Blockchain Chicken Farm and Grass Mud Horses
with Xiaowei Wang and An Xiao Mina
Register for Zoom link here! [link no longer available]
Or stream on YouTube at: [link no longer available]
Video, Transcript, and Review Now Online
For the video of the seminar, click here. [link no longer available]
For the transcript of the video, click here. [link no longer available]
Join us for a conversation about trans-Pacific internet cultures and social change with Xiaowei Wang and An Xiao Mina! Xiaowei will discuss their forthcoming book, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside (FSG, 2020), an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world. An Xiao Mina will discuss their recent book, From Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power (Beacon Press, 2019), a global exploration of internet memes as agents of pop culture, politics, protest, and propaganda on- and offline, and how they will save or destroy us all.
About Xiaowei Wang
Xiaowei Wang is a technologist, a filmmaker, an artist, and a writer. The creative director at Logic magazine, their work encompasses community-based and public art projects, data visualization, technology, ecology, and education. Their projects have been finalists for the Index Design Awards and featured by The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, VICE, and elsewhere. They are working toward a PhD at UC Berkeley.
About An Xiao Mina
Researcher An Xiao Mina served as a contributing editor for the book Ai Weiwei: Spatial Matters. A 2016-17 research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, she was also a recent 2016 Knight Visiting Fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where she studied online language barriers and their impact on journalism.
With The Civic Beat, a global research collective focused on the creative side of civic technology, they have led workshops and exhibitions in spaces such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Mozilla Festival Open Artist Studio (curated by the V&A Museum and Tate Modern), the Asian Art Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, the ACLU and RightsCon, and they’ve been producing what Net Monitor called “the cutest map of the internet” — a world map of animal memes in collaboration with over a dozen internet culture researchers.
Mina is author of Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power (Beacon Press, January 2019). Kirkus Reviews called it an “incisive and illuminating study,” and Booklist described it as a “thoughtful and engaging look at the complex role and power of memes in global politics and social movements.”
Accessibility
BCNM events are free and open to the public. All of our events for the 2020-2021 academic year will be held on Zoom in English, in Pacific Standard Time (PST). We provide live-captioning in Zoom and offer a separate Streamtext window for live-captioning with options to customize text size and display. We strive to meet any additional access and accommodation needs. Please contact info.bcnm [at] berkeley.edu with requests or questions.
BCNM is proud to make conversations with leading scholars, artists, and technologists freely available to the public. Please help us continue this tradition by making a tax-deductible donation today. If you are in the position to support the program, we suggest $5 per event, or $100 a year.