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Meanwhile In China

Yang Mu & Sai Bao – Matthias Schäfer (DE), Sofia Braga (IT)

Douyin 抖音, internationally known as TikTok, has become one of the world’s most successful apps and a leading platform for creating and sharing short videos. It was developed by Beijingbased Bytedance and is one of the few apps that has been successful outside the big firewall. To comply with Chinese law, Douyin is a completely independent app from TikTok. Although the user interface and logo look the same, the content is completely different and not accessible in the international version. The goal of this work is to explore and analyze this vast digital ecosystem from different perspectives: screenshots capture a moment in a rapidly changing environment, determined by Douyin’s artificially intelligent recommendation algorithm. These found images are then decontextualized without change to give visitors space and opportunity to think about them and gain insights into a delimited platform and its algorithms used to show you the most engaging content.

Screenshot TV

Stella Markidi (GR), Patricia Cadavid H. (CO)

*Screenshot TV* is an installation that invites visitors to watch a new genre of reality TV. Every few seconds, the TV shows another online screenshot, uploaded to a special website by anonymous people using a screenshot tool, so that the information can be shared by simply sending a URL. The URLs are usually sent privately, but are public and accessible to everyone. However, sometimes users upload screenshots that contain important and sensitive information and forget that the Internet is a virtual space with transparent walls.