Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze remarked, that following the society of discipline in the 18th and 19th centuries as explained by Foucault, we were entering the society of control. According to Deleuze, the enclosure of spaces in the disciplinary society, such as schools, hospitals, and factories is being challenged and replaced by borderless variations of corporations, which exercise control as modulation with the numerical language (Deleuze, 1992). This progression can also be seen by looking at the various forms of moving image beyond traditional cinema that are becoming ubiquitous daily displays. Among which, one significant example is the surveillance image, with its twofold phenomenon: as the coercive mechanism placed by state and corporations into civilian life, as well as the user-generated self-surveillance image and its popularization in social media and cultural productions. Situated in this context, this paper attempts to analyze the growing circulation and migration of surveillance image into different forms of audiovisual productions within Chinese society. I argue that the surveillance image has become the new “cinema of attraction” (Gunning, 1990) in digital circulation. Ranging from the indexical CCTV image to stylized live stream broadcasting, all of these can be surveillance images encompassed within the modulated network. I will also offer a critical analysis of existing moving image interventions from artists to counteract this phenomenon, with the core challenge remains what Claire Bishop termed as “the digital divide” (Bishop, 2012).