Deng Yufeng: The evasive game in a transparent world
“A Disappearing Movement” is the artist Deng Yufeng spending six months in 2020 investigating all the cameras in Beijing’s Happiness Street block, studying the dead corners of each camera, and creating a set of road maps that can avoid camera surveillance, free for the public to use. The artist leads the participants to disappear in the Happiness Street performance art project in the way of a “guide”.
Through technical analysis, this art project explores possible paths to disappearance in a transparent world. In modern society, public areas are filled with cameras, like the eye of God, monitoring everything at all times. This may, to some extent, provide a guarantee for maintaining public safety and strike fear into the hearts of those with bad intentions.
However, at the same time, we are also becoming transparent under this surveillance, which raises significant questions about the boundary between public and private rights. Thus, this “vanishing movement” creates a kind of viewing void in the way of a game, involving, but not limited to, the boundary between public and private rights. The chosen location, “Happiness Street,” also has a symbolic significance that provokes profound discussions about how happiness is defined in the public sphere.
In today’s tumultuous world, the ethical scale of surveillance in individual countries changes as society’s public security escalates, causing the privacy of individuals to shrink further under the squeeze of the public interest.
While I was drafting this blog, one of China’s largest social media platforms, Weibo, has just introduced a new feature that displays users’ real names and job information on their personal profiles. This requirement is expected to extend to all Chinese social media platforms gradually. This announcement immediately sparked heated debates on the internet. Some believe that real-name registration online could help reduce online violence and curb the spread of malicious false information. However, others are concerned that it may infringe on their privacy and potentially expose them to the risk of online harassment.
In the context of China’s online environment, from displaying users’ IP locations by city, which started last year, to displaying real names this year, we can observe a gradual warming trend. It’s almost like placing a frog in gradually heating water. Whether it’s surveillance cameras or tracking online footprints, it represents a form of control and design intended to guide and regulate people’s thoughts and actions. Against this backdrop, it is essential for us to reflect on the compromises required today between individual rights and technological convenience, as well as the role individuals play as “designed” entities in the city's public spaces. As Deng Yufeng aptly puts it, even though my project may be only a brief action, it represents the struggle of an ordinary individual confronting power.
Reference：
https://async.market/art/master/0xb6dae651468e9593e4581705a09c10a76ac1e0c8-4219
