‘The Gray Area’ is a thesis project that explores Danmaku culture, a form of interactive social engagement on video platforms where users post real-time comments that directly overlay on the video screens, creating a "barrage" of text. In recent years, this culture has reshaped social habits, evolving from a niche subculture—a smaller cultural group or community that exists outside the mainstream with distinct behaviors, beliefs, and localized cultural practices—into an integral part of mainstream culture in China.

However, under the dual pressures of cybercolonialism and commercialization, Danmaku culture has transformed. Its diversity and highly liberated forms of expression have gradually been marginalized or erased, resulting in a shift toward more uniform and standardized products of consumption.

This project is an autoethnographic exploration of Danmaku culture through my personal experiences as both a creator and participant in Danmaku culture. Through data analysis, personal reflections, and practical experimentation, the thesis delves into the rise and fall of Danmaku culture in Bilibili, China's—and arguably the world's—largest Danmaku platform. It focuses on examining its transformation under the pressures of the cultural industry of social media and the economic waves of globalization. Drawing upon the theoretical frameworks of Adorno and Horkheimer’s cultural industry, Mbembe’s necropolitics, and reception theory, this research reveals the contradictions of Danmaku culture between free expression and cultural control, as well as its adaptation and reconstruction in response to technological, policy, and societal changes. Through practical works and collection, this study reconstructs fragments of the disappeared Danmaku culture and explores its ephemerality and fluidity through interactive media installations.