Yesimola is not a glitch.m4v

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

Yesimola is not a glitch is a new video work by Lu Meng that comes out of a year-long engagement with others on the internet. Meng created an online personality who functioned as a vlogger and fashion influencer with over 500k followers on a social media platform.

The work explores cyber-nationalism, memes, fandom, collective effervescence and consensus, tapping into the performative nature of life on and off line.

Under these live streaming conditions, she documented the reaction of her followers and analysed the collective effervescence, a term originally coined by Émile Durkheim in 1912 to describe the exciting and unifying experience of coming together under the same thought or action, often associated with religious experiences but, within contemporary life, reflective of online fads and virtual connections between large numbers of users. The work is around 30 minutes long and becomes part of a model of post-emotional consumerism where interactions and responses fit within a transactional sphere.

Meng has used the making of this work to push the boundaries between her online personality and reality in Chinese cyber-space, blurring the lines between being in front of and behind the vlogging camera. Although there seems to be a great deal of trust and acceptance from her followers, established through their relatively long-term relationship, the actions taken in this video, when analysed, have the potential to break the fan-imagined persona, demolishing and then reconstructing that personality on the screen.