"Venice is an island city that is divided into smaller isles by canals, which are linked with bridges for people to come and go freely. Languages are like islands, and translators are the bridges that allow people to communicate thoughts across different languages. The work of an artist is rich in meaning and will be carefully interpreted to the audience with the help of a docent. This was what I wrote in my motivation for the application for the on-site docents in Venice Biennale; this was also my motto I followed during my stay in the City of Water. During the two months in the Pavilion, the four keywords in my daily life were: contemporary art, language, audience, and politics.
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Being contemporary does not mean excluding the past
At the end of the stone stairs to Palazzo delle Prigioni stood the projection tower, and the rotating images of historical figures and modern prisoners hovered like spirits. As a contemporary artwork, 3X3X6 displayed ten figures across 300 years, which once again reminded us on that being contemporary does not mean excluding the past; rather, being contemporary means to create art pieces through brand new media, scopes and topics. I met a student who studied contemporary art. Since he didn't have a tight schedule, I recommended several classical works that were worth visiting around Venice during our discussion on contemporary art because I always believe history nurtures artistic creation. However, "I have seen enough beautiful things," he replied.
Through workshops and reading the catalogs, I was aware that the artist and curator made great efforts to search in history to accomplish 3X3X6. I believe for creators, the greatest obstacle to success was a lack of open-mindedness, or to put it another way around: creators without an open mind can hardly be successful. When people think they’ve learned or seen enough, they deny their access to inspiration and innovation for artistic creation.
Building an incomplete bridge
For students studying translation, it is crystal clear that “translators are bridges” is a total lie. From my docent experiences, I can better relate to such saying: translations are like bridges that link different cultural beings, but they can be full of traps. As Professor Te Hsing Shan once put, “Translating is just like pouring water from one barrel to another. It can never be done without spilling.” This metaphor is simple but vivid. This probably explains why the artist chose not to offer subtitles to all the short clips in different languages. She wanted to keep the ideation intact, rather than running the risk of compromising it through translation.
"3X3X6" has a complicated historical context. When the audience failed to understand the difficult words in the guided tour, I had no choice but to use more simple expressions. The audience probably faced the same dilemma when they were asking questions. Such compromise was just like removing some steel bars from the bridge. Even so, I still had a sense of achievement building an incomplete bridge. My anxiety for translation was alleviated whenever the audience had a eureka moment or shared their feedback in great excitement. And this motivated me to do my best to build a bridge between the audience and the artwork.
Tour guiding should be audience-centered
In the beginning, I tried to randomly pick my audience in the exhibition hall because the spatial arrangement wasn't available for group tours. After many attempts, I realized the best way was to linger beside visitors who had stayed for a while and offer my explanation or answer their questions when the time was right. Talking to the audience was quite amazing. Sometimes they were touched by the work and shared their life experiences voluntarily; at other times they offered me a different perspective.
Many visitors impressed me a lot. One of them was a mother from Taiwan with her daughter in grade 6. She came to me for a guided tour, and after the tour, she told me, "I think this work is fantastic. The nudity and sex scenes displayed in the exhibition seem fine to me. Elementary school students are not too young for sex education." She also added that she was happy for the approval of the marriage equality act in Taiwan this year. Yet she thought Taiwan could make faster progress and hoped that artists could lend a helping hand to further promote and spread the importance of sex education. Can art be educational? Should art be educational? After she left, these questions have haunted me since.
There was an art critic and forester from Germany who had quite a conversation with me. From the surveillance system and the facial recognition system in the exhibition, we started to talk about the pros and cons of the social credit system in China. The forester also shared with me one work that truly moved him in the India Pavilion: the armistice letter Gandhi wrote to Hitler was projected on a fog screen where visitors could walk back and forth. However, there was also a curator who directly criticized the artwork, which was quite uncommon. In her opinion, the poorly chosen installation media couldn't blend in with the environment. One professor from the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University led a group of students to the Biennale. He took them to the Taiwan Pavilion in particular and hoped that his students could pay more attention to female artists and artworks on gender issues.
Through all these encounters, I came to realize that artists had their expectations for how works were to be introduced and interpreted; so did the audience. Except for those who visited by accident, visitors expected to learn something when they were aware of the fact that they were here “for Venice Biennale”. They either wanted to acquire knowledge, enjoy a wonderful experience, or even engage in a more comprehensive learning session. And the job of a docent was to cater to their needs.
Politics is politics, art is art?
On top of the three elements mentioned above, politics was ubiquitous throughout the exhibition. The awkward political status of Taiwan has remained unsettled throughout the years, and the fact that Taiwan Pavilion was ostracized from National Participations to Collateral Exhibitions was the best manifestation of the status quo. Taiwan Pavilion received overwhelmingly positive feedback this year and thus attracted many visitors; nonetheless, there was no Taiwan Pavilion on the map. They could only find 3X3X6. During my interview and the preparation of the internship, I could sense that many staff attempted to "depoliticize" the whole event. However, the artist's work involved many political issues. The imprisoned Chinese woman in the work wouldn't have been convicted in Taiwan. As messages concerning Anti-ELAB and Taiwan independence were maliciously crossed out or erased, should we remain silent and turn a blind eye to that and claimed, "Politics is politics, art is art?"
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"Hello, do you want to know more about the works?" It is my honor to be given this opportunity to greet people from all over the world with this sentence at the Palazzo delle Prigioni. I read related materials before I joined the internship and thought that this program could not only do something to promote Taiwanese contemporary artists to the international audience but also helped TFAM fine-tune their curatorial policies. My participation strengthened my assumption. I look forward to the next internship program two years later, which once again brings docents to Venice to clear up all the unique and various doubts from the audience.
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。