Friday 8 August 2014

Ai Wei Wei | The Blog as a 'Social Sculpture' (as seen by Hans Ulrich Obrist)




Paper Trai(n), 2014
Classon Av., Brooklyn 
 Iphone Instagram Format


I first setup a blogger account in 2010 and 4 years later, my first post. What pushed me over and into the untamed garden was this book - 'Ai Wei Wei Speaks'. In it, through conversations with Hans Ulrich Obrist, you get a glimpse into the artist's thought process, and his fascination with the internet, and blogging in particular. Given his country's dark history, and whose present condition is perhaps still grey, the mere act of arraigning words and images and sounds is an expression of freedom- an act against the state- let alone one that is curated by arguably one of the biggest artist alive today.

The medium is the message. 

What then is our message, for those of us who do not come from such a society? Why do we blog? Born and brought up in the costal city of Madras in Southern India, and then studying abroad in England for 4 years, and now living in New York, I have been fortunate to bounce through the liberal side of the wall. This blog is then perhaps an attempt to confront a medium that has come to define the world we live in - The internet; a city to end all cities, whose center, as described by the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio,  will be nowhere and circumference everywhere.

The rest, the real,
pushed away into the 
periphery; blurry. 


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