Photomonitor Student Award 2020

Liu Wa - Racing Thoughts (USA/China)

The work traces the artist’s discursive Internet surfing by juxtaposing both clinical and humanistic approaches to human emotions. On the right channel, a brainwave headset objectively monitors her real-time emotional changes. On the left channel, hand-drawn animations illustrate her subjective thoughts and imagination with a human touch. As she scrolls through the endless webpages, the Internet also brings unexpected discoveries back into the real world, which range from data privacy in neurotechnology to mental health issues among students, from air pollution in China to its nuclear industry during the Cold War. In the end, this virtual journey on the Internet leads to her field research of China’s first military nuclear base “404.”