Isabel de Porcel
Isabel de Porcel | Gao | C-type | Look into my Eyes
Look into my Eyes is a project that undertakes the sensitive topic of modern surveillance technologies used in our societies. From a range of surveillance techniques including speech recognition, closed-circuit television, smart cards, credit records and internet surveillance technologies, the artist chose to explore the specialist face recognition software used in China. At present China is constructing a gigantic digital database capable of watching its citizens on the streets and online, listening to their phone calls and tracking their consumer purchases. According to some witnesses the central government eventually wants to have city-by-city surveillance, so they could monitor one city and its surveillance system as a whole. This high-tech surveillance and censorship program is known in China as "the Golden Shield."
‘If you walk out of this building, you will be under surveillance in five to six different ways’. †
The facial recognition software is able to match a face with a 10 million person database in one second. With the cursor on the computer’s screen, one just needs to mark the pupils of the eyes with two cross signs, enabling the system to measure the distance between one’s features, a distinctive aspect of our faces that does not change with disguises or even surgery.
Half of the cameras produced in China are shipped overseas, destined to peer from building ledges in London, Manhattan and Dubai as part of the global boom in "homeland security."
At the moment London boasts over half a million surveillance cameras.
Using specially constructed lights, the artist has created crosses that reflect in the sitters’ eyes. She explores the meaning of freedom in our modern society and its fluid transition between physicality and psychology. What does it mean to be watched or spied upon? The project became a journey through the feelings of indifference, apathy, changing moods and hope.
All the sitters are practitioners of Falung Gong, a spiritual practice first taught in China in 1992. It consists of a series of physical exercises (known as qigong), which promote mental and physical wellbeing. In 1999, 100 million people were practising Falung Gong in China and the communist regime banned the practice, threatened by any group that is capable of independent action. Over the last ten years, Falung Gong practitioners have sought to publicise the terror campaign to which they have been subjected including torture, illegal imprisonment, beatings, forced labour, psychiatric abuse and systematic organ harvesting.