Yan Li

Have a great watching.

Best,

Yan Li

Everything can be a watcher getting involved in the surveillance system. The other day I was walking on the street, I noticed there were two security cameras placed next to each other, which looked like a pair of googly eyes. After that, I made a harmless prank/ art intervention on the streets by pasting these amusing but conspicuous stickers to remind people that there are some potential watchers around us. 

If you were a Gen-Y like me growing up with a famous Japanese animation called Doraemon, you must have been eager to have one of the magic gadgets in it - Memory Bread (Coping Toast). One presses the bread on a book, and the contents will then be 'printed' on the bread. When the user eats the bread later, it will allow them to memorize any information on it. From this 'futuristic function' at that time, you can tell how desperate people are for obtaining unforgettable memories.

Nowadays, with the advent of cloud storage, remembering is easier than forgetting. Digital technology empowers us as never before, yet it has unforeseen consequences as well. In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer has proposed a simple solution to resist tech companies’ strong incentive to track your online behavior through their perfect remembering - setting expiration dates on the information. I collected my own online data of websites I browsed regularly from the chrome setting, then printed these sequences on a few pieces of “Memorization Bread”, placing them somewhere damp. After one month, the texts embody my data were blurred following the appearance of mould. This 'rotten work' is expected to act as a reminder for netizens to actively delete their digital traces on a regular basis in order to slow down the pace of the internet’s ability to memorize. 

I secretly installed a camera in a lift of the White City campus, which recorded a ten-minute video and saved it to a USB. I encrypted this video file so that nobody, including myself, can see the events which were recorded. Because the image inside is invisible and intangible, we cannot figure out how many people and what happened in the lift at that moment. In this context, the lift may be simultaneously both private space and public space, which is similar to a physical concept: Quantum superposition state.