From marcodonnarumma.com:
Golden Shield Music (Marco Donnarumma, 2009) is a generative composition for eight audio channels that sits somewhere between net.art and sound art originally created for the Zeppelin 2009 exhibition at the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture.
The work is inspired by the Golden Shield Project, sometimes referred to as the ‘Great Firewall of China’.
According to Wikipedia it is a censorship and surveillance project operated by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) division of the Communist government of China. The project started in 1998 and began operations in November of 2003.
It involves the massive use of web technologies such as IP (Internet Protocol address, a computer’s network address) blocking, DNS filtering and redirection, URL filtering, Packet filtering, Connection reset) to censor specific contents – mostly, but not only, political or historical subjects – through web search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Msn.
This same technology has been semantically displaced and re-used by the author to create a generative piece of music which doesn’t focus on the structure or aesthetic of the composition, but simply makes a free, creative use of a technology ideated to subtly constrain the freedom of the Internet as a global Network.
