CHARLIE YIP  

Projects Review

Ars Electronica Festival 2020 and Hong Kong Escape Views at the Junction of Time

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For AE2020 Garden Hong Kong September 9-13, 2020, we produced a variety of online, offline and hybrid events. At the beginning phase of the pandemic and after a series of twirling in the political environment in 2019, people had never been so eager to escape from the imposing social distancing restrictions desperately, meanwhile, be connected to the global community. We especially presented Hong Kong Escape Views for AE2020 as our memorial of the time. 

We scouted a few locations, for example, cemetery and bunker, and even attempted to request permission to shoot in the satellite earth station. In the end, considering the feasibility, we shot 360 videos in Repulse Bay, Kowloon Park, the reservoir of the Kowloon district, Kai Tak Terminal, car park of the City Hall, Rooftop of an anonymous building in Sham Shui Po and the Western District Public Cargo Working Area, so-called the Instagram Pier. The video footage was stitched together, edited, masked, tested and made Hong Kong Escape Views.

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Hong Kong Escape Views, created by MoBen for this project, brought the desire, struggles and paradox of surveillance of the locals of this time and era onto our handy screens. This online playable artwork depicts a protagonist, who is wearing a protective suit, surgical blue gloves and shoe covers, 3M N95 mask and a bag, installing surveillance cameras about the well-recognized sceneries in Hong Kong. The Audience may first perceive this online 360 video as for any other 360 video that introduces tourist attractions and navigate the panorama with their mouses or VR devices. There is no game instruction for the audience but requires them to explore and learn throughout the game. To play with the 360 videos at home, the audience has to find out the surveillance cameras so they can move on to the next scene in a loop randomly and endlessly. As if a training stimulation, or put it as a “survival practice” for the audience.  Wherever they are from, local or overseas, they should better notice where the eyes of the big brother are so they can play their role in this fiction with no end. Escaping from scene to scene, the audience is learning to monitor the monitoring and watch over the watching overs. They shall never truly escape from the view of surveillance cameras if they indulge in the sceneries of Hong Kong or the game with the protagonist. They escape only when they quit this game, but do they? Or do they fall prey to another?  

Any private place must put up a sign, explicitly telling the guests in the house that they are on camera if the host has installed a camera to record them seemingly for the reason of security. Thus, in order to have a private party, we must know that we are being monitored and be alert to this surveillant action. Privacy in this sense may mean that doing private affairs publicly under surveillance with our consent and performing what we want the camera expects from us, for which we take little private pleasure. 

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We’ve organized online, onsite and in online-onsite hybrid programmes, including Live Conversation, Live Lecture, Online Showcase and Workshop.

In response to the underlying questions of surveillance unconcealed or deteriorated upon pandemic, Moscow/Lviv/Hong Kong Expert Tour & Planetary Wine Tasting Party took us to look deeply at the desire of the people in this particular moment. An online event is for the pleasure of the audience online and an on-site event is for the pleasure of the on-site audience. In this hybrid event, people could take pleasure in being watching and watching, as though being the performer and audience simultaneously. After the edited version of the recording is released as video work, people can also look back to the event as observers from a third perspective. They may find the video much entertaining and gladly disseminate the video to friends if they see themselves being recorded. We performed Hong Kong Escape Views at the party and made the 360 video footage into a part of our work.

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