Jinming Zhang

"30-Day Social Experience"

Section MS4, Mirna Pedalo

Keywords: social media, time, moving image, documentation

This project focuses on my social media interactions, the intensity of which had increased due to the impact of COVID-19. Besides the usual communication with family members and close friends, in the grip of the pandemic my social media circle widened to include estranged classmates, acquaintances and people from other realms of my life. The often conflicted feelings produced by these interactions have prompted me to think about the differences in face-to-face and online forms of communication.

I decided to undertake a bold experiment: a 30-day record of my WeChat social media interactions. Updates were posted on daily basis, and the content came from my everyday life, whether in the form of text, images, video, sound or a combination of them. Having completed the 30-day challenge, I singled out 7 specific days, when the posted content and the subsequent interactions affected me in a particular way. I used those records to produce a diary. The diary itself takes various forms, depending on the content of the day, such as collage, handwriting, painting, two-dimensional code, vlog video etc. The final output combines the diary narrative into a video.