Blue Marbles
Blue Marbles is interested in the seemingly “mundane” and “common” aspects of surveillance culture in the use of communication/social media apps to document life. It is an investigation of this feeling of inevitability and numbness that it produces while meditating on the connections between the labor and physical materials involved in the production of surveillance camera hardware, data management, and the rituals of documentation.
Although surveillance is not confined to any specific space or form, I have decided to use common symbols and tropes found in Chinese surveillance hardware commercials as the basis for this film. In loosely analyzing commercials released by Chinese surveillance companies circa 2018-2019 – such as, Hikvision, Da Hua, and Sensetime – some common symbols were round spherical objects: the camera lens, the eyeball, crystal balls and the earth (blue marble like images) seen from space, etc. In addition, the sounds and narration of these commercials were used, sliced, stretched, manipulated, and ripped apart to create a new sonic space where the tropes can exist in a limbo disconnected from their original sources. I link what is often perceived as ‘alien’ and other – China and its mass surveillance network – to some common tools of surveillance capitalism such as online gaming and data collecting lifestyle apps.
Orwellian depictions of the Chinese surveillance state often brings a sense of disconnection from the way democratic countries see their own surveillance networks. Furthermore, these depictions often create a notion of false detachment from the experiments of surveillance in authoritarian countries rather than an awareness of the interconnected nature of globalized surveillance technologies. Rather than aiming to try to sensationalize surveillance, I hope to bring out and disrupt the numbing effects of a surveilled networked life and the ways that all of us as individuals are implicated into this large data stream.
Blue Marbles was made as a conversation with these tropes of traditional surveillance (Big Brother, the camera lens, Bentham’s Panopticon, etc). It uses the language of surveillance as input to either be processed or analyzed as data and reprocessed as new images. The film is composed of image sequences created from datasets of surveillance camera products, blue marble images of the earth taken from outer space, rare minerals particularly Lanthanum (used to produce camera lenses among other things), Chinese shanshui landscape paintings, and processed snippets of existing brand commercials. The datasets were then prepared and trained using StyleGAN ADA and Pix2Pix Next frame prediction models to create new images which make up the basis of the film.
Kai-Luen Liang is a Los Angeles based sound and media artist working with/in/through plunderphonics/sampling, generative systems, low tech/ DIY electronics, and neural networks for image and sound generation. His work deals with the geopolitics of surveillance, migration, and memory. Liang is interested in machine and human symbiosis, and world building through speculative and nonlinear narratives. Follow him on Instagram @kailuen3030