Video: Unerasable Images

Artist’s Note: The creative project, Unerasable Images, is a collection of my screenshots that are taken over a year in 2017 from Google search engine with the Chinese characters “六四” as the image keyword search. The keyword is equivalent to the numerical values of 6 and 4, referring to the student-led Tiananmen Square Protest of 1989, around the date of June Fourth, in Beijing, China. The collected screenshots are reappropriated to remove all the resulted images as negative white space except the colored Lego Tank Man.

Within the context of Chinese Internet, censorship is implemented in social media and search engines, yet some of the content is not immediately censored but take some time to be erased. Therefore, the censored content may leak out somewhere. I am particularly interested in a specific image that had been successfully uploaded in 2013 on a famous Chinese web portal. The image was a Lego recreation of the famous scene with the “Tank Man” blocking the way of the tanks. Although it was censored and erased on all online platforms subsequently in China, this image, after four years, is still searchable and it occasionally appears on the first few rows of Google image search.

Over the year of taking screenshots in different countries through various screens, the default search result page was personalized that was based on my geographical locations and many other parameters to structure the responsive image grid and the corresponding priority of image sequences.

The project aims to create a temporal networked space where the colored image(s) move within and beyond the screenshot’s frame, examining the geopolitics of data circulation, internet censorship, the materiality of image (re)production through complex entanglement of human and nonhuman parameters.

Unerasable Images