The Burrow – Monitor & Control

2021

Video

22 mins

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The burrow–Monitor & Control tells the story of a female controller situated in an underground surveillance room of a gated middle-class community who is intimately connected to the machines. In this hidden digital prison, the control perceives time, nature, and weather of the outside world through LCD screens and cameras. The natural objects in front of the cameras—in this case, a few growing willow branches—playfully enter the lackluster image frame and obscure the cameras. The work of the guard consists in identifying the cameras covered by the branches of plants then to warn the gardeners so that they cut them.The machines are operating autonomously as if they themselves were living organisms, conducting the human body with incessant alarms, while the human becomes an integrated circuit board, gradually exhausted by the collaborative labor of the auxiliary digital machines. Night time, underground, machines, the mysterious female controller who is always blurred constitute this worrying central control room which echoes Kafka’s allegory of “Prometheus” and “the burrow,” revealing the universal plight of human beings in digital noise. 

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