TY - JOUR
AU - Tang,, Pao-Chen
AB - Increasingly since the 1960s, the compound eye, a visual organ typically found in arthropods, has served as a fitting metaphor of camera as a receptive device in the system of surveillance apparatus. This is not just because the setup of a conventional closed-circuit television (CCTV) control room readily evokes associations with the organ, insofar as instantaneous images recorded by numerous single-lens cameras can be simultaneously exhibited on one sizable screen. Since the early 2010s, the mechanism of the surveillance camera has literally taken up the form of the compound eye. In 2013, for instance, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign took inspiration from the compound eyes of insects and succeeded in building a compound camera. With more than one hundred micro-lenses on its polymer, the camera could look at more than a hundred directions at once (Kubetz). Unlike a traditional wide-angle lens that could distort the image in one way or another (exaggerating the depth; bulging the lines near the edges of the frame), this compound camera’s field of vision covers an extremely wide angle while maintaining, rather accurately, the spatial relations and graphic quality of its filmed entities. Such a device celebrates an omnipresence of audiovisuality. By opening up a radical perception of space, could it offer a different way of viewing and understanding the world as well? It came as no surprise that researchers of the compound camera immediately recognized its potential application in large-scale surveillance projects, not least in urban environments. Perhaps nowhere is more suitable for this novel technology to call home than mainland China, which is expected to be dotted by an estimated 400 million CCTV cameras with artificial intelligence in both public and private spheres by the end of 2020. Beyond executing the by-now familiar task of facial recognition or the estimation of gender, age, and ethnicity, the most advanced kind of surveillance camera in use across major Chinese cities can further perform pattern recognition of a targeted person’s daily habits, places that s/he frequents, and people with whom s/he regularly interacts. An artistic response to this form of the surveillance society and the desire to infinitely better its operation through a compound vision is acclaimed Chinese artist Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes (2017). In the preproduction stage that began in 2015, Xu and his team viewed, selected, and stitched materials from more than 10,000 hours of video footages recorded by surveillance cameras across China and uploaded online to the public domain of cloud storage.1 The result of such a laborious process was a video of eighty-one minutes, made without any professional actor or “human” cinematographer. Its narrative is driven forward primarily through dubbed dialogue and voice-over narration written after the selection of this specific footage. A summary of its main plotline: A woman named Qing Ting, meaning literally “dragonfly” in Chinese, lives peacefully in a Buddhist temple where she has been trained to be a nun since she was seventeen years old. According to her first voice-over narration, her daily life is characterized by its deep and harmonious embeddedness within nature: “We read sutras with the Master every day. During the evenings, our chants blended with the sounds of the cricket, the birds and the water. And when our voice stilled, the natural sounds continued.”2 Some recent changes made to the natural environment surrounding this site, especially the removal of a gingko tree, however, have disrupted her equilibrium. She feels the need to regain her inner poise outside of the temple (though her master rejects this spatial dichotomy). After exiting the temple, she first works at an industrial dairy farm, where she befriends a technician named Ke Fan. They quickly develop affection toward each other and, together, relocate to a city. But their relationship comes to an abrupt end when Ke Fan goes to jail for assaulting a female customer who has previously insulted Qing Ting at a dry cleaner where she works. After Ke Fan serves his time, he searches for Qing Ting without success, as if she has completely vanished from the world. He suspects that she has undergone plastic surgery and assumed a new identity: Internet celebrity Xiao Xiao. But soon Xiao Xiao disappears as a reaction to the immense pressure of cyberbullying that accompanies her fame. The police also cannot locate her through the facial recognition function of their surveillance apparatus because, as they claim, plastic surgery and dominant beauty standards have turned many women, including Xiao Xiao, into look-alikes. Toward the end of Dragonfly Eyes, Ke Fan intriguingly changes his name into Qing Ting and surgically transforms himself to resemble her presurgery appearance. This immersion of identity further deepens when he follows in her footsteps vicariously, dwelling in her old residence and doing her old jobs. After telling the police, over the phone, to stop searching for Qing Ting because “I gave her a rebirth […] she’s with me,” Ke Fan visits the Buddhist temple where Qing Ting used to live. There, Ke Fan asks himself, in the video’s final voice-over narration: “Will I have Qing Ting’s past? Or my own future? I don’t have the answer.” Discussions of Dragonfly Eyes have focused on the body’s visibility and privacy in contemporary China as a biopolitical regime in large part due to its widespread surveillance network. Indeed, the police’s failure to locate Xiao Xiao is but one of the jokes that the video humorously makes about the function of pattern recognition so essential to surveillance technologies today. That said, given the rich interpretive potentials that Dragonfly Eyes opens up with regards to the power of surveillance camera, its rather simple narrative has been overlooked, if not discredited outright as unsophisticated and trite.3 Not much has been said about the specific content of each image edited into the video, the characters’ discourses, and the aesthetics of found footage filmmaking that undergirds the colossal construction of this work, especially when a great number of filmed entitles do not, at least at first glance, pertain to China as a surveillance state. I am referring to several shots of violent natural disasters—flood, typhoon, volcanic eruption, among others—that punctuate Dragonfly Eyes. One cannot ignore, as well, a recurring theme that curiously features an enigmatic “magnet field,” which Ke Fan once takes Qing Ting to view (though they do not see it eventually). On this field of energy, Qing Ting relates: An ancient magnetic field can match a modern one. When thunder and lightning strike, the sound and image are recorded in the magnetic field. And if the same weather appears again years later, the sound and image from the past will be projected into the air. Here, it is worthy to dwell on the process of constructing this narrative before we move onto interpreting specific elements or events within. To be sure, the overall relation between the narrative and the selected images is hierarchical, insofar as the former organizes the latter into several meaningful units. Without the dubbed dialogue and the voice-over narration, cowritten by poet Zhai Yongming and filmmaker Zhang Haiyi, that braid discrete footages, the video’s visual components would make little sense to the viewer—not unlike a policeman forced to watch one segment of surveillance footage after another without an aim. This acoustic aspect of the video achieves two crucial effects. First, as per Ling Zhang’s reading, the unmistakable disjuncture between the silent footage and the added sound “creates an alienating distance resonant with [the video’s] ‘surveillance look,’” one that casts doubt on the authenticity of surveillance footage, frequently used as evidence in legal cases (73). Second, the (added) acoustic that gives meaning to the (found) visual footage serves as a reminder of the necessity of our active interpretations of surveillance footage, if not all images in general. It is as if Dragonfly Eyes is commenting on the futility of collecting and archiving images when they are not animated through storytelling. This second point directly speaks to the aforementioned insufficiency of understanding Dragonfly Eyes merely as a critique of China as a surveillant state. Surveillance technology itself does not necessarily enact oppression or paranoia—certainly not when the video fantasizes how plastic surgery could easily trick it. Without a viewpoint, the accumulation of visual data, however immense the scale might be, amounts to little more than indices too fragmentary to reveal a full picture of anything authentic. Indeed, the beginning of the song that accompanies the ending title sequence well captures such a tension between illusion and reality: “And in a blink the light is launched; darkened spaces look real—they’re not.”4 What, then, might the audiovisual components of Dragonfly Eyes tell us about its guiding viewpoint? One way to approach this question is to follow a conceptual division that Renren Yang has drawn between those that contribute to the unfolding of the narrative and those that do not. “These seemingly irrelevant people and episodes are,” according to Yang, “recorded and coalesced via Xu Bing’s digital survey and surgery of scattered surveillance videos. Xu Bing suggests not only the reality of the digital surveillant society in China, but also the highly contingent and absurd nature of the everyday world” (Yang 264). While this second group of audiovisual components might indeed seem absurd, for at least two reasons, the discourse of contingency—itself accompanying the history of cinema from the outset since the “wind in the trees” in the Lumière brothers’ The Baby’s Meal (1895)—does not adequately address their functions. First, the immense scale at which the moments of natural disruption and supernatural revelation operate forcefully solicit our recognition of their presence on screen. By no means are they contingent details that may or may not be perceptible to viewers depending on their level of attentiveness.5 They not only constitute the primary attractions of a number of shots but also invite alternative understandings of Dragonfly Eyes from not simply a human-oriented perspective but also an ecosystem perspective wherein humans navigate (not least given the impact of the gingko tree removal on Qing Ting). Second, insofar as Xu and his team’s labor invested in the collection and editing of numerous raw footages is concerned, to describe these audiovisual components as contingent downplays the potential significance of each selected shot in found footage filmmaking. I, therefore, hope to take them as seriously as possible and consider what their functions could be in relation to those components seemingly more essential to the main plotline. By engaging with the notion of hyperobject and its conceptual cousin, hypersubject, as well as Xu’s found footage filmmaking, I aim to address Dragonfly Eyes—its content and form combined—more holistically. I would submit that, through the video’s compound vision that incorporates various entities—human and nonhuman alike—and connects them in ways that deviate from the classical principle of narrative causality, a kind of heterogenous and yet unified ecological vision transpires. This interpretive framework not only helps us better understand Xu’s work but also contributes to broader aesthetic inquiries concerning the visualization of our present-day ecological condition, not least the relational network formed collectively by the human and the nonhuman.6 The Vision of the Compound Eye Before delving into Dragonfly Eyes, let us take an excursus on a potential intertext in contemporary Sinophone culture, which explicitly tackles the visual registration and display of nature in relation to the compound eye: the titular creature of Taiwanese scholar and writer Wu Ming-yi’s novel, The Man with Compound Eyes (2011).7 According to a character in the novel who witnesses said creature’s presence in the middle of a night, its contour resembles a man who was big and tall, and though I couldn’t see him clearly I felt he must be a young man, but he also seemed kind of middle-aged and youthful at the same time. He was just like a shadow, one moment big, the next moment small. I heard them, and they seemed to be talking about something. For a moment his eyes met mine, and those eyes were … how shall I put it? Ah, it’s hard to say. It was like a tiger, a butterfly, a tree and a cloud looking at you all at once. (96) Such a mysterious creature defies any clear-cut and facile categorization based on physical appearance, age, species, gender/individuality (as indicated by the shifting pronoun between “he” and “they”), or degree of animation (from a wild animal to a plant). What beckons, too, is the character’s account of the creature’s omnipresence, established through a sweeping, overwhelming gaze. One recalls Jean-Paul Sartre’s renowned description of the moment when a viewing subject’s comfortable position gets destabilized as s/he suddenly realizes that s/he is the very object of someone else’s gaze: “All of a sudden I am conscious of myself as escaping myself, not in that I am the foundation of my own nothingness but in that I have my foundation outside myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other” (261). This episode that exemplifies the process of Sartrian objectification leads to the character’s epiphanic awareness of the microscopic scale at which his own existence navigates: a grain of sand in an extreme long shot, to borrow the vocabulary of cinematography. To be in the field of vision of the creature’s compound eyes is to be subsumed into an expansive milieu featuring “a tiger, a butterfly, a tree and a cloud,” among other entities in the world. Indeed, later in the novel, another character, who has seen the creature, similarly describes his/their eyes as “compound eyes composed of countless single eyes, the eyes of clouds, mountains, streams, meadowlarks, and muntjacs, all arranged together” (186). One couldn’t help but wonder: Could the eyes of humans find a place in such compound eyes too? Scholar Darryl Sterk, who also translated The Man with Compound Eyes into English, would likely give an affirmative response to this hypothetical question. In his reading, Sterk proposes that this peculiar and powerful vision fashions a “sphere of subjectivity” into which all animate and inanimate entities are incorporated. In dialogue with, but ultimately reversing the vector of, Timothy Morton’s famous notion of “hyperobject,” which ascribes human agency to other objects, Sterk suggests the man with compound eyes can be interpreted as a symbol of “the subjectivity of nature as a whole [ … ] a hypersubject” (188). Because of his/their capacity of incorporating, maintaining, and managing distinct perspectives simultaneously, the creature opens up a sphere where the distance between the human and the nonhuman could be abridged. As a result, meaningful contacts between them become possible. Crucially, as Sterk points out, this hyper-subjectivity is essentially technologically mediated despite the fact that all the components of the compound eyes are visions of natural entities. The man with compound eyes evokes, in effect, the multiscreen aesthetics that has gradually come to define the format of imaging in the postmodern age—not least for surveillance purposes, we could add. Referring to Fredric Jameson’s take on postmodernism, Sterk points out that such an overload of images in contemporary media typically forms a kind of postmodern sublime, which results in the viewer a state of confusion, insofar as these audiovisual messages that constitute the postmodern sublime are so decontextualized and arbitrarily juxtaposed. Unlike this fragmented totality, however, Sterk suggests that the sphere of subjectivity established by the compound eye emerges as a utopian alternative, one that has the potential to ecologize the postmodern sublime. This is because in this sphere, “the individual can adopt different perspectives with a view to integrating themselves into some larger whole without compromising subjectivity and agency” (216). Sterk proposes to describe our experience of this hyper-subjectivity as an encounter with the postmodern ecological sublime. Correspondences Might we read Dragonfly Eyes as one such hypersubject? Indeed, as I will demonstrate, each part of the video—however seemingly discrete—works with one another part, forming a whole whose operation is governed by an underlying principle of correspondence. The images of natural disasters that punctuate the video, most specifically, are not isolated attractions or sensations unrelated to the narrative or to other footages. Through editing, rather, they point to the presence of larger-than-human forces that are nevertheless associated with major events in the human sphere. Viewed relationally, the filmed entities in each individual shot reveal a sense of confusion where their identities, actions, and even feelings bleed into one another across shots. Consider the aforementioned episode when the female customer insults Qing Ting at the dry cleaner. The first six shots of this eighteen-shot sequence intercut between the interior of this space (shots one, three, five) and a stormy day outside seen through a dashcam in a car (shots two, four, six). Having experienced a rough day and unsatisfied with how the dry cleaner handles her dress, the customer takes her anger out on Qing Ting, who is in turn ignited. As the tension between them escalates indoors, the three dashcam shots correspondingly display an increasingly violent storm and all the damage it has done on the streets: from a lightning that strikes a tree to a powerful whirlwind and halts the entire traffic. Such a connection between the interior and the exterior, between the personal and the public reaches its peak when the seventh shot returns to the dry cleaner. At the cue of the female customer’s furious order “fetch your boss,” the camera cuts back to the exterior but this time physically exits the automobile’s protection and presents, in a high-angle long shot, an empty road where a giant fountain of water explodes from the underground, pumping the manhole cover high and creating a large crater on the road. The rest of the sequence furthers this correspondence in different ways. The subsequent three shots, respectively cut to three flooded urban spaces after the storm, are all recorded on surveillance cameras and monitored by the police in their CCTV control room in shot twelve. Something unsettling lurks beneath the surface of the still water in these ruinous spaces overwhelmed by the force of nature. The next five shots move between the space of the control room and some surveillance footages implied to be viewed by the policemen there. These footages capture a woman’s jump off a bridge—she could also be pushed down, but the image is too pixelated for the policemen to discern. While this event might seem irrelevant to what has previously happened at the dry cleaner, a sense of uneasiness nevertheless creeps in with each surveillance footage that potentially records an unidentified woman’s death. It anticipates the advent of shot eighteen when the camera brings us back to the dry cleaner, where the owner fires Qing Ting for how she has treated the customer. This incident, we will soon find out, enrages Ke Fan, who later tracks down and assaults the female customer. He is soon arrested and sentenced, leading to the breakdown of his relationship with Qing Ting and her unexplained disappearance—a kind of “death” anticipated by the woman’s voluntary, suicidal, or forced jump off the bridge. Along with some other sequences, this example characterizes the human–nature relation in Dragonfly Eyes as not simply a cinematic staging of the Romantic notion of pathetic fallacy. More than a rhetorical device, an ontological blurring literally emerges. Connections are made, too, on the interpersonal front when the likely finitude of an unknown person’s life foreshadows the erasure of someone else’s identity. In this process of leveling, individuality seems to be expanded. Conscious or not, one gets inextricably bound up with others. Such a process made possible through editing would also account for various episodes previously highlighted in my plot summary. Throughout the video, one’s identity is routinely revealed to be a malleable, replaceable substance as Qing Ting becomes Xiao Xiao, as Xiao Xiao and countless women resemble one another (which, again, the most advanced surveillance technology fails to differentiate), and when Ke Fan finally takes up Qing Ting’s identity. Indeed, doesn’t the fact that the video is titled “Qingting zhiyan” in Chinese—meaning either the eyes of dragonfly, the insect, or the eyes of Qing Ting, the character—already bespeaks an association between the hyper-subjectivity of the compound eye and Qing Ting’s fluid identity, which is not one? Morever, at the level of materiality, the characters Qing Ting and Ke Fan are themselves virtual composites that only come into beings as Dragonfly Eyes collects, selects, and assembles the images of hundreds of distinct men and women. Aside from the connections made across locations and shots, temporalities converge in the world of Dragonfly Eyes. too. This convergence occurs not only because the past of Qing Ting and the future of Ke Fan have been sutured in the final question that Ke Fan poses in the Buddhist temple but also because the video constantly hints that the world it constructs unfolds in a nonlinear temporal structure. The fantasy of the magnetic field most explicitly exemplifies this convergence. The end of the video reiterates what the characters have said about the matching between magnetic fields old and new as well as its effect of replaying “the sound and image from the past.” After a policeman regrettably acknowledges the failure to locate Qing Ting, a colleague of his says “I just wish the time will come when geo-magnetic images play. We can watch events replayed and have a better chance of figuring them out.” While one could read this recurring discourse of supernaturalism as a metaphor of surveillance technology in its consummate form, this reading ultimately seems insufficient, insofar as it overlooks the video’s inner complexities and ecopolitical significance that only emerges when we recognize how its parts cooperatively move toward a unifying whole. The compound eye’s field of vision, one could say, covers a much wider range. But before we celebrate this expanded vision, we should also be aware of the fact that the politics of hyper-connectivity, whether established through editing, found footage filmmaking, or other means, is not inherently progressive or radical. Indeed, according to Zhang, much is left open to interpretation as to the video’s imagined transcendence of spatial boundaries and temporal orders in relation to the ideologies and techniques of informational capitalism. For instance, Xu’s method of filmmaking, which requires no camera operator, resonates with “recent so-called ‘sharing economy’ business models in technological capitalism (Uber, Airbnb, Postmates, and so on) that use computational support to provide a platform to connect labor forces, consumers, and commodities, without the need for ‘raw materials’ or hiring a large number of workers” (75). Additionally, the gathering of all the footage from surveillance cameras highlights the uncertainty of whether “the overproduction and increased circulation of surveillance images suggest a hyper-surveillant audiovisual future and hyper-mediated intimacy” (76). Returning to my previous reference to Sterk’s notion of the postmodern ecological sublime that the compound eye could elicit, has Dragonfly Eyes ecologized the postmodern sublime symptomatic of late capitalism? Or has it, in fact, given form to the latest capitalist techniques? While there might never be a satisfactory answer to such a quandary involving the everlasting tension between aesthetics and politics, one thing we could do is to trace Xu’s artistic trajectory vis-à-vis his environmentalist commitment by contextualizing Dragonfly Eyes within his oeuvre. In lieu of a conclusion, therefore, below I will reflect on the found footage practice that establishes Dragonfly Eyes through the lens of Xu’s ongoing environmental artwork, entitled Forest Project. Editing Like a Child From 2005 to 2013, Xu visited several regions in Africa, Latin America, and East Asia to conduct on-site teaching with local children (ranging from six to twelve years of age) on the depiction of trees. He subsequently selected a few of their drawings and placed them on an online platform for auction, the profit of which was directed toward efforts of reforestation in the regions he visited. Before the drawings went on sale, Xu personally copied, juxtaposed, and compiled each of them onto the surface of a long paper scroll. When asked about the motivation behind his manual reproduction and assemblage of distinct drawings, Xu praised children’s artistic creativity from which he hoped to learn. “No existing theory and analysis can explain the children’s fantastical imagination,” he advanced, “the visual knowledge and experience you possess appear passive and fall behind the children’s steps. Their drawings better my eyes” (Xu).8 I highlight this aspect of Forest Project because its formation shares a structural similarity with that of Dragonfly Eyes. Despite evident differences on sundry fronts, both projects are essentially the outcome of a meticulous process of selection, arrangement, and composition of found objects. While the scale of their respective source pool—some dozens of drawings for Forest Project; more than 10,000 hours of surveillance footages for Dragonfly Eyes—drastically differs, Xu has been equally fascinated by the tension between existing materials in the world and their second lives animated by artistic repurposing. Such a tension in his two most recent projects carries great ecological stakes. I would propose that the figure of the child plays a key role not only in Forest Project but also in Dragonfly Eyes, insofar as the artistic strategy of editing a film out of numerous raw materials has, itself, been described as a figurative interplay between adulthood and childhood in the history of found footage filmmaking. The former, with associated notions of logic and rationality, represents a highly organized and structured approach to editing. One shot is linked with another shot, in this paradigm, when they are motivated by a causal connection, be it implicit or explicit. The latter, however, recognizes logical order but ultimately does not consider it to be the most important factor. Marjorie Keller’s account of collage film pioneer Joseph Cornell, for instance, suggests that Cornell’s editing appears childlike as it frequently “substitutes fantasies for more awesome realities through either embellishment, distortion, or complete censorship” (110).9 Alternative principles of forming interconnections are privileged so as to illuminate an occulted realm, which narrative causality cannot adequately articulate. The montage of Dragonfly Eyes stages this interplay between adulthood and childhood. As I have demonstrated, a reading of the work oriented around its representations of human activities does not address their cosmic correspondences with those “more awesome realities” that traverse temporospatial dimensions. Such a principle of correspondence is crystalized at the end of the video when Ke Fan willingly dissolves the boundary of his identity and returns, as Qing Ting, to the Buddhist temple—a chronotope where human–nature oneness once transpired. The environment of the temple might have changed, but so has this new Qing Ting, now a hypersubject like the man with compound eyes. She (or perhaps they?) has regained the connection with nature for which her initial departure from the temple aims to search. And as we observe Qing Ting across this journey, we have also been offered, on screen, a glimpse of her regained equilibrium as well as a mode of artistic creation that makes palpable such recuperation, so urgently needed in our time. Endnotes 1 According to the ending title credit, a few footages were recorded by surveillance cameras in other countries such as Afghanistan and Spain; the precise locations of quite some footages captured in China were unidentified due to the lack of GPS record. 2 All English translations of the video’s dialogues and voice-over narrations follow its official English subtitles. 3 Jay Weissberg, for instance, describes the “run-of-the-mill melodramatic plot line” of Dragonfly Eyes as “ultra-banal” (Weissberg). David Frazier also complains that “the plot is tawdry and fails at any sort of emotional engagement” (Frazier). 4 The lyrics were written by Zhai Yongming as well. 5 There are other violent images in Dragonfly Eyes featuring human suicides and fatal accidents such as a plane crash. Taking a cue from the video’s recurring Buddhist motifs, Andrea Lingenfelter has offered a religious reading of them (especially how the video is bookended by its opening scene of a drowning accident and the final sequence of a series of accidents): “Life is cyclical, and each life is bookended by a pair of deaths: the one that precedes it, and the one that ends it. In the film, as in Buddhism, human beings exist in an endless cycle of life and death, which very few are able to escape.” Yet Lingenfelter also isolates these violent or supernatural elements from the rest of the video, insofar that they don’t “seem directly connected to the story” (Lingenfelter). Another potential approach to these images is to consider them in relation to other creations by the two scenarists, Zhai Yongming and Zhang Hanyi. Paola Iovene has generously pointed out to me that violence, desire, and the transformation of identity, as articulated through the genre of ghost story, are crucial themes in some of Zhai’s poems. Zhang’s film, Life After Life (2016), also explores the cyclicity of life through the ghostly realm. 6 One such attempt can be found in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” in which he argues that the ecological condition at a planetary scale overpowers the first two steps in the typical trident process of visualization: “classification, separation, and aestheticization.” As classification and separation become rather redundant, “to visualize the Anthropocene is to invoke the aesthetic” (213). 7 Since the narrative of the novel does not constitute my primary object of inquiry, I hope I am justified in being eclectic in approaching solely the titular creature. 8 The quoted passage comes from the second section (out of three) of Xu Bing’s article “Zhaohui dasenlin” [Retrieving the forest]. The first sections were based on an interview on August 8, 2008; the third section was added on October 8, 2009. For an account of the aesthetic and ecopolitical significance of Forest Project more generally, see Pao-chen Tang, “Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Art and Ecology in Xu Bing’s Forest Project.” 9 Not simply a matter of editing principle, Cornell’s films also directly feature children. Works Cited Frazier David. “ Man, Machine, or Dragonfly? ” ArtAsiaPacific 107 (March/April 2018), <http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/107/ManMachineOrDragonfly>. OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Keller Marjorie. The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell, and Brakhage . Farleigh Dickinson UP , 1986 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Kubetz Rick. “ Bugs View Inspires New Digital Cameras Unique Imaging Capabilities .” Illinois College of Engineer 29 , Apr. 2013 , <https://engineering.illinois.edu/news/article/2013-04-29-bugs-view-inspires-new-digital-cameras-unique-imaging-capabilities>. Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Lingenfelter Andrea. “ The Epistemology of Surveillance .” The China Channel 10 (2018) , <https://chinachannel.org/2018/09/10/dragonfly-eyes/>. Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Mirzoeff Nicholas. “ Visualizing the Anthropocene .” Public Culture 26.2 ( 2014 ): 213 – 32 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Sartre Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness . Trans. Barnes Hazel E. . Philosophical Library , 1956 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Sterk Darryl. “ The Apotheosis of Montage: The Videomosaic Gaze of The Man with the Compound Eyes as Postmodern Ecological Sublime .” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 28.2 ( 2016 ): 183 – 222 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Tang Pao-chen. “ Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Art and Ecology in Xu Bing’s Forest Project .” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 15.1 ( 2016 ): 86 – 108 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Weissberg Jay. “ Film Review: ‘Dragonfly Eyes’ .” Variety 13 , Aug. 2017 , <https://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/dragonfly-eyes-review-qing-ting-zhi-yan-1202525754/>. Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Wu Ming-yi. The Man with the Compound Eye . Trans. Sterk Darryl . Vintage Books , 2013 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Xu Bing. “ Zhaohui dasenlin .” Xu Bing , 8 Aug. 2008 , <http://www.xubing.com/cn/database/writing/366>. Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Yang, Renren. “Discreet Camera-Eye, Spectacle, and Stranger Sociality: On the Shift to Prosumer Digital Surveillance in China.” Surveillance in Asian Cinema: Under Eastern Eyes. Ed Karen Fang. Routledge, 2017. 245–68. Zhang Ling. “ Foreshadowing the Future of Capitalism: Surveillance Technology and Digital Realism in Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes (2017) .” Comparative Cinema 8.14 ( 2020 ): 62 – 81 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Ecological Vision of Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isaa063
DA - 2020-07-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-ecological-vision-of-xu-bing-s-dragonfly-eyes-iG20Dy4XDq
SP - 440
EP - 452
VL - 27
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -