Xiaowei R. Wang, PhD is an artist, writer, organizer and coder based across the Pacific. Their multidisciplinary work over the past 15 years sits at the intersection of public art, tech, social and environmental justice. They are the author of the book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech In China's Countryside which examines the social and environmental impacts of technology on agriculture and rural communities. The book is selection for the 2023 National Book Foundation Science and Literature Program and New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Xiaowei’s work is shaped by their Buddhist spiritual practice, guided by the experiences of their ancestors and the care of the communities they are part of. A big influence in their work and how they see the world is their experience of ongoing vision loss due to their glaucoma diagnosis in 2017.
As of 2023, they are one of the stewards of Collective Action School (formerly known as Logic School), an organizing community for tech workers. As part of the 2024 Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellowship cohort, they are working on a project at the intersection of climate crisis, empire and violent beauty, centered in trans-Pacific legacies. They are also a Senior Civic Media Fellow at University of Southern California Annenberg, a faculty member at ELISAVA’s Master in Design for Responsible AI and for 2023-2025, a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center on Race and Digital Justice / UCLA Gender Studies. They hold a PhD in Geography with a Designated Emphasis in New Media, from the University of California, Berkeley in 2023, supervised by Brandi T. Summers (chair), Clancy Wilmott, Desiree Fields and Abigail De Kosnik, and a BA from Harvard.
They are part of Collective Action in Tech’s Embedded Organizers community and serve as an advisor at Processing Foundation, an organization working at the intersection of open source, art and social justice. They are a 2022-2023 Luminary for Omidyar’s The Tech We Want program. As of 2023, they’ve finished the International End of Life Doula Association (INELDA) training and are working towards certification as a death doula.
Their collaborative project FLOAT Beijing, an Index Design Awards finalist, created air quality-sensing kites and public workshops to challenge governmental data censorship. Other projects — from art installations to a community created radio for local bus lines in Beijing have been featured by the New York Times, BBC, CNN, VICE and elsewhere.
Their most recent new media work, The Future of Memory, was a recipient of the Mozilla Creative Media Award, and explored the creation of a new language to bypass online surveillance. Their previous individual and collaborative work has been exhibited at a number of venues, including Haus der Kulturen der Welt, MoMA New York, Taipei Design City Exhibition, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and have taught workshops and given talks at Asian Art Museum, SF MOMA, TED, Taipei Design & City Exhibition 2014, IAM Weekend, The Conference, Unfinished Live, Cornell University, Harvard University, CtrlZ.AI Zine Fair Barcelona and more. Their writing has appeared in TANK, transmediale, The Nation and more.
In previous lives, they spent 7 years as the Creative Director at Logic Magazine, which they cofounded in 2016 along with Ben Tarnoff, Christa Hartsock, Jim Fingal and Moira Weigel and left in 2023. Xiaowei has worked as an engineer at Mapbox, and a designer at Meedan, a global tech non-profit building open source tools for journalists and activists, and at Situ Research.
Headshot, PLEASE CREDIT CHLOE JACKMAN: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6uem3fghqfcx5u9/Chloe-Jackman-Photography-the-tech-we-want-luminaries-2022-1819.jpg?dl=0
As of 2023, they are currently on a digital sabbatical.
Financial disclosures/conflicts of interest/how I pay rent:
I do not knowingly own any tech stocks, although I have a 401k that is automatically managed by robots. I have a small amount of Mapbox stock options and less than .005ths of Bitcoin. I have ~80k in student debt in U.S. direct federal loans and send money to my parents for their mortgage and their managed retirement funds. I support myself thru project grants, speaking, freelance writing and institutional funding (UCLA Postdoc, USC fellowship, Omidyar’s Tech We Want Luminary support).
Highly recommend https://thehellyeahgroup.com/ and https://www.ridefreefearlessmoney.com/ for those who are looking for radical financial literacy without shaming.