2020

Title: Unerasable Characters II

Autor: Winnie Soon

The project collects unheard voices in the form of censored/erased (permission denied) 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 Hong Kong University. 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 that scrapes the erased “tweets” from Weiboscope on a daily basis, the project presents the living archives in a grid format. Each tweet is deconstructed into a character-by-character display occupying a flashing unit for a limited period. The duration of the visibility of each ‘tweet’ is computed from the actual time the post was present on Weibo before being removed from the platform, transforming from a busy cacophony of voices and characters to a silent and empty space, marked by the disappearance of the characters. New archives which populate the work continue to be fetched endlessly.

 http://www.siusoon.net/projects/unerasablecharacters-ii