DSL Magazine: Issue 11

73 Mengxuan Sun (b. 1992) uses video, installations, and live performance to explore the perception of both virtual and real spaces. As a member of the post-90s generation, she experiments with humour as a way to show how language developed on the internet intersects everyday life, visualizing how the boundary between reality and virtuality is blurred in the process. In works like the video art piece Second Nature (2018) and the interactive in- stallation - 零 + (2018), virtual charac- ters are used to explore interactions between humans and technology, fo- cusing on their role in expanding the perception of space, self, and time. Sun’s works are strongly influenced by the contrast between her experience of growing up as a Chinese internet user and her life as a student in Berlin. HTTPS://? (2019) In 2019, Mengxuan Sun collaborated with Timur Tokdemir to question the construction of realities through the internet with a live performance and video installation titled HTTPS://?. The inspiration for this work comes from the historic first e-mail sent from China, which on the 20th of September 1987 successfully reached the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and read: “Across the Great Wall, we can reach every corner in the world”. Interested in how this iconic sentence has since become moot in the in- creasingly balkanized context of na- tional internets and censorship apparatuses like the Great Firewall, Sun and Tokdemir weave a mythical narrative around emerging digital di- vides. HTTPS://? features a specula- tive prototype of VPN-enabled glasses that empower vision across internet blockages, offering insights into the flow of identities around more or less metaphorical boundaries - as the work’s signature slogan recites, “You are the only myth in the internet.” 孙梦璇 Mengxuan Sun