User:Jonas Lund/thematic1.2
Trimester 2, 2012
Description
Behind The Great Firewall Of China
The piece Behind The Great Firewall Of China is an ongoing attempt to break the Guinness world book of records record of most comments on a single Facebook post by using a simple piece of javascript code, which automatically posts comments to the post on an interval of one comment per two seconds. The current record holders are a group of 107 people located around the US and the record is 1,001,192 comments.
The piece was started as I was going on a trip to Beijing, and would be unable to use Facebook due to China’s firewall restrictions, as a way to maintain an online presence during my stay in China by surrendering my actions to that of an algorithm.
Behind The Great Firewall Of China is at the same time a performance of the transmission and an archive of itself. As the comments slowly grow it’s occupying the news ticker of my Facebook network, the piece is broadcasting itself, not only in the shape of comments on the post but also in the form of an omnipresent entity, taking up seemingly pointless space, merged within typical Facebook interactions.
By initiating a performance that in the best case scenario would take approximately 2 million seconds to complete (around twenty three days) I wanted to look at the performance of time within a networked system. Do we perceive the passing of time in a social media network? How does time manifest itself in an ongoing, never sleeping computational system?
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Behind The Great Firewall Of China
