Prof. Jung Choi published a peer-reviewed article, “Patching Worlds through Levitating Machinic Vision: Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.
ABSTRACT
In Dragonfly Eyes, Xu Bing repurposes surveillance footage as his new ready-made material, weaving a new aesthetic reality reflecting the omnipresent yet invisible nature of machinic vision in contemporary society. This essay examines how Xu Bing’s work intervenes in the “operationalization of visuality”—a mode of seeing where images, detached from human interpretation, act upon the world with their own logic. By weaving together more than 500 pieces of surveillance video, Xu exposes how contemporary visual technologies not only record but also reshape our perception of existence. His aesthetics engage with the distributed, levitating gaze of machinic vision, where visuals are embedded in the infrastructure of daily life, blurring the lines between human and machine perception. Through the lens of Dragonfly Eyes, this essay explores how Xu Bing critiques and reconfigures this automated vision, creating an (im)perfect aesthetic reality that compels us to confront the political, social, and psychological implications of a world increasingly governed by autonomous surveillance technologies.
