A superstar duo of creative renegades—both admonished by their respective governments for political dissent—Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and American Wikileaks hacker Jacob Appelbaum have teamed up with new digital art platform Electric Objects to make an exclusive piece of digital art.For their collaboration, which comes courtesy of Rhizome's Seven on Seven, Appelbaum flew to Beijing to meet with (pre-passport) Weiwei, and they created Panda to Panda, a series of cute bears stuffed with shredded NSA documents from Wikileaks. The stuffing process was filmed by award-winning Citizenfour documentarian Laura Poitras, and the pandas—also stuffed with backup memory cards of the shredded documents—were mailed to hacktivists like Julian Assange, as well as galleries and museums all over the world.
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Today, Panda to Panda is also immortalized as a limited-release digital artwork that comes with the special Panda Edition EO1, which can be yours for $599—but only in October. Electric Objects is both a digital picture frame dedicated to displaying internet art, and a marketplace for finding your new favorite GIFs, photos, and interactive artworks. Panda to Panda uses this marketplace as the first of an upcoming series that will only be available with limited edition Electric Objects frames.See a glimpse of the exclusive Panda to Panda artwork for Electric Objects below.
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