Unerasable Characters II
Winnie Soon (Hong Kong)
The project explores the politics of erasure and the temporality of voices within the context of digital authoritarianism. It presents the sheer scale of unheard voices by technically examining and culturally reflecting the endlessness, and its wider implications, of censorship that is implemented through technological platforms and infrastructure.
Artist’s Statement
The project collects unheard voices in the form of censored/erased text, including emojis, symbols, English and Chinese characters from Weibo. Consisting of a customsoftware that scrapes the erased “tweets” on a daily basis, the project presents the archives in a grid format. Each tweet is deconstructed into a characterby-character display that occupies a flashing unit. Since the duration of each “tweet” is computed from the actual visible time, the visual will transform from a busy canvas to an empty one. Such a cycle will repeat endlessly by fetching another set of archives.
Credits: Dr. Fu King-wa, Weiboscope research project
