Cat and Mouse Game
HD video - 10 minutes
installation - metal, paper, sponge
Censorship is not a one-way practice. Anti-censorship activity arises spontaneously.
At the center of the stage are those Chinese characters as the convergence point of the multi-party contest. When censorship takes place, the phrases and words do not just vanish. Their disappearance has a ripple effect that triggers the establishment of new entanglement with other words and phrases in the universe of expression.
Sometimes the expressions people use or create to replace the censored ones can be even more creative, vivid, and accurate. They are the flower of evil. But this flower is just a flash in the pan because the iteration of replacement is not infinite. Those vocabularies’ meaning, usage, and perception are inevitably distorted. Most importantly, censorship will always succeed in cutting off the circulation of information.
VIDEO
When I analyze the way people resist censorship, I see the link between anti-censorship and poem writing: Both practices make roundabout of the object they describe. Though the poet detours to reach a greater expression, anti-censorship reacts to make communication possible again. Free rhetoric and wordplay are the core method. From one perspective, writing a poem is a word or language game, and so do censorship, as new sets of rules of language usage are created in these process. I transformed this power dynamic of resistance versus censorship into a performance sculpture: it is a self- and anti- censorship practice on a poem.
Through this poem blog sculpture, the violence and cruelty censorship exert on those characters are shown, not only the censored ones that are exiled or castrated but also the ones used as replacements. Their signified are contaminated; the signifiers are out of shape. It's not a critical deconstructive bottom-up practice, but a top-down suppression that causes communication rupture and further atomization of the society.
According to the censorship
mechanism, keywords and the
combination of keywords will be
detected and deleted.
so firstly, the poem was split into
phrases.
Secondly, I need to find other
phrase to replace the censored
ones. I used either rhetorical or
wordplay technique that is
rooted in the Chinese context
and this specific poem context.
The first iteration makes it a
new poem.
After three times
of iterations, the content can
not be recognized anymore.