GFWlist (2010)

In GFWlist the artist, blogger, and free thinker Xu Wenkai, alias aaajiao, reveals the addresses of websites banned and blocked on the Chinese Internet. They are listed on a roll of paper issuing endlessly from a thermal printer mounted on a tall black slab. As it is forbidden to publish these Web addresses in China, aaajiao is committing an act of civil disobedience with this installation.

The tall black monolith is familiar from Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssee of 1968. At the beginning of the film, the monolith appears suddenly at a water hole in the desert where early humans are fighting over the last water resources. Like some extraterrestrial of advanced intelligence, the monolith in the film triggers epic changes in evolution: by playing with and then smashing dry animal bones the early humans discover that these can be used as weap- ons, and they then use them to bash in the skulls of their rivals at the water hole. In Kubrick’s film this is how technological development and civilization begins. 

Video Documentary:

ZKM | Institute for Visual Media

Camera: Sarah Binder, Jonas Pickel, Martina Rotzal, Christina Zartmann
Editing: Johannes Maag
Voice: Rabea Rahmig