The creative response to this chapter is Straw Dog - an effigy of the ceremonial straw dogs referenced in the verse that would be revered for the duration of a traditional ceremony and then discarded.
Straw Dog is constructed from shredded screenshots of notices I received reporting the deletion of several of my social media posts on WeChat and the Chinese version of TikTok.
The first instances were the deletion of social media posts advertising my project and exhibition BitMing, presumably for containing the word ‘cryptocurrency’. Later, the live streaming of performance work A Line Made By Kneeling, was terminated, which violated the rules due to my being a “non-Chinese Mainland host”.
The binary indifference of algorithmic censorship is one where nuance and humanity are regarded as the straw dogs. But as the bellows are emptied, the fire is fed. The very act of censorship simply highlights the bias and agenda of a system.
