real time

The project explores the politics of erasure and the temporality of voices within the context of digital authoritarianism. Unerasable Characters II presents the sheer scale of unheard voices by technically examining and culturally reflecting the endlessness, and its wider consequences, of censorship that is implemented through technological platforms and infrastructure.

The project collects unheard voices in the form of censored/erased (permission denied status via the official API) text, including emojis, symbols, English and Chinese characters, which is based on one of the biggest social media platform in China called Weibo. A daily scraping script is used to fetch those text via Weiboscope, a data collection and visualization project, developed by Dr. Fu King Wa from The University of Hong Kong, in which the system has been regularly sampling timelines of a set of selected Chinese microbloggers who have more than 1,000 followers or whose posts are frequently censored.

Consisting of a custom-software (written in Python and p5.js) that scrapes the erased “tweets” from Weiboscope on a daily basis, the project presents the archives in a grid format. Each tweet is deconstructed into a character-by-character display that occupies a flashing unit for a limited period. The duration of each ‘tweet’ is computed from the actual visible time on Weibo, and the visual will transform from a busy canvas to an empty one with all disappearance of text. The program will then fetch a new set of archives and the cycle will repeat endlessly. It takes an average of 4 hours per cycle to empty the screen.

Unerasable Characters II raises questions regarding not only data capture from a corporational perspective, but also the matters of who might be the readers in digital platforms like Weibo, and even the wider influential audio and web conference platform like Zoom, where online events were being censored globally. The project further points to the operations of censorship that requires different levels of collaboration between corporations, states, human labours, the intelligence of machines and algorithms, but more importantly is to examine the contested notions of "violation of policies" (rule of law) as the seemingly common argument of corporations, as well as wider issues of censorship and the threats to free speech and academic freedom.

The series of projects called Insertados en Tiempo real (Inserted in Real Time), began in 2001. These projects raise the question of the definition of art and the limits between a performance and a real-life situation. The name "inserted" translates the intention these works have of interrupting, questioning or twisting real situations in real time. All inserted were played by actors (professional or non-professional, actors in the sense that they act following certain instructions) and function in several contexts, not necessarily art exhibition contexts (Source: Collection FracLorraine).

This British mockumentary consisted of a (fictional) website documenting a (fictional) tv crew who were making a documentary about the solar eclipse in 1999. Readers who signed up in 1999, could see the web site develop from day to day, and were "accidentally" also signed up to receive private emails between the characters. As the eclipse approached the story became more and more mysterious and frightening. Murders happened and readers were able to join in the detective work. After the initial run, the website and emails were archived, but the website was no longer available by 2003. The Internet Archive has the cover page archived but no more. When the website was still online, readers could access the emails by clicking the "admin only" link which gave access to mock unix accounts for the tv crew.

written in java this applet gets a lot of rss feeds (in the french zone) in real time and composes, in real time also and as a work in progress, with them visual poems; each of the results are exported to my local computer in order to finally get, at the end of the 2013 year, some kind of archive of the "news" by which we are invaded each day---- and that we very often forget the day after! - it 's a kind of work about our "media-collective-memory". The words are treated in relationship with frequency in the news: the biggest are the most frequents. But not allways the most importants...