INSPIRATION

The whole project was inspired by what I have seen on TIKTOK (China version). I often see videos that specific words or items were mosaicked or directly captioned in a way that didn't match the video. After doing some research, I learned that these video bloggers took it upon themselves to caption their videos to ensure that their videos would not violate the rules and that they would not have their traffic restricted because they involved negative content. This “self-castration” action gives me the opportunity to think about this broad problem. The original purpose of making a video is to convey content either as fact or as an opinion. After covering up and weakening some existing facts, is what is presented still the original facts? Without knowing the whole picture, people receive fragmented information like a blind man feeling an elephant, so how can the real truth be conveyed?

This has led me to pay attention to the censorship of texts, language expressions, and education. Starting from the simplest and most fundamental source, I found an English-Chinese bilingual dictionary. As I went through the dictionary, I blacked out words and phrases that might be "blocked" or "disappeared" based on my own understanding and speculation from the basic educational tools. At the same time, I kept the original English text so that the meaning of the blacked-out words could still be conveyed in another way. In conducting a self-initiated, unofficial review of the dictionary, I found that I sometimes could not make an absolute judgment about a particular word or phrase. Whether or not to erase the word often depends on the context in which the word was used and my own slightly superficial understanding of the masking system. Sometimes I black out normal words if I associate them with words or phrases that might cause them to be blocked.

Such censorship is also common on social networks and is a well-known and agreed-upon "unspeakable". The most famous and common image on Sina Weibo is an image blocked under Sina Weibo censorship. The images that are blocked can be varied and unexpected. From real pornography, which should be banned according to law, to normal text, it is difficult for internet users to know the real blocking rules. Sina Weibo's blocking mechanism, in my opinion, can be described as preferring to kill 10,000 by mistake rather than letting one go. As a countermeasure, people first delete or hide content that might be blocked at the time of posting; later, creators consider the rules and regulations they might face when creating their posts. As a result, when creating something, it may have undergone a self-castration from the creators themselves to be released smoothly. 

I also noticed that in many variety shows, there is some processing of the subtitles. In addition to replacing some words, I was most impressed by the use of quotation marks for “death”. For example, guests may say "I'm laughing to death", "I'm scared to death", etc., and the word "death" is always accompanied by quotation marks. As far as I can remember, this habit or requirement hasn’t emerged until recent years. Because I have seen too many deaths with quotation marks when I saw a joke once, my own mind came up with "laughing to death", the death in my mind also wore quotation marks. This was one of the things that drove me to do this project, motivated by the absurdity and fear of forced habits and Pavlov's dog-like education.