China | Future of Memory online residency 2022

Call for international media artists or collectives for the new three-month online Future of Memory Residency, organised by China Residencies in partnership with Future of Memory.

Held from mid-June to mid-September, the residency will centre around the theme of resisting and interrogating algorithmic surveillance and control.

All over the world, words and online expression are being harvested for data, privatised for profit and wielded to manipulate people’s ability to assemble in a truly public space and speak truth against injustice. Words online can spark hope, resistance and refusal, so who gets to shape the future of memory? In light of increasingly automated control, digital platforms have become an arena in which creative forms of opacity arise as people scramble to ‘fool the machine’ through clever use of homophones, memes, images, text and new ways of writing to bypass OCR (optical character recognition) and evade specific censored keywords.

The Future of Memory Residency will select four applicants who will work on these themes. 

The selected residents will receive:

• USD 2,000 stipend
• Mentorship from Qianqian Ye and Xiaowei Wang, the two artists who created The Future of Memory as an online toolkit and provocation in 2019
• Support from the China Residencies team
• Optional artist talk, workshop and virtual open studio

Application guidelines  

Deadline: 20 April 2022

This initiative is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

China Residencies is dedicated creating opportunities for creative people from all over the world to engage with ideas and issues in China and the greater Chinese diasporas. The Future of Memory is a toolkit and a text-based adventure game that looks at the tensions that emerge when corporate platforms centralise power and prioritise profit over care.