Unerasable Images

The artwork Unerasable Images presents screenshots from Google Image Search results for the search term “六四” (“64”), a reference to the date of the student-led Tiananmen Square Protest in Beijing in 1989. The most iconic image of that day depicts an unidentified protestor referred to as ‘Tank Man’ facing down a column of advancing tanks. This photograph is routinely censored by authorities and blocked from any search results in China. In 2013, a Lego reconstruction of the Tank Man image started circulating before it, too, was quickly erased. Nevertheless, the image was later found beyond China, and it occasionally appears in the first few rows of a Google image search.

With more than 300 screenshots taken in 2017, this project aims to create a temporal and empty networked space where the thumbnail image(s) move within the hidden infrastructural grid and beyond the screenshot’s frame, thereby examining the geopolitics of data circulation, internet censorship and the materiality of image (re)production through a complex entanglement of human and nonhuman parameters.