We Have Been Harmonised by Kai Strittmatter

Author:Kai Strittmatter [Strittmatter, Kai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913083014
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2019-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

The eye of the dragonfly is made up of 28,000 facets, each of them a little eye in itself. Dragonflies have a 360-degree view of the world and can pick up images five to six times more quickly than humans. Dragonfly Eyes is the title of a feature film that I watched on an autumn day in 2017, in an artist’s studio in one of the faceless new estates north of Beijing’s fourth ring road. ‘I’ll tell you a secret,’ says a young man in the film. ‘I often watch you, on the monitor.’ Then, from off-screen, the narrator’s voice: ‘This is a man,’ he says. ‘He will be seen 300 times each day. This is a woman. Her privacy is all used up. The man and the woman meet.’ It’s a love story, to begin with. The woman works on a dairy farm. She watches the cows. And is watched by cameras. The people who monitor the cameras are also being watched, watching. The film shows a couple having sex in a car, it shows sweet nothings being whispered in a restaurant, a car chase on the motorway, wild punch-ups and plastic surgery. The film has been screened at festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival. It may be the first feature film for which not a single scene has been acted or specially filmed. Every image, every scene – over 600 of them – comes from Chinese surveillance and live-stream cameras.

China is eagerly bringing the future into the present, and at a much faster pace than the West dares to adopt. ‘In 2013, when I had the idea for the film, there was hardly any material,’ says the Beijing artist Xu Bing, who had become a global name in the late 1980s with his installation ‘A Book from the Sky’, for which he invented thousands of new Chinese characters. ‘But then, in around 2015, suddenly all these streams started appearing online, on websites that anyone could access. A lot of them were surveillance cameras belonging to individuals and private companies. Suddenly we had much, much more material that we ever could have hoped for. It exploded at a rate no one could imagine.’ Xu Bing’s team set up 20 computers to download images 24 hours a day. They took 11,000 hours of video and distilled it down to 81 minutes for Dragonfly Eyes.

A few kilometres from Xu Bing’s studio is a functional room with screens on the walls – a lot of screens, with faces on them. They are our faces: from the street, from the corridor, each with a name, sex and ID number. They have been captured by the cameras of Megvii Face++, one of the hottest start-ups in a hot sector, which claims it wants to change the world. Here, artificial intelligence is a business model. Megvii Face++ is already doing something the State Council plan has only just called for. In this room stands a young man named Xie Yinan. He’s a marketing director.

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