Two years ago as I just arrived in the Netherlands, I made a quick decision and bought a ticket to Venice for the Biennale. Back then, cultural studies had long been my research interests, and my appreciation for art was still limited to classical art. As an average visitor, I was mesmerized by the contemporary artworks that represented each nation or was chosen by the curators of the Biennale with a glance just in two days. Back then, I never dreamed that I would be allowed to work for this fascinating global art event in the future.
3X3X6 was on display adjacent to the Doge's Palace and the Piazza San Marco, and my life there was busy and rewarding with crowds of visitors coming in. From south of the Netherlands, I thought Venice in May would greet me with the torrid sun, but the exhibition this year was inaugurated in an unforgiving biting and rainy weather. However, such weather echoed with Palazzo delle Prigioni as a prison in the past, and together with the dim light in the 3X3X6 exhibition hall intended to simulate an ambiance under surveillance, the overall uncomfortable scenario seemed to be meticulously rendered by Shu Lea Cheang to further engage the audience in the physical and mental prisons in the ten fictional videos.
With a record-breaking number of visitors during vernissage and a daily audience of three to five hundred visitors during the exhibition period, these visitors helped me become a more confident and articulate docent at the exhibition. Seeing all these globally well-known artists, critics, curators, and media during the vernissage, I came to realize how influential Shu Lea Cheang and Paul B. Preciado are to the global art circle. At the reception table, I was lucky enough to greet many distinguished guests and listen to their positive comments on the exhibition. There were also many curators and art critics who have been following the Taiwan Pavilion for a long time sharing with me how impressive the exhibitions over the years are to them.
My challenges began after the official launch of the Biennale. In the beginning, I was worried if the audience would show privacy concerns over facial scans at the entrance as well as have doubts about the controversy of the issue. As it turned out, the visitors admired the pioneering technology of the exhibition and accepted the narrative structure. The audience was intrigued by the dancing footage uploaded to 3X3X6 by people who supported the Iranian young lady, Maedeh Hojabri, and started from the universal recognition of " dancing is not a crime" to further delve into the values of gender issues, bodily autonomy, and sexual autonomy. During my introduction and discussion with the audience, many expressed that these seemingly abstract short films and art installation evolved from an artistic demonstration into a profound social discussion after the guided tour. Contrary to my assumption that the visitors would be conservative in the first place, I was touched to find that most people were willing to join the dialogue. After the tour, many parents were more willing to continue the exhibition tour with their children and convey the importance of respecting diversity.
In the discussion over Shu Lea Cheang's ten trans punk fictional short videos with the visitors, people could always relate to them or be reminded of other social issues. Most of them were able to comprehend the exhibition discourse and praised the democratic development in Taiwan. One visitor told me that 3X3X6 was her favorite exhibition of the year because every installation, exhibition approach, and technique had its necessity and irreplaceability. She said that in Shu Lea Cheang's work, the artistic presentation became a new communicative approach that overcame the language barrier in reality and interacted with the audience.
I have fruitful results and unforgettable memories from the two-month work experience as an intern docent in the Taiwan Pavilion. From the discussions in the exhibition to the written exchanges in the comments book, every visitor gave meaning to the exhibition and created different memories for each other. This is my first time working in the art circle. It is my honor to be in the team representing Taiwan in art, and I have a better understanding of the importance of the guidance of a docent in exhibitions. I cherished every chance to promote Taiwan and Shu Lea Cheang's work to more visitors as a docent and did my best to bury the anticolonial debate in the minds of every visitor.
Reflecting upon the transformation of surveillance techniques since the panopticon to include contemporary 3-D facial recognition, AI, and the Internet, Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 restages the rooms of the Palazzo delle Prigioni—a Venetian prison from the sixteenth century in operation until 1922—as a high-tech surveillance space. Taking as its starting point the story of libertine writer Giacomo Casanova, imprisoned in the Prigioni in 1755, Cheang has conducted in-depth studies on ten historical and contemporary cases of subjects incarcerated because of gender or sexual dissent, including Marquis de Sade and Michel Foucault, as well as contemporary cases from Taiwan and South Africa. Their fictionalized portraits become part of the exhibition’s system; the title of which refers to today’s standardized architecture of industrial imprisonment: a 3 x 3 square-meter cell constantly monitored by 6 cameras.
Cheang departs from the architecture of the panopticon to construct the central space of the exhibition in Room A: the surveillance tower has been inverted to project the portraits of the ten prisoners and connected up to a newly developed 3-D camera surveillance system, which installed at the entrance of the exhibition scans the visitors’ faces—by electing to enter the exhibition they are accepting to become part of the system and to having their face modified. Here, gender and racial morphing become queer digital strategies to disrupt the tradition of colonial and anthropometric identification techniques, extending from Alphonse Bertillon’s criminological photography of the nineteenth century to today’s facial recognition technologies. Connected to the Internet 3x3x6 allows visitors (both physical and virtual) to send selfies and images to the exhibition system. The visitors are thus inside the total surveillance apparatus. Moving into Rooms B and C of the updated Prigioni, the physical visitors then wander into a maze of monitors that unfold the stories of the ten prisoners across time and space, histories and cultures. Whereas in the eighteenth century Casanova’s libertinage and Sade’s atheist negation of morality were the object of surveillance and discipline, in contemporary technopatriarchal digital conditions, the black man constructed as “rapist,” the HIV-positive homosexual, the transgender person, as well as women constructed as sexual e-hunters and witches are the new subjects beyond the law. Finally, in Room D, visitors are invited to discover the control room and the very operating system of the surveillance apparatus in function.
Hacking digital surveillance technologies and social media, Cheang uses the site of the prison to create a real-time dissident interface that the visitor is invited to join. Involving legal documents, fake news, historical reports, myths and fantasies, as well as the data retrieved from 3-D surveillance cameras and the images uploaded by visitors, the exhibition constructs a collective counter-history of sexuality—where trans-punk- science fiction, queer, and anti-colonial imaginations provide visual and critical frameworks to think through the histories of subjection and resistance—and activates a critical proliferation of poetic and political actions for digital times. A contribution to the digital avant-garde, Cheang’s 3x3x6 equally challenges the aesthetics of Internet global capitalism and the gender, sexual, and race norms that hold up its hidden infrastructure.
普里奇歐尼宮（Palazzo delle Prigioni）是威尼斯從十六世紀起一直使用到1922年的監獄。
鄭淑麗的作品《3x3x6》將其打造為一個高科技監控空間，反思從全景監獄（panopticon），到當代3-D人臉辨識、人工智慧、網際網路等監控技術的變遷。鄭淑麗以1755年被囚禁於總督府的浪子作家賈科莫．卡薩諾瓦（Giacomo
Casanova）的故事為出發點，深入研究了十位歷史上及當代因在性別及性傾向上持有異議而遭囚禁之人的案例，包括薩德侯爵和傅柯，以及臺灣及南非的當代個案。這些人的虛構肖像成了展覽體系的一部分。而此次展覽的標題《3x3x6》有意突顯當今監獄體系的標準化建築結構：由六個攝影機監控的3x3平方公尺牢房。
鄭淑麗以全景監獄為靈感來打造A展覽室：監控塔被反轉用來投射十位囚徒的肖像；並透過展覽入口處安裝的最新3-D攝影監控系統，掃描參觀者的臉部——只要選擇參觀展覽，觀眾即接受成為展覽體系的一部分，與自己的臉被改造。在這裡，性別與種族的轉化成為酷兒數位策略，藉以對殖民及人體測量識別的傳統提出質疑——這類技法從十九世紀阿方索．貝蒂雍（Alphonse Bertillon）發明的犯罪攝影到今天的人臉辨識技術，不一而足。《3x3x6》透過網路連結，讓觀眾（包括現場觀眾和網路觀眾）可以把自拍及其他圖像傳送給展覽體系。由此，觀眾被納入了整體監控體系的內部。接下來觀眾進入升級後的普宮B展室和C展室，在這個螢幕迷宮內，講述著十位跨越時空、跨越歷史文化的囚徒生平。在十八世紀，卡薩諾瓦的浮浪和薩德對道德無神論式的否定都是監控和戒律的對象；而在當代數位化技術父權下，被認定為「性侵犯」的黑人、患有愛滋病的同性戀者、跨性別人士，以及所謂的E女巫，則成為新的法外之徒。最後，在D展室，觀眾被邀請進入控制室，探索正在運作中的監控系統。
鄭淑麗以駭客方式入侵數位監控技術和社交媒體，利用監獄場域創造了一個即時的異議界面，並邀請觀眾參與。這個作品採用了法庭文件、偽新聞、歷史報導、神話想像，以及從3-D監控錄像採集的數據，與觀眾上傳的影像，由此集體創作性的「反歷史」——在這部歷史中，跨龐克（trans-punk）科幻、酷兒，以及反殖民想像提供了視覺與批判的框架，讓我們思考征服與抵抗的歷史。同時，這個展覽批判地激發了數位時代的詩意行動及政治行動。作為對數位前衛藝術的貢獻，鄭淑麗的《3x3x6》挑戰了網際網路全球資本主義的美學標準、以及隱藏在其結構中的性別、性及種族規範。