and find it. So there's even a way about finding certain products online. So that comes into play with sort of creatively going through how to exist on this Chinese internet. So let's look at some of these products. Well, so pornography may be illegal in China, but toys are not. So these are just a few examples. And I'm kind of previewing this because I want you to understand that the culture is incredibly vibrant and everyone has the same desires. So there's options. However, actually if you notice back there, I don't know if I can go back because I've been having trouble with the video. But you notice how there were stickers on and kind of censoring certain parts of the image. I want you to keep that aesthetic in mind because we're going to talk about that again also. Let's see. So now I'm looking up Germany. And look at all the beer. Some of it's real German beer, most of it's fake German beer. And just in case you need some birthday shampoo, we have that in China also. I tailored this for the Germans. This is a streaming. I'm going to kind of stop soon just to show you how fast video also streams. Yoku is basically like YouTube. And it's pronounced Yoku, not Yoku, by the way. So yeah, you can see that video actually streams quite quickly. Yeah, we got some dancers. Yeah, I think you get the idea of the aesthetic and kind of what it's like, the differences between trying to access the Western web in China versus actually just existing on the local platform. So let's move in and talk about what that means. So the Chinese internet. I like to call it the Chinternet. Essentially, it's obviously a cross of Chinese and internet. And essentially, it means an internet with Chinese characteristics. That's what we're going to kind of talk a lot about today. Now, the thing that we have to understand is it has its own ecosystem. It has its own existence in a way of doing things. So instead of Facebook and Twitter, we have Weibo and QQ. Instead of Google, we have Baidu. YouTube, Yoku, eBay and Etsy, Taobao, Alibaba. WhatsApp, WeChat. So everything that you have outside of the Chinese internet exists inside of the Chinese internet. So this idea that it's a desolate or barren or empty landscape is very untrue. And that's what I really want to talk to you about today. So the biggest difference at this point in the history of the Chinese internet is that it actually mostly exists on a device like this. So thinking about that, if you think about most of us in this room, probably first access the internet through a very large computer. It was expensive. It was slow. It was dial-up. So we had a certain expectation for how to surf the internet, right? At this point in China's history, the majority of people experiencing the internet for the first time are experiencing it through a mobile device. So their expectation for how they interact, for how they maneuver through things, the speed at which it goes is very different from most of us. We also have to consider this. So this is a really funny advertising from WeChat, which is one of the biggest mobile app platforms. And it keeps getting bigger and bigger. And in this, it basically says that they are going to change the world. And that's kind of what I'm going to talk about. So that moves me on to my research, which is partly anthropological and also partly performative. I call it the Chinternet Archive. So to explain the Chinternet Archive, what I use is something called People Nearby. And it's a function in the app that lets me use the location-based services of my device and access other people. And I think it's around 1,000 kilometer or 1,000 meter radius. So it's very location-based. A lot of what I've collected for this archive has come from places like Beijing and Shanghai, Guilin, Shenzhen, Xi'an. I think there's like six different Chinese cities, also Korea, Texas, now Germany. So what I'm showing you is how I access this. So if I were to go and view People Nearby, this is what I would find in different areas. So it becomes very interesting the fact that it is location-based. Because everywhere I go, I find out new things about how people interact with this app. And exactly what is their relationship to China? Because this is a Chinese app. It is owned by a Chinese internet company. So it is a part of the Chinternet. So here's San Antonio, Texas, where I was briefly before I came here. And here's Germany. And what I found in Germany is actually it's mostly German men and a lot of Turkish, Iraqi people, which I wasn't surprised. WeChat has a reputation in the Middle East already. So I wanted just to give you an idea of how this happens. And I kind of go through and I start looking through profiles. Any profile that has, it tells me that I can look up to 10 posts, which means they've kept their account open. So I go through and I collect images in open accounts like this or profile images. So they're all public images. So what do I do with these images? Well, I'm looking for patterns and collections. And I'm trying to find out what's going on in China in the virtual world. A lot of times you can view what I am as sort of a documentarian. So I'm a documentary photographer because a lot of these are actually screenshots. This is an example, again, to look at the aesthetic of the Chinese internet. We have a lot of busyness, a lot of color, a lot of bling, a lot of different text in the same image. It's a little overwhelming. One of the artists that I work with is her name's Ying Mao. I'll talk about her later. She likes to describe the Chinese internet as an internet ecstasy. So let's keep that in mind as we move forward. So what do I find in most? I'm going to show you a few sets of things I find quite often. And one of them, oh, actually, we're going to talk about graphics. I'm sorry. So again, here we're just reinforcing that internet ecstasy feeling. Notice all the hearts. And actually, this is what an open moments page looks like. So if I can go into an account, this is what I'm looking at. And then below that will be the posts that they make. OK, this is a really great example. We have a few things going on here. We have a Chinese lamp. We have some roses, some Christmas candles and presents. And what does it say? It says, greetings. Good morning, good morning. It says, good morning in two ways. It's all Shanghai and so on. Same meaning. But they decided that it was necessary to say it twice. So again, this gives you an idea of how things get mixed up. And it's this piecing together when it comes to aesthetics. So this is probably a retailer. And she's probably selling beads like this. What she's using to make this edited part is a Chinese app called Mateus Yousiu. I've used it a lot myself. And guess what? Chinese people use it a lot, too. So this is a very common aesthetic, is this sort of overload. And if we think about that early Taobao page where everything was blinging and everything was boom, bam, whatever, it starts to translate in every part of life in China. But I think it's really quite special. He's saying, like, have a great time. He is, look, he's having a great time. So now let's say we're going to have a traditional picture. We still need to have some chaos. If you notice, all the different patterns everybody's wearing on their shirts. And if you also notice the background, we have bling on the background. So you can escape this. It's beautiful. So this is actually a photograph I took in the park. I like to spend a lot of time in the park because I think what I do on the Chinese internet is kind of like it's a virtual landscape. So often I look at what I do is if it's like a virtual street that I'm walking down. And I'm seeing things. But sometimes for me to understand those things, I actually need to exist in real life, which is why I live in China. So I spend a lot of time at the park because it gives me a really nice place to see a lot of diverse types of people. So do you notice his aesthetic, this mismatching in his shirt and its chaos? So this internet aesthetic exists in the physical form. It is everywhere. OK? So we're going to talk about that more later, too. So I'm telling a little story. So if you haven't gotten that yet. So what are some other things that I have in my archive? Lots of hearts. So this is a funny one because to play a lot of the way that things work on the Chinese internet is word play and number play. So in this case, 520 is in Chinese, Hu Arling. But it sounds a little bit like I love you in Chinese, which is why me. So they've decided that if you make 520, it means I love you without actually having to say it or use the characters. So this is internet speak in China. And it's interesting because in WeChat, it allows you sometimes during like Valentine's Day or different holidays. If you type 520, little hearts will float down the screen. It's very interactive. Also something to consider. The experience online in China is very interactive. Moving on. So someone made a nice dinner for his love. And there's crabs and a heart candle. Somebody's decided that their dog needs a heart. Food in shapes of heart. Roses. Shrimp. This is a particularly beautiful one, I think. They get very, very creative with their hearts, let me tell you. See, we could even, why not on your desktop, have one? And why not post an actual heart? This is a heart of a 38-year-old woman. So that moves into another portion, which is how actually explicit posts can be. There's not the same kind of censoring for gruesome things. So it's very interesting. I find a lot of injuries. Like I find a lot of people posting injuries. Very vivid ones. In the far left, they're very straight lines. So it's kind of, yeah. It could be self-induced. I also find a lot with IVs in the hospital. So these are common. And that moves into the hand ones. I have so many images like this. And they're very random. It's like an object in their hand. Sometimes their hand is doing something. Sometimes the object's doing something. Sometimes they're just holding it. But what I really want you to pay attention to is how actually when you start to look at these, it almost looks like you're entering that space yourself. It has this perspective of virtual experience, like that first person. So let's keep that in mind also. So this is the circle of life. Yeah, I don't know why I find this quite often also. Food. You'll notice on the second middle row, there's a nice one that's a little surprising. You don't catch that usually. I get to see in people's houses. So I get to see what their house looks like, what kind of technology they're using. This is a whole series of TVs, which I'm going to move into the houses a little bit. I get to have a very intimate perspective of how people are living in China. And it's varied actually. I have images inside of migrant homes or migrant dormitories, inside of student dormitories, inside of very, very wealthy people. So there's a very huge economic diversity in the country as well. The aesthetic we saw earlier, it's kind of happening here too, right? Do you see it? Not as extreme, but it's there. So here's some other ones. There's always pictures of food. This one's quite funny. He's got a bottle, Yes, My Wine. But I don't think it's actually the original name, because that looks like a sticker on top of the original label. And the Chinese name is actually Ye Mai Diou, which sounds like Yes, My Wine. So it's sort of a funny wordplay. And these are a bowl of chicken feet. So this is a really interesting cultural pairing, because wine is not a traditional, red wine is not a traditional alcohol beverage of China. It's something imported. We also have Tylenol, also something imported, and something very traditional, which is the chicken feet. And beautiful, beautiful still lives of all kinds of interesting objects. I'm sort of showing this because in the archive there's also a lot of different qualities of resolution, which can reveal to me demographic as well, what kind of phone they have. This is a beautiful still life also. So I'm going to kind of move into Apple products or also something very heavily made fun of in China by Chinese people, because it's a status thing. So I'll just quickly go through these. We have a few iPhone 7. That's a nice one. So yeah, some more technology. These are webcams in different. Most of these are from gaming, like internet cafes. People covering. This kind of comes back to the topic of when people do want to censor themselves, because they do know the degree of which images are used, they will do it intentionally. And they use different apps to do that in kind of funny ways. She's done an interesting job here. It says hey, hey. And it's a smiley face next to it. She's also blurred out everything around her. These are also some important things to consider. Face, there's a heart again. So this is Tianjin. And I'm realizing that I actually might have to jump through some stuff, because I'm going to run out of time. And that's the only thing I want you guys to actually be able to see some artwork also. But I am going to talk about this meme, which is quite funny. There was one day, not too long ago, we had many weeks of smog. And then there was this glorious rainbow. And everybody's feet looked like this in Beijing, just over and over and over of rainbows. So actually, one artist in my feed made a beautiful rainbow picture in honor of it. And what was interesting about this was that the meme only lasted as long as the sun set. By the time the sun had actually set, all of the images, all of the jokes, all of the pictures were basically gone. And what was left was this amazing GIF animation. For a meme that only lasted two hours max. It's pretty good, really. So money is really big, lots of money, piles of money especially. Monies and phones also really big. Notice that they're Apple phones, although they could be fake ones, I'm not sure. So these are collections that I do. I post every day in my WeChat moments to sort of, as a daily performance of showing and revealing and learning more about these images as an archiving collection. So it's been installed actually at E-Project Space, which is owned by German and Hungarian women, in a show called Wang Wang Wang, which is internet, internet, internet. I typically will install it on a mobile device and so people can come in and they're actually can witness it because I post every day. So it's a performance in real time. So that brings me to the art portion, which I'm thinking I still have time for. I started a project as a result of this. The archive began because my research partner, Gabrielle DeSetti, he's actually a media anthropologist specifically focused on Chinese internet. And he was the one that introduced me to all of this. We started a band and then we started researching. But he proposed that we write a paper looking at Chinese selfies initially. And so I spent, that's how the archive started actually two years ago. And I spent eight months with just collecting selfies. During that time I realized I wanted to understand more because there was all this amazing stuff happening. And that's how it became what it is. And so the archive now is about 20,000 or more images. So it's a small data, but it's very telling and revealing as you saw earlier. And this influenced, I was already researching artists dealing with technology in China because I come from an internet background, tech art background. And the Chinese internet is a whole new landscape. And I was getting bored of the Western web. And I thought to myself, man, this is a whole new place that we don't know anything about. And I bet there's some interesting art happening too. So I moved to China four years ago to do this. And then started this archive two years ago, which is basically the pairing of the archive and the work with artists is, excuse me, important because I have a very in-depth cultural perspective of what's happening in China that influences, for influences in how I can understand the art and what's being expressed and why. And that's very important to understand. So I started Netizenet. And it's actually a play, Netizen, which is citizen and internet, came out of 1984. Not the book, but life. And at the time it was a word coined in the West for unified web freedom. But for some reason they used this word to describe Chinese internet users because when internet sort of entered China, it was a unified experience. It was the first time the country could sort of connect across all over the place and sort of voice and share their ideas and opinions and anything else. And so this is why they were referring to, they refer to Chinese netizens, okay? So a play on that. To make the Chinese name, because I need a Chinese name, it's Wang Yao Wang, which is just internet friend network. And what that actually translates to, it's referring to the early years of BBS boards and chat groups, right? A lot of people made very, very close friends on the internet in the early years. So with Netizenet, I'm looking at a lot of things and I started commissioning. New Hive was supporting some of this. I'm moving a lot into interviews. My biggest thing is I like to interview these artists and ask things like, when do you remember hearing about the internet? What's the first piece of technology? I'm very interested in creating a timeline of experience with the history of technology in China also. So my first artist was Ying Miao and she did a nice little show online for us and she named it Meanwhile in China, which is a Western meme, but so in love, we'll never feel tired again. And it's quite, so tired is spelled wrong and that was a chinglish accident that she made and then we decided to keep it because it was very appropriate. So she did, I'm not gonna talk about all of it, but she did one piece where we ended up splitting the screen. This is a video that comes from this meme. There was a meme with a kid born in the 90s who wrote like, so in love, we'll never feel tired again and ended up becoming viral. And then somebody, this is an example of a website called billybilla.com, which allows people to stream their own videos and then comments just run across. It's very interactive, right? So she splits it, it's actually in Youku and in YouTube. And so when you're in China, you can't see the YouTube side. And when you're in the Western world, Youku loads very, very slowly. So this piece specifically is straddling both internet at the same time. If you wanna see it, I'll give you the website later and you can go through it. So the one thing, actually, the first piece that she did dealing with the internet was in 2007 called the blind spot. She spent three months taking a dictionary, Chinese dictionary and a list of Google censored words and blanked them out. So this is the first piece I'd ever found that was really directly dealing with what the internet was in China at that time. That was in 2007, which leads me to Fenya. She was doing some screen paintings in 2008. And this one is particularly interesting because if you notice, it's a Google CNN. In 2010, Google left China because they were not into the censorship issue or censorship laws that were going into place and they routed everything to Hong Kong. So this is a really interesting piece because it's documenting a screen that no longer exists for a very specific reason. And she's gaming. So that interactivity thing is a really big thing to understand about the Chinese internet. It's an experience. This is Wei Yi Li and she's quite interesting because she is the first artist who's also curating works online. She has an online gallery called, sorry, called bigbadgallery.com. She does some really interesting projects. So if you wanna know it later, ask me. So this piece is called Oriental Giants and she actually, what she does, I can try to access it. She might not load. We've been having trouble with loading. Basically what she did is sort of like an open source crowd surfing project where she's trying to get people to send her images and information about giant Mao Zedong statues around the country and she's creating a statistical map. Ironically on Google Maps of things of these giant Mao statues all over the country. And this is interesting. So Katie's is actually an American and she's working on a project called Human Spam. The biggest experience with mobile device is the way that information is flooded. People are so connected, you don't ever not have your phone. You never log off literally. So she was doing some pieces where she was actually spamming everyone and like only regurgitating information. And this is a play on sort of when you lose the search engine actually and you don't have that browser to go explore the internet and you're functioning mostly in something like WeChat. Everything becomes, oh, what happened? Did I press something? Yeah, I don't know. Well, so this is ah-ha-ha-ha. So it's kind of funny that it's laughing at us. I don't know what happened. It's... Yeah. Thanks, guys. Let me find where I was. Anyways, so her work with Human Spam is basically this idea that if you're... You know, if you lose the search engine then basically you're losing like that exploratory factor to go and find things. And so what happens is information just gets like regurgitated. It's in cycles. So it kind of feels like this. You're just seeing all this same stuff over and over again. That's kind of what it feels like on the Chinese internet now. This is something she did. I can play very quickly playing on this. And it just shows you the interactivity. So she types in... She pastes from somebody else's miss you. And this is... See? When you say certain things, stuff flies down the screen. So like I said, the experience is very much about interactivity, which means the virtual world is a very special place and means you're always connected together and never logging off. So that virtual world experience and that real life experience are exactly the same thing. That's very different from the West. We may think that we're always logged on, but not like this. I promise you. So this is Aspartime. They did another piece commissioned by New Hive for Net-a-Cinette. And they're playing on this idea. It's called Nine Computer Exercises for the 21st Century Online Digital Interactive Era, which is a great title. And it's based off of this idea in Chinese. There's daily routine and daily practice. It's a part of the culture. And so they're sort of playing on this digital era and the idea of how do we exist when this is that reality, when we are always interacting, when we're always online. This is an example of the piece. So it gives you instructions. Each slide gives you instructions. So, yeah. They also did some pieces. We're using Taobao, where they were called ideas, and they would ask people to make art for them. You need to find a bunch of stuff the same weight, like a pile of books, a bunch of pork, and like weigh them and take photographs for them. This one's quite funny. They're asking someone to buy this piece by and make it themselves. And what they have to do is get us like a stage smoke machine and like stage this whole scene and take photographs and videos and then like send it back. Again, that's an artist playing off of that interactivity. I asked them about Cheng Yu as a traditional idiom or poem in four characters, and I asked them to make one up for the Chinese internet. So they have xuamiya mozuo, which is mysterious. You can't imagine how deep it is, difficult to guess or comprehend. This is a Chinese person's perspective of the internet in China. This is happening right now by performance artists Beyo and Funa Ye, which we saw earlier. She did that Google CN painting. They're doing it through an app called 51rebo.com, which is like a domestic live streaming so you can have your own like reality show. What I want to show you, these are some screenshots. So what you're seeing here is that virtual and real world paired together. So they took, actually this is a friend who did this. This is an image she took at the studio while they were recording. And she realized it didn't have that right aesthetic. So she went and blurred it and she used xu-su-mu-mu and basically blurred the whole thing to make it feel right. And she did this in the digital realm because then she could share it properly on the internet. This is actually just what the scene in the live broadcastings actually look like. Okay, so that physical, that virtual, they're all real. They're the same thing. This is what the app looks like when you're featuring it. And again, it's interactive. Everyone's bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, giving you images, giving you content. It's super sensory overload. So Wang Niu Wan is interesting for her quote. I'm sorry I'm rushing. I kind of over-prepared. I asked her what she considered herself and she said that she saw herself in different physical forms and identities in the virtual world. And she sees herself actually becoming less and less in real life and more integrated online. So I'm seeing this consistently with artists working with technology. The body is losing the entire meaning. Identity is losing meaning and the virtual existence or the reinvention or creation that comes with virtual life is primarily what they're sort of moving into. Which if you think about what we saw earlier, digitizing the real life, like that seamlessness of virtual and physical and the way that something like WeChat is everything, it's centralized. You can have boyfriends and girlfriends and get taxis, pay your bills. So that leads me to Wang Xin thinking about that virtual world. She did an 8 hertz hypnosis lab thinking about that mind focusing on that mind and actually losing the body. Also looks very chinter-net right inside. So she does hypnosis and she's actually moving more into VR with Oculus now. And I asked her about what this experimentation is about and what she wants to create and she's working on at the moment is VR hypnosis. She wants to actually basically have an entire experience that's entirely mental and dimensional on many different levels of perception. It's not just hypnosis, it's about going and sort of figuring out the issues or dealing with issues, right? So that leads me to my conclusion. This is also from the archive. What I'm leading to is that this is actually an example for all of us of what's sort of happening in the world as we continue to advance with mobile technology. It's not a doomsday thing, it's just a reality we have to consider about what this means in legislature, in choices, in production of materials, all of these things. So basically this says that the internet is like opium 100 years ago, 100 years now, 100 years later. And this is made by a Chinese person. However, it's in a traditional It's not simplified Chinese, it's traditional. So I don't know if this could actually be in Hong Kong or Taiwan maybe, or very far south, because in mainland we use simplified usually. You know, China is the first country in the world to actually officially say that internet addiction is a serious psychological problem. I see it every day. Again, we have that pairing side of the digitizing of real life and real life wanting to become a cyborg. These are also from my archive. What I'm trying to say is that in this massive archive I'm seeing these trends emerging. I'm seeing how life is becoming digital and virtual and less and less physical. And as we can see here he's already ready. And he's like thinking about it. He's like, I'll try this on. So what do we do with this idea? Well, I think there comes a little of this first. I think first we need to keep a sense of humor. And as we can see from a lot of some of the memes and some of the content that I've shown, the Chinese internet has a great sense of humor, actually. So even considering everything that is happening and that it's a walled garden, it is flourishing. It has its own digital landscape and it's affecting creativity in very fascinating ways. And that's actually what I am most interested about my studies. It's looking at how do limitations actually begin to emerge new ideas or experiences. And the reality is the entire world is digital. And so we all need to be considering what direction we take with this. And I suppose it's thank you in Chinese. All right. We have plenty of time left for questions and answers. So if you have questions about the very interesting Chinese internet, please come to one of the soil mics in the room. So everybody can hear you. And I think we'll start with a question from the interwebs. Yes. The internet would like to know, is it common for Baidu to track and analyze one user's or web user's behavior for statistics like Google analytics does or like it's done in the western world, I guess. Sorry. I didn't understand. The question is, is it common for Baidu to track and analyze one user's behavior? Yeah. I don't know. I don't study Baidu. I mean, I study user interactivity in WeChat. So I'm specifically looking at how people exist in this app. So that's not my specialty. I'm sorry. Thank you. All right. Then we move to the mic over there. Is this on? Thanks for this. Yeah. So I'm going to talk about where children who were addicted to gaming or just the internet in general were putting these boot camps, military style boot camps in order to break them of the habit, could you speak a little bit more of how the culture, the older generation and the younger generation are kind of interacting over the internet and technology and their creativity as well. So there are a lot of older people that are interacting in WeChat for sure. So it's becoming commonplace. And part of that is because most business is done, a lot of business, not most. I'll say a lot of business is done through WeChat. The centralization of the app also plays into this virtual, like, constant virtual experience because you can pay your rent. You can have a virtual girlfriend and boyfriend, a virtual secretary. You can use people nearby for hooking up. You can chat, video chat, group chat. There's retailers, people sell everything. So in terms of that interactivity I see mostly like older people, they tend to be businessmen or retailers. So they're using it specifically for e-commerce. With younger people it's definitely more about sharing and broadcasting. Quite funny, I had a retailer WeChat friend and she put me in a mother's group of 100 Chinese women once. And it was immensely fascinating. It was like every morning at 7am they're all talking about what they're going to feed their kids, what kind of detergent they should use, like where can they buy this or that. So the group chats are really functioning as discussion platforms for people to connect and solve. Solve issues in their life. And also to share information. Does that help? Yeah, great, thank you. Cool. Then we'll just stick with that, Mike. Your question please. Thank you for a great talk. It was very interesting. I have a question. Could you please say a bit about online dating in China? What is the perspective? How do people, both men and women know something about it? I mean, in your study. From the perspective of a foreign woman? No, I mean, professionally you do study internet, so that's what I meant actually. I don't know personally, I don't use any Chinese dating apps. They are used, I mean, with my experience, when I first started the archive, actually my profile was a Chinese woman, like a very beautiful Chinese woman. And so I was doing this because I really wanted to see what kind of natural interactions were happening. And sure enough, two years ago it was just lists and lists of men contacting me. Very rarely was it women. So I'm finding that definitely this people nearby function is used for dating and while I've been in Germany and other parts of the world using it, I see the same thing. Because I don't know that a lot of Germans maintain people nearby function in Germany for Chinese business because I'm finding it's mostly Germans or Turkish or Middle Easterns and that tells me it looks like it's more interactive for dating. In Texas it was weirder because my profile is still ambiguous and they thought I was Chinese so it was a lot of white men contacting me in broken, chinglish, like in broken characters I think thinking I'm Chinese. In terms of other areas I'm not familiar I don't use Chinese dating apps so I can only give my perspective so yeah. Is that okay? Perfect, then switch over to the other side of the room. I would like to ask you if you're sure that you haven't been trolled maybe by the culture because if I was looking at my timeline and the regular timelines of maybe professional Twitterers that would be the same cultural discrepancy I would say. So you're saying that I'm trolling? No, no, no. Being trolled. Yeah, it's like image board culture compared to maybe Facebook or well maybe like 9Gag, it's a bit more intense maybe. I mean again it comes back to the purposes for use are going to be different in China because the cultural context is different so if the apps used for centralization of most experiences the reason I know that the men contacting me are interested in hookup is because of the things that they say. No, I mean Did I misunderstand? No, I didn't reflect on that in the talk itself in general. About, I'm sorry? About the talk itself. Oh, the talk itself? About trolling? No, the images you showed maybe they were just not serious. Well yeah, I mean a lot of the images are incredibly playful but that's a part of the culture that's a part of online experience is not being serious and humorous. Yeah, I guess. It's a part of the meme culture. I'm sorry I don't understand the question. Alright, then we'll maybe move to another question from Twitter, IRC. IRC would like to know if you have experience or comments on Chinese image boards. Chinese like BBS boards? Yeah. I can't talk about that. Sorry. For a number of reasons. I will say this I will say this. From what I understand like many of the artists that I interviewed about their early experiences like BBS boards were the first sort of point of interaction. And you didn't have streaming sites in the beginning so everything was sort of shared with links and links and people would create portals outside of the Chinese web and send links to share certain kinds of content through BBS boards. So I guess that was made for Chinese men who want to pick up white girls and so they give you they all talk about giving each other advice of how to get a foreign girl for Chinese men. So it's, yeah. Sounds nice. Another question from... I guess that is your dating question also. Hang on a second. I think your mic is not on yet. Just repeat the question please. Do you think that the opposite side like if there is a Chinese person doing the same thing for the western internet? I don't know. Actually I haven't. Is there? Does anyone know? I think it would be very hard because for me to collect this amount of image you have to have a database and a function that allows you to collect images in this way that's location based. So the fact that it's a radius of people when I turn on people nearby means that the characteristics the kind of images I'm getting are based on location. So when I was in Korea I'm finding images that relate to why Chinese people are in Korea. A lot of it's like buying makeup so there's tons of piles of hotel rooms with makeup everywhere in suitcases. Now imagine if I went to places like Africa where China is actually investing in infrastructure and you have a lot of Chinese workers building railroads things like this I would also have a very particularly location based sense content that tells me what's happening in Africa in relationship to China and that's what's quite interesting is we have this idea of the Chinese internet being something only based in China but like I said WeChat is still the Chinternet. It's still Chinese internet with characteristics of Chinese culture it's related and it's based in China and it's mobile and so that begins to show us actually what China has on a much larger global scale because it's a location based feature. Okay alright then switch over there. I would expect that people interact quite differently online depending on audience whether they're talking to their work colleagues or their family or their friends could you maybe talk about how that affects the visual styles and how they behave? Yeah I mean I have people in my feed that I don't want to see things so you can actually block people from seeing your moments and this is the really interesting function of the fact that WeChat is also group chats and individual chats so what actually happens is these individualized groups exist and they're formatted or they become about topics or a group of people with shared interests and so that becomes the you know putting everything in little boxes that's part of it. I've also talked to young Chinese students and there's I know a few that they use QQ more with their friends and they use WeChat more with their parents and that seems to be the difference in platform allows them to separate that as well Yeah Okay perfect Thanks for your talk I have a short question Did you experience any situation when a Chinese person was so surprised by let's say kind of western content? Did you show anything which is special for let's say western internet to the Chinese person and it seemed so weird as this stuff seemed weird for us? I'm trying to think because you know a lot of the kind of people I would show that to would be artists or like very open minded creative people and most of them already have VPNs most of them have already studied abroad typically because it's an education class thing I think that's the other thing we have to consider is that when we talk about people who are really walled in this world garden they're of a certain class because when you do have a certain education background or you come from a certain demographic you have opportunity to travel and so you get experience on western webs and then if you come back to China you want to stay connected to your new western friends so you have things like VPNs or you just use WeChat because WeChat you know the reason I use it is because it's the quickest most reliable way to stay in touch without me having to use that slow VPN so that's also something to consider it sort of like jumps over that wall a little bit thanks okay you have the mic to the right please yeah also thanks a lot for the talk it was super interesting that you showed this kind of parallel internet but then in terms of the very similar to well western that art and how much do you think these two influence each other yeah because ultimately a lot of these artists who are working the art market landscape in China is still very very traditional so artists who are working with technology or the internet are the much younger generation and so they're already a little internet savvy and are familiar with the western webs so yeah of course they've been influenced so what happens is like we have a global aesthetic now across the web we all sort of adopt you can see this if you go to like most cities hipster culture exists everywhere in Africa in South America in China like so there is sort of a global aesthetic and so those influences still exist in China which is why you're seeing some similarities I would say the differences come in the platforms themselves or the cultural context for example their personal influences or something like using WeChat that are very Chinese specific but yeah okay I see one more question from the other side last image that you showed to me was kind of very political in the sense that it referenced the great the century of great humiliation and then it referenced like traditional imagery no traditional lettering could you talk more about the political context of that image or if there was one I mean I don't see the political context most of the time in images like that because I'm like images like that are very common and they're commonly posted like Chinese people use meme like imagery to sort of comment on those kinds of things and so it's almost like a solidarity factor it's like this is the situation that we're in what let's laugh about it and that's a part of feeling like we all get it now what's going to I mean what's happening I think there's you know it's a country that's changing incredibly fast and when you have an economy that moves that fast it's a little bit ahead of society in terms of the way of thinking and so there's like lag I think there was what Alvin told future shock I don't know if you've ever read this book it's this idea of like you have the people who are like ahead and then there's this this society that's moving at a certain speed and certain technological advances or societal things are ahead of us and then humans are not quite ready for it and so it becomes this like shock of the future at the speed I sometimes feel like that in China sometimes I really feel like I'm existing in an alternative future and I think everyone feels this and it's going by very it's really really fast and so what happens is it ends up being translated into like endless endless memes like this that also talk about politics and that's the easiest way to talk about politics is with humor that's yeah thanks sure so I don't see any more questions in the room but we have another one from the internet the internet would like to know what is your favorite Chinese cinematic movie my current Chinese favorite Chinese cinematic movie I don't I don't like Chinese movies that's the truth I'm sorry okay yeah then there's another room question I was wondering in terms of censorship and this being a very big platform if you have any data on how things are censored on on any topic of that yeah so some background on me I actually I gripped in Saudi Arabia in my early childhood but my parents are Americans so when you're a foreigner in Saudi Arabia in the 80s you're monitored pretty extremely so I grip with a very like high awareness for this and so self censorship is something very natural to me which is also why I was interested in the Chinese internet generally censorship happens with the person first like it's really a there's parts of like the internet for example they realize very fast that in Weibo that if you you know typed certain text it could easily code could be written to basically censor that very quickly right so to get creative they realized oh you could have a JPEG of text and this could spread around really fast before it was taken down so that innovation there's a lot of that comes out is this creative innovation to deal with the situation it plays on language it plays on formats and then it plays in memes again these memes sort of become something that generate the solidarity of experience so yeah it always starts with self censorship to be honest thanks okay so I don't see any more questions and we are almost out of time so thanks again Michelle