My little catastrophe

Oct 14, 2011


("My little catastrophe" is the first and only line of the poem "Mathematician's Love Letter" in Terre de Diamant by Kenneth White)

My little catastrophe is a project made of photographed Chinese websites home pages.
In western eyes, Chinese websites often appear cluttered and anarchic. They overflow with text and links, use garish colours and animated gifs and are meant to create a rich visual experience, engaging for the Chinese and asian audience in general, when western users tend to prefer a simple and to-the-point design. In Asia, a spare home page is seen as a sign of a rather poor content.
It is (again) a situation of cross-cultural difference. Everything is explained here in more details. See also this Quora thread.

I carefully chose representative home pages and photographed them. The resulting images retain the artifacts generated by the computer screen, thus gaining a new dimensionality and texture and becoming photographic objects. Images are printed at 11" by 20"/28 by 51 cm.