The Burrow – Monitor & Control

2021

Video

22 mins 23 seconds

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This video work depicts a female security guard who is intimately connected to the security machines, situated in an underground surveillance room of a gated middle-class community in China. In this hidden digital prison, the controller perceives the time, nature, and weather of the outside world through LCD screens and cameras. The natural objects in front of the cameras—a few growing willow branches, vibrating leaves—playfully enter the dull image frame and obscure the cameras. The guard's task is to identify the cameras covered by the branches of plants and then notify the gardeners to trim them. The machines operate autonomously, as if they 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. She herself is constantly under surveillance. This troubling central control room, echoing Kafka’s allegories of “Prometheus” and “The Burrow,” reveals the universal plight of human beings amidst digital noise.

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