Panda to Panda

Ai Weiwei created Panda to Panda alongside the hacker Jacob Appelbaum. The work consists of a set of twenty plush panda toys stuffed with shredded copies of the confidential documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. Inside each panda was also a USB stick with a micro-SD memory card containing a backup of the confidential documents. In Chinese, the word for “panda” sounds similar to “secret police.” Panda to Panda also references Peer to Peer (P2P), a decentralized digital communication method and an egalitarian philosophy of human interaction on the Internet. Panda to Panda was commissioned by Rhizome and the New Museum in New York. The project was documented by the artist and filmmaker Laura Poitras in her film The Art of Dissent (2015).