ocat

I’m a child of the internet. One of my earliest memories is being sat behind my family’s gray Dell laptop, Sesame Street mouse in one hand, playing CD-ROM games. Because of my ability to access the internet freely, something that has always lingered in my mind is places like China and their “Great Firewall”, a technology that restricts the ability to use the internet and access websites that we consider to be normal such as YouTube, Gmail, and Wikipedia. 

Due to my interest and background in technology, a work of art that stuck out to me was Guo Cheng’s “The Net Wanderer,” an ongoing project that tracks down the physical boxes containing the hardware that keeps the firewall up. The project, which has been going on since 2019, has taken Cheng all around China, with his website only showing 40 photos. 

Something that shocked me was where these boxes, which trap over a billion people into not being able to access the world wide web, aren’t stored in an underground silo or behind heavily guarded buildings but rather on street corners or telephone poles. 

The work at the museum, which consisted of a video and a collection of photos showing the hardware behind the firewall, felt like a perfect way to explain everything. It was very straight to the point, which grasped my attention. I watched the film in its entirety twice and I was fascinated by the topics covered in it. It changed the way that I’ve been looking at street poles and random telephone boxes in and around Shanghai. 

I feel like this work touched me deep down. I have very vocally been open about everyone everywhere having free and open access to the internet, and I knew that coming to Shanghai my opinions would be considered wrong or invalid. To see what has been keeping people away from having the ability to use the world wide web hit me on a level that I didn’t imagine. I feel like, out of most of the artwork on display, this one had a meaning and story that was and is so important, and shows something that interferes with the everyday lives of billions of people.