Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes (2017); US Premiere at NYFF55

A feature film made essentially with (found) surveillance footage in China collected and uploaded onto the cloud, Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes (2017) will have its US premiere at the New York Film Festival in October. Working through 10,000 hours of surveillance footages publicly accessible online, the artist and his assistants edited the excerpts into a 81-minute feature. A trailer of the film is available on YouTube.

I had the amazing chance to preview excerpts from the film during Xu Bing’s visit to Parsons as part of the Parsons Fine Arts Visiting Artists Series. Xu talked about the sheer ease of publicly accessing an entire database/archive of surveillance footages in China, how the proliferation of surveillance cameras has essentially turned the world into a studio set, and (rather than simply regurgitating the typical image of an Orwellian police state in China) what he thought about the emergence of a “post-surveillance” China where people are themselves reclaiming and using the surveillance tools and infrastructures to produce their own footages.

 

DATES
Sunday, October 8, 2017, 9.30PM
Monday, October 9, 2017, 8.45PM

LOCATION
55th New York Film Festival 2017
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
70 Lincoln Center Plaza
New York, NY 10023

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