Social Movements, Solidarity, and Expressing Grief Online: An Interview with An Xiao Mina
An Xiao Mina is an artist, author, and leading technologist and digital scholar. She is a contributing writer and consulting editor to Hyperallergic, and has written about the intersection of social media and art for The Atlantic, Wired, Design Observer, and as a columnist for Art21's Art 2.1:Creating on the Social Web. Mina is a research affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and a recent 2016 Knight Visiting Fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where she studied online language barriers and their impact on journalism. She is co-founder of The Civic Beat, a global research collective focused on the creative side of civic technology.
Mina recently sat down via Zoom with Krista Alba, Georgie Payne, and Yihsuan Chiu, emerging curators and recent graduates of the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) at Bard College, to explore the topics of her 2019 book —- Memes to Movements: How the World's Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power, which traces the intersections of digital uprisings across the globe and the ways in which Internet memes have shaped and informed pop culture, politics, protest, and propaganda on and off-line. Together, they discuss with Mina how her research has evolved since publishing, and how her text has served as a major point of overlap between the three of their individual research projects over the past year. Particularly looking at how the digital space has become a crucial tool for mobilizing social movements, building solidarity, and expressing grief.
Georgie Payne: I think it would be great to start with your 2019 book Memes to Movements: How the World's Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power. Can you reflect a little on how the book came to be and how you're thinking about that research in light of the pandemic and recent social justice movements?
An Xiao Mina: I started researching the intersection of art and social media back in 2008. I was looking at the role of Twitter, Facebook, and other semi-nascent and already established social media platforms. I was particularly interested in the work of Marina Abramovich, and the performative work that she was doing at MoMA. There’s this one component that was on video — live-streamed — and then all of the photos from the performance were uploaded to Flickr.
There was an interesting interaction where people were remixing the performance photos and creating their own art. In the context of social media, it wasn’t just about Marina Abramovich, but it was more about the community and people that she inspired who were doing remixed works. It seemed like social media was playing a key role. At the same time, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was using Twitter as a way to build community with people in China, even though it was banned. People were using VPNs to access it. One thing that interested me was that there was a lot of writing and focus on his installation work and his architectural work, but not as much writing about his social media. A few friends and I were curious, so we started translating the tweets to open up a dialogue about his creative practice: he was doing performative pieces, such as encouraging people to post pictures of sunflower seeds, or to state their real name (because most people were using pseudonyms).
“We’re entering a period where narratives, political views, and values are being debated through memes.”
And then around 2011, I started to notice the use of memes to talk about censored issues in China. This was around the time I started writing about “internet street art.” That’s where I saw an opening to write about politics intersecting with art and the internet. Fast forward to 2019 when the book came out — it landed during a very intense political time. Keep in mind, the book was published in 2019, but I had the manuscript in 2018. How do you write a book about memes with things changing so quickly? Any meme I wrote about in 2018 is frozen in time; meanwhile, things have continued to change and shift.
In the final part of the book, I wrote about this notion of “memetic contention,” of the fact that we’re entering a period where narratives, political views, and values are being debated through memes. And that’s not new. That's the story of media and power. But I do feel we’re in a period where we’re seeing power being negotiated. Memes become this one lens through which one can look at the whole story.
GP: That’s so interesting to think about the timeline of the production of your book in 2018 and 2019. Have you continued your research in light of this moment and have you considered how we’ve been using social media now? Has your research continued to evolve at this moment whereas you already said — everything is moving so rapidly?
“When people are negotiating power within the internet, where is that power derived from? ”
AXM: I’m not as active in that research as I used to be. I took a step back after the book and started reflecting on what I wanted to write and think about. In terms of my technology writing, it’s been about infrastructure and political issues. I wrote a piece that reframed how we might think about the Chinese internet, for instance. Over time, I became interested in these infrastructure issues.
And so we think about memes as the bottom-up part of the internet, right? How are people shaping culture and power? Of course over time, as I worked on the book, it became clear that people with power were also utilizing memes. That’s where the questions about infrastructural issues arose: how is the internet built, designed, and shaped, such that when people are negotiating power within the internet, where is that power derived from?
The internet isn’t a blank canvas, but instead is a place where the people who run Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba — rich individuals — have shareholders they’re accountable to. There are also governments that are keen to shape how the internet evolves.
More recently, I’ve gotten interested in the history of media, plagues, and pandemics. This names the way in which humor has played a key role, in these times, as a source of levity and finding connections, but also in the spread of misinformation about the virus. It’s an enormously complex subject but offers a rich field of exploration at this moment.
Krista Alba: In response to your comment about misinformation, I’m interested in the way you’re thinking about these larger digital ecosystems that perpetuate inaccuracies and false claims. You bring up Seema Yasmin’s term “MDMI” (mis-, dis-, and mal-, information), which is also referenced in Ryan Milner and Whitney Phillips’ article “The Internet Doesn’t Need Civility, It Needs Ethics.” Can you talk more about how these digital ecosystems might be affecting the pandemic?
“Where do we build the politics of the internet? ”
AXM: I think in general, I feel like that's where technology conversations need to go. That's one thing that's exciting about your work because, for you all, you're engaging with notions of justice and power in some form. When we think about the early days of the internet and the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, it represents this earlier narrative that the internet was an independent space — a space that is apolitical, free, or open-source. Not free as in free beer, but free as in free speech. What’s becoming super clear is that cyberspace, as John Perry Barlow conceived it, is interdependent. We have a lot of interlocking actors: private actors, individuals, governments, and inter-governmental organizations. All of these groups with their own interests are shaping how the internet evolves.
And so, when we say that the internet needs ethics, we say that it genetically already has ethics, and that was based loosely on California libertarianism. The internet was made with an individualistic sense of freedom. But, I think as we evolve our notions of the internet and our conversations around justice and power, the question now is: whose internet, and what are the kinds of ethics we want in that internet?
Yihsuan Chiu: I’m curious about how you’re thinking about the extensive criminalization of using social media for protest.
Physical action has been largely banned — because of the pandemic and because of the National Security Law in the Hong Kong Protests. The movement has shifted from offline to online, but at the same time, the government has increased surveillance on social media platforms in order to identify people. Many protesters are now hiding their identities, deleting friends on Facebook, staying anonymous, and using pseudonyms. What are your reflections on this?
AXM: I see it as a continuation of the shaping of the internet. Parallel to that California view, you have the evolution of the internet in China. It was almost always designed to have some sort of top-down authority. It has similar technical features to the California internet because they have to interact and interface, but the very design of the early Chinese internet reflected a different set of political values.
What’s happening in Hong Kong isn’t surprising. In the past few years, both in democratic and non-democratic settings, we’ve seen the increase of surveillance, the increase of disinformation tactics with bots and trolls, we’ve seen the rise of various political actions on social media — it’s all a reminder that the internet is not independent. In Memes to Movements, I talk about the concept of a digital plaza — I use the world plaza in particular because plazas are spaces of contention. They’re spaces of protest. But then we have incredible crackdowns on these protests that then follow.
I think we have to remember that political space is highly contentious because anywhere, where people gather, is contentious. So the question now, again, is where do we build the politics of the internet? Where do we build ethics and international understanding? Because somewhere between that “libertarian model” of the internet and the more authoritarian framework, there’s a centralized control vision of the internet. We need something else. I think there’s a tendency to say that the internet democratized media and expression, but we didn’t get democratic institutions or values baked in.
YC: We’re witnessing more self-regulating ethics, such as the protesters in Hong Kong who educate each other on internet safety. It’s incredible how they developed software and protocols for how to interact with each other, or how to share information. They’re building those ethics themselves.
AXM: Absolutely. Building ethics and also building tactics for negotiating power in space, right? If there’s a surveillance mechanism set up in social media, then blurring faces becomes one of the ways to resist that.
In the context of your research, I think exhibitions offer a different way to look at these power struggles —- that push and pull — because it’s all been done through the media. So exhibition in curation, in particular, makes a rich space for exploring how people are negotiating these issues.
GP: I find it interesting that people often speak about their social media presence as a “curated” version of themselves. How we share content online is a gesture at a certain political or individual identity, and also expresses a belonging to a larger collective action.
In the US context, I’m thinking about how the left and the right have been using social media for those ends, and how they’ve been organizing it through their social media presence, whether it’s sharing the location of rallies and calling for bodies in space. There’s a difference in how the right will openly identify themselves and make it very individualistic. They’re demonstrating what they believe to be national pride. I’m wondering how you’re thinking about those kinds of toxic tactics and the difference between those types of organizing.
“Who does this internet belong to?”
AXM: One thing about this moment — whether it’s a Black Lives Matter protest or a far-right protest — is that you often hear the chant: “Whose streets? Our streets!” It points to where we're at right now. Who the streets belong to is now a question of active contention and active debate. We can extend that to the internet. In general, I think in the US context and just globally it's a question of who does this place belongs to? Who does this internet belong to? Who does this country belong to, these streets belong to? It's an enormously important and complex question. And again, I go back to this idea of the memetic contention. You look back to the history of any social movement, and if you think back to the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and movements around racial justice historically in the United States, it has also been accompanied by the rise of the far-right. It's kind of like Newton's law of physics, you know, for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction right there, we can apply that to social movements. It was never going to be the case that one movement would simply emerge and kind of progress into their vision of society. But instead, what we see is there's a lot of push and pull, and I do see a similar connection here with Hong Kong because as a movement rises and grows, there's a pushback there. And so how that happens is different depending on the political and cultural context, but we should expect it. And we should also expect the tension around tactics. Potentially learning about tactics or sharing of tactics. And so all of these actions are our actions for media and influence. So it's the power and the ethics behind them that shape our understanding of whether or not we think they're effective. It always goes back to power and ethics as we think about the future.
GP: I've been thinking a lot about this quote from Aria Dean’s “Poor Meme, Rich Meme” which states "When we say that the internet extends and exacerbates the same old offline relations, we mean it." I think that's such a poignant way of pointing to the fact that we kind of assumed that this internet space would be one different kind of nature or that we'd have a different form of control, but it often replicates the systems we see in the real world.
AXM: That's a tough pill to swallow. It's also the more we face that reality, the more we can actively figure out how we might address it, to then build a better connection.
GP: We talked about this previously, like the ways that humor has been used historically as a way of a coping mechanism or a form of relief, also a critique of power structures. I think that in the same way, the internet has also started to find ways of infusing and utilizing humor. That's happened throughout time.
AXM: Humor has this role to play, particularly now in the pandemic. I was scrolling through Tik Tok. Right. And in moments of fear and anxiety, it could dispel fear for a little bit. At the same time, humor can also be a suit of destruction. We can think of problematic forms of humor. And so even humor has ethics and politics. Humor has a particular role. It takes something down a notch. If you're punching up, that's great. That's kind of challenging authority, authoritarian government, the status quo, for whatever reason. But if you're punching down, then you can actually destroy people and their lives, health, and happiness. Humor always has to be set in a context, in terms of why are people laughing and for what purpose?
GP: It's also dependent on our algorithms because what we're seeing in our algorithms can be something that reaffirms our thinking. Depending on what your politics is and how you're using the platforms, you'll get a different thing that might reaffirm your worldview.
AXM: I think of algorithms as part of the basic architecture of the internet, like how our streets work. They're often invisible and misunderstood. They shape our experience with the internet, similar to walking down the street. If you live in, you know, Williamsburg versus in the South Bronx, or in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, your perspective of the world is initiated by the architecture around you.
“The collective grieving process is very limited to us right now. It’s shaped through the internet. ”
KA: Speaking of architecture and returning to your comment about the Plaza and the idea of the commons, in an article you wrote for Medium entitled “After Orlando: Livestreams of Grieving and Song”, you write about the digital modes of carrying and relaying the jewels, and you can compare video shares to sharing fire through the wicks of candles. Can you talk about the collective forms of mourning and resilience we've seen during the year of the pandemic and how you've seen that translated or activated digitally?
AXM: I think that's the question for you all. I'm speaking of algorithms. One thing that's been so striking about the pandemic is our inability to grieve in public. The very nature of what is happening means we still can't gather in public and in a meaningful way. Obviously, I've seen murals, I've seen a few art installations, but the kind of collective grieving process is very limited to us right now. It's shaped through the internet. And that's the reason I think it's a question for you all, too, is because we all experienced it in different ways because of how fractured and diffused the internet is, which is a plus and minus. If we don't have the kind of iconic image of grief just yet, we don't have the iconic gathering.
Even at the inauguration, it's a kind of access to money and power. The way that they showed gathering was just through flags planted in the ground. We're not quite there yet. We don't have that image. I think of the AIDS quilt in terms of the pandemic. That was possible because it was spread all through the national mall because people could assemble something. I don't know if I've seen that yet. I think these kinds of things take time. For now, I see people sharing on social media.
KA: I feel the exact same way. There is an important form of embodied ritual that is sometimes missing or has to be considered differently in the context of digital space. The scope of safety has changed so much in the context of mourning that it's interesting to see, during the BLM rallies last summer, people were less concerned about their safety and more concerned about organizing. How does that immediacy of the moment change the condition in which you're willing to sacrifice your own safety? It's been interesting to watch and participate in those movements and also to see the care put into offering strategies for staying safe in the streets.
AXM: Absolutely. That's probably the closest I've seen to a collective agreement [during the BLM protests] around urgency and care. It was not a coincidence to me that this was all happening as the pandemic was pulling back a little bit and the country was just starting to reopen somewhat, the Memorial day weekend, which is the day that George Floyd died. So, for all of us, we should pay attention to this summer. I expect to see a lot more.
YC: Zines have been an important tool for the Hong Kong protesters to build community and connect with their international supporters. I remember seeing one of them in an independent bookstore in Taiwan. It was about experiencing emotions during the protests — it is okay to be angry, to be sad. And when you're sad, it is okay to hug someone next to you.
When I came back to the States, I learned that the Asia Art Archive in America has done digitization of some of the zines. And that's just how I think about it now, that digitization and archiving are a part of care.
GP: In thinking about personal grieving on a family level versus collective movement, I think that the movement within the streets and seeing bodies altogether has been a kind of memorial, but I think the personal level is more diffused, so we don't really see it. Rather than seeing a funeral procession or traditional gatherings, we don't really see that as much. We see on social media platforms, sharing the news of someone's passing or, memorializing people on Facebook, rather than having this moment together. Sharing memories on social media has become a kind of dominant form of collective grieving together with not necessarily people you even know, but you have a shared connection with this person you've lost.
AXM: Connecting this with Yihsuan's points, curating that, and documenting that kind of even the online work is important in some way as some kind of memory. I think about reading the history of the Spanish flu; there's no major memorial to that. There are memorials, but considering the number of deaths, and comparing that to the memorials for WWI and WWII, societies in general, at least as far as I can tell, don't have the same way to grieve. When you think about just in the US alone, 500,000 passed, and 2.1 million around the world. It demands a response. At the same time, the history of art created during pandemics is closer to the personal grief you are talking about. It's so private. It seems to be smaller. Maybe that's the nature of it. In some ways that highlight the importance of the curator to bring that together and tell those stories and to help us understand how grieving does occur.
I just want to say you've been doing exhibitions around these important topics during a critical time. You're in a constrained environment with a physical exhibition, but I do think that there are tremendous opportunities for curators like yourselves to tell the story of the internet. That is a practice that's evolving and shaping, changing. It sounds like a terrific set of topics that obviously intersect with each other and during an important moment in history.
I'm most excited by seeing folks like yourselves, who are exploring themes and visual culture and movements in new and interesting ways. I think that really it's the work that you all are doing that's really going to push this field forward. And so I am just really excited to hear about your work and what you're doing, the fact that you're taking it as a curatorial practice. When I started writing about this around 2011, it was very hard to kind of find curatorial spaces for this, so I'm really excited that you have this space within the CCS program to explore these topics because it's super important that we're engaging with this critically.
Georgie: Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with us, and we will look forward to what is to come next from you! We should also thank CCS, and Lauren Cornell, and Evan Calder Williams in particular, for encouraging us to tackle and think through these particular kinds of Internet histories and encouraging our research to expand and intersect into these really interesting spaces of protest, mourning, and digital culture.
Krista Alba is the curatorial assistant at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. Her current scholarly and curatorial research focuses on the intersection of craft, class, and labor politics. She is the curator of Tell them I won’t be long, a recent solo exhibition of works by American sculptor and educator Tammie Rubin, in which the artist thinks through the subject of grief with newly commissioned ceramic works and a survey of select sculptures.
Georgie Payne is a Co-Founder and editor of Dirt. Her research centers on exploring the role of comedy in critical dialogue around racial and economic inequity, particularly within born-digital art practices. She is the curator of Yacht Metaphor: The Collected Works of @CoryInTheAbyss is a browser-based exhibition that explores the work of American artist, poet, and meme-creator Jenson Leonard, showcasing a selection of internet memes created between 2015-2021 under the artists’ online alias, @CoryInTheAbyss.
Yihsuan Chiu is an independent curator based in New York. Her work focuses on the intersection of modern history, politics and contemporary art of East Asia and its diaspora. She is also a researcher in Chinese-language cinema. She recently edited Haze Publication - 2019 Hong Kong Protest in Contemporary Art and Culture, which brings together the reflections from fields of art, culture and activism on the representation of political struggles.