SURVEILLANCE MOVING IMAGE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Most images generated in our present-day society are not for human eye but rather for machines, such as CCTV footage and cloud computing patterns. But this kind of “nonhuman” imagery, in “which the human is absent—as its subject, agent, or addressee” (Zylinska, 2017), greatly shapes and influences both the human and the non-human world. Acknowledging the Anthropocene reveals the true dilemma of a Society of Control: although great control is exercised through numerical language, powered by variations of corporations in late capitalism (Deleuze, 1992), we are in fact feeling more constrained by our own technological prosthesis as well as experiencing loss of control on many levels.

This paper will look at the conjunction of Anthropocene and Society of Control through a special case study of the film Dragonfly Eyes (2017) by Chinese artist Xu Bing. Believed to be the first feature film in history made of solely surveillance footage, the film remarkably took shape out of more than 10,000 hours of surveillance video footage from over 245 million global surveillance cameras and cloud computing (Frazier, 2018). The film and its making provide rich layers to reflect on a critical ontology and the agency of the moving image in the Anthropocene.