Dragonfly Eyes

Welcome to a brave new world! Every one of us is constantly being monitored and recorded. According to statistics, Big Brother watches us from CCTV cameras up to 300 times a day. In China, footage from the monitoring of public spaces has been uploaded to the cloud and made available to the public since 2015. Xu Bing, a new media artist, reviewed 10,000 hours of recordings and condensed them into a fascinating 81-minute contemporary philosophical story with a melodramatic twist. The story of Qing Ting, a Buddhist nun who becomes a YouTube star, is the emblematic life story of our time. Sometimes funny, sometimes grotesque, the director puts us inside an industrial dairy, an exclusive boutique and right in the middle of a high-speed chase on the highway. When we realize that all these dramatic twists come from CCTV cameras, we know that privacy is really a fiction. And the new world order is being created not only through technology that is changing the face of art and society, but also more discreetly, by changing the way in which we perceive the world. It's not by chance that, in Chinese, the name of the main character, Qing Ting, means dragonfly, an insect with eyes all over its body-the totemic animal of modern times.