Into town on the subway again, this time to meet Wenhao and pick up the photos he has been taking. On the subway, as well as ads and news, I’ve been noticing quite a few other things, such as responses to hotline SMS questions about the World Expo (“How much will it cost if I want to park my car there for the day?” was one I spotted, and another asked about additional flights and trains in and out of Shanghai while the Expo is on). There seems to be a lot of PSA information about riding on the subway and so on. According to one newspaper article I read, they are expected 70 million visitors to Expo. That’s a lot of people from out of town, so I guess the PSAs are not so surprising.

Wenhao has taken an excellent series of shots in and around the Shanghai South Station without any trouble. I think we just have to take the line that it’s a public space, that no one stopped him, that lots of people take pictures there and put them on their blog and so on, and so we can go ahead, too, without asking for special permission. Fingers crossed… Everyone here seems to think I am crazy to want to get permission, and that it’s not necessary.

Wenhao has also taken very interesting videos of the 2 screens at Wujiaochang, as I requested. What makes them interesting is the way he has chosen to video them. He’s gone in close, so you see almost nothing except the screen, and he’s recorded sound, too. The result is eerily cinematic, as you are staring at the screen much as you would in a cinema, and not seeing any of the other things in the environment. It’s very thought-provoking. He has asked that if we use it in an exhibition (which I think I’d like to, even though my initial motivation for asking him to do this was purely to have a record of the ads for research purposes), we play the sound or make it available to listen to through headsets.

Finally, I’ve asked him to go and take a series of shots inside public transport.

His wife, who is a journalist, came along, too. We talked about the issue of screens in the back of taxis. It turns out she has heard they might be removed, too. But she hadn’t heard anything about a celeb being injured in an accident. What she had heard about was complaints from riders who feel they are being forced to watch ads and pay for it. She said the first thing does if she gets into a cab with one of these is turn it off. Well, I can understand that. I feel pretty much the same way.
Talking about the ads on public transport, she reminded me that MM is a subsidiary of Oriental Pearl Conglomerate (东方明珠集团), but that the lightboxes in the all the stations of the subway are Decaux (or 申通德高 in Chinese). She also said there were blackboards all around the old communities she knows.

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