We are Watching You

Statement:

These days everybody is leading a life in a virtual world, where we establish profiles, store and share our data and get connected to people and information that would be impossible for us to access in real life. The Internet brings convenience and enlarges our capability, but at the same time it learns about us, at a rate and level that many people don’t realize. When Facebook and Youtube recommend us materials and videos that directly appeal to our interests, when our iPhones automatically backup everything onto Apple’s servers, when we click on “share my location” button whenever it pops up on our devices, we should be concerned about the fact that we are thoroughly exposed, kept track of and studied by these companies. It’s an age of “Big Tech” surveillance, and I want to raise the public’s attention toward this issues and encourage new technologies, legislation and companies dealing with this privacy security issues.

Context:

The first inspiration for my work came from my trip to Andy Warhol Museum, where I saw Ai Weiwei’s wall of photos (Study of Perspective, 1995 to 2003) in which he points his middle fingers toward the famous monuments around the world. Ai Weiwei intended to demonstrate “his personal form of rebellion against any government authority who blatantly or covertly disregard the freedoms of its citizens.” All these photos are juxtaposed closely on one single, and they all have the exactly same composition and the recurring motif of the middle finger. Such design and layout made me feel overpowered by the same message they all try to convey, as if they are screaming how badly they want their voice to be heard and how ubiquitous the issue is. Another inspiration came from the “Big Brother is Watching You” poster for George Orwell’s 1984, as I want to create the effects and impressions of “you are being watched”, so I borrowed the idea of dramatized staring eyes. Besides, as I use screenshots in my work, I think it can be considered as following Marcel Duchamp’s readymades.

Process:

I want to create the same overpowering effect as Ai Weiwei’s wall, so I adopt the same general layout, that is, juxtaposing several pictures of the same motif and layout. Originally I intended to use the photos of the headquarters of these big tech companies but later I felt maybe directly using their interfaces may make the audience feel more closely brought into the scenario I want to create, that is, as soon as you type your search or log into your accounts, the companies start watching you.

Product:

My work consists of four images of similar layout and the same recurring “big, dramatic staring eyes”, so I started with making that. I asked my friend to open his eyes widely, I took a picture of that, and then I feed the picture into the Prisma App to dramatize it. For the backgrounds for each I took screenshots of the corresponding pages of the companies, and again used Prisma App to enrich them with colorful shades so that they fit more coherently with “the eyes”. In the end I used photoshop to blend the two elements for each of the four images and finally put them together in one big image.

Critique:

In general I think the four images look good together, and the special filters applied onto them by Prisma provide a sense of art and beauty. The eyes in each image do look creepy, desperate and attentive, which is exactly the kind of impression I want to leave on the audience. There is also a variety of colors involved and they seem harmonic with each other.

Personal Reflection:

The biggest takeaway from this project is that I learn to combine different sources of inspiration, including what I learned in lecture, my trip to gallery and personal online research of artworks, together to make them all embodied in one single work. I learned to borrow from the others not only their techniques, but also how the ideas underlying their techniques may fit or further what I want to express. What I would do differently is that this work still looks not natural enough, and expresses my message so explicitly that it’s not really like what most art does.