I wander thro’ each charter’d street – Research into Psychogeography MAFAzine Issue 3
When Monitoring Data is Used as Image Material
By Xinyan Tan
Unlike ordinary contemporary art video works, “Dragonfly Eyes” has a complete story, but the production method is completely different. The pictures used are all video materials that can be downloaded on the Internet. Taking the love stories of young men and women as clues, it reflects the faces of sentient beings in contemporary society. This work seems to be a highly dramatic “confidant” story, but in essence it reflects on the separation of people in our age of image explosion. At the exhibition site, we can see a line of big characters: “The world is a huge studio.”
Since “Dragonfly Eyes” was formally published, it has received extensive response and research both at home and abroad. This experimental video work, on the one hand, continues the artist’s profound criticism and reflection on social phenomena and technical landscapes. On the other hand, it also brings the viewer into a labyrinth of visual changes: it is both contemporary people interacting with each other. A common encounter in the mirror image, while radically revealing the reality of the essence of “image as the world”.
Xu Bing first discussed the general meaning of public camera recording. First, it has objective reality. The camera is set. This is an inhuman point of view. The picture is not a picture of a video work, but a kind of data and information. At the same time, public cameras have another meaning. In addition to recordability, they also have surveillance properties. They are a kind of “presumption of guilt”. There is no privacy under public cameras. The film cleverly discussed the general cultural connotation of public cameras with plots such as plastic surgery and face recognition.
On the one hand, Xu Bing applied surveillance materials to narrative video works, realizing a redefinition of surveillance. On the other hand, it is also a redefinition of the narrative film, because the story line of the surveillance material is not prepared in advance.