I’ve just come back from photographing the big screen on the Youyi department store. I’ve ended up with 500 or 600 photos and got quite confused about whether or not I’ve got everything. However, the contrast to the Orient is very clear. They only have two things in common. First, they have a lot of ads for themselves. And second, they have a lot of ads for Expo.

Other than that, they are very different. The big screen does have world brands. Last year, it was Pepsi. Right now, it’s L’Oreal. Everything looks much glossier and big budget, with a faster cutting rate (hence my confusion!), good lighting, special effects, and so on. However, I must admit there’s not a big range of material. There’s a lot of Expo and a lot of SMG (Shanghai Media Group), repetitively. Maybe that says something again about how Wujiaochang is still very much in the making. Maybe once the KIC (Knowledge Innovation Community, 创制天地) thing and the subway station are in place, it will all come together a lot more. (Oh, I noticed that there are now brown landmark road signs for KIC itself. Must photograph those. They use the old 1930s Yangpu Stadium as the icon for KIC.)

No clock on the screen, so hard to know exactly how quickly it cycles through. But I think it is approximately a 15 minute cycle.

Still, I think working through this stuff — although daunting — will really help to provide an interesting tale of two screens and a way to talk about how quickly new technologies can become old, meaning that then people feel obliged to replace them (or not, in the case of the Orient!).

This is one occasion when I really did wish I had brought that video camera we bought. Still, I can either try to do that next time or try to get someone else to video it, maybe.

On my way down into the underground plaza at the centre of Wujiaochang, I found some materials from a 2007 plan for the development of the area stuck to the wall. These I photographed especially carefully!

Met with Wenhao in the evening and went over to the Shanghai South Station to brief him on what we need. Interestingly, he felt it did not look so great in the evening, because not all the lights were on. Reflecting back, I guess I had liked the slightly more mysterious feel, or romantic lighting! But maybe it won’t photograph so well. I will leave that to him to decide.

After a discussion, I have also asked Wenhao to take a few more photos of the egg at Wujiaochang, plus video of the two screens. This will help me a lot to do an analysis of what’s on the screen. He gave me some photos of the repaired egg, taken in winter. As he explained, there was no dancing in front of it then, because it was too cold.

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