Writings

Instituting a Format Border

Small-Gauge Projectors in Socialist China

What is in a format? In this media archaeology project, I focus on the materiality of obsolete small-gauge (8.75mm and 16mm) cinema in socialist China and discover that, surprisingly, the portable projectors not only expedite but more often constrain media flows. Instead of conditioning democratic, decentralized guerilla politics or producing experimental cinema culture, small-gauge cinema alienated filmmakers from the masses and enabled the authorities to regulate film circulation. Small-gauge projectors are border-making apparatus.

From Closed World to Open Machines

CAPTCHAs as Mechanisms of Extraction and Control

[Abstract to be added]

Infinite Minds, Infinite Notions

Knowledge Management, Alienation, and Acceleration

What happens to knowledge in an era of acceleration? Taking the unprecedented popularity of knowledge management software (e.g., Notion, Obsidian, and Zotero) as examples, this paper argues that we are embedded in a new mode of alienation whereby managing knowledge has passed for a form of producing new knowledge.

What is the Worst Programming Language Like?

[Subtitle — possibly related to aesthetics, politics or performativity of code]

[Abstract to be added]