Spring 2023 Lecture: Xiaowei Wang

The 2023 Spring Lecture Series continues on Mar. 6 with Xiaowei Wang, author of Blockchain Chicken Farm. Wang will present “Blockchain Chicken Farms and Taobao Villages” beginning at 5:30 p.m.

According to Wang, “What happens when tech goes down to the countryside? Smart cities, digital urbanism, and the urban spaces of tech enabled surveillance have been well documented, but what awaits in the periphery, in the places that manufacture the hardware we use? In my talk, I will look at the economic flows between rural America and rural China, through online consumption culture and platform enabled e-commerce. From the religious performance of American multi-level marketing to the self-improvement tones of ‘Taobao Villages’ in China, tech is carving out new spaces and behaviors in countrysides struck by neoliberal precarity. I look at the ways tech is reshaping the countryside, in China and globally.”

Get to know Xiaowei Wang

Xiaowei R. Wang is an artist, writer and organizer whose work centers community driven tech and the importance of care in organizing for a more just future. They work across new media and social practice at the intersection of environmental justice and data driven technologies. Their previous individual and collaborative work has been exhibited at a number of venues, including Haus der Kulturen der Welt, MoMA New York, Taipei Design City Exhibition, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, as well as workshops and talks at Asian Art Museum and SFMOMA.

Their collaborative project FLOAT Beijing created air quality-sensing kites and was an Index Design Awards finalist. Other projects have been featured by The New York Times, BBC, CNN and elsewhere. Their most recent project, The Future of Memory, a recipient of the Mozilla Creative Media Award, created a poetic toolkit for reimagining visual language in the age of algorithmic censorship and content moderation.  For the past 6 years, they have served as the Creative Director of Logic Magazine, a print journal about tech and culture. They are the author of the book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech In China’s Countryside, which a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and one of the lead facilitators of Logic School, an organizing community for tech workers.

This lecture is funded by the Robert B. Church III Memorial Lecture Fund. It is free and open to the public.

Unless otherwise noted, lectures are held in McCarty Auditorium in the Art + Architecture Building at 5:30 p.m. For last-minute changes to this event, check this page as well as the college’s Facebook page.