Taiwan’s Representation at the 58th Venice Biennale 2019 Announces 3x3x6 as Title
Artist Shu Lea Cheang Creates Site-Specific Work to Explore Confinement and Liberation
Taipei Fine Arts Museum, along with artist Shu Lea Cheang and curator Paul B. Preciado, have the pleasure to announce today 3x3x6, the new project representing Taiwan at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Expanding on the artist’s practice over the last three decades, Cheang presents a new multimedia research project, including images, installations, and computer programming, in which past and present, virtual and real worlds converge.
Born in 1954, Cheang grew up in Taiwan and developed an artistic practice in the US and Europe, putting into dialogue Western and Eastern contemporary approaches to the body, desire, affect, and technology. Internationally recognized as an Internet art pioneer, Cheang explores the changing relationship between technology and living bodies in the age of late capitalism and globalization, and its impact on body politics. Cheang combines the critical and visual traditions coming from feminist and queer cultures with cutting-edge digital/electronic technologies and computer programs to create performative artworks online and offline. Her films, installations, interactive interfaces, and live performances are a meditation on the power of images and fictions to undo normative representations of gender, sexuality, and race.
The Palazzo delle Prigioni, a prison across from the Palazzo Ducale, will house the exhibition in Venice. Taking this location as an opportunity for a site-specific work, Cheang will create an immersive installation with multiple interfaces to reflect on different technologies of confinement and control, from physical incarceration to omnipresent surveillance systems in contemporary society. Using as inspiration ten historical and contemporary cases of imprisonment due to gender, sexual, and racial nonconformity, 3x3x6 questions how legal and visual regimes shape sexual and gender norms over time. The title, 3x3x6, refers to the new architectural model of industrial prisons developed globally: a 9-square-meter cell constantly monitored by 6 cameras. Combining physical space with a surveillance program, the project speaks about the new conditions of freedom and control within contemporary democratic societies. The installation is an invitation to imagine a society without prisons, but further a society beyond the epistemological prison of gender, sexual, and race categories.
Taking as starting point the panopticon interface she created in Brandon (1998–99)—the first Internet art commissioned and collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York—Cheang transforms the exhibition space at the Palazzo delle Prigioni into a high-tech surveillance territory infused with fictional and real data collected from history as well as live interactions. Computer algorithms mix three image sources for the installation projection, including the images of individual viewers on-site (with their consent) and their selfies taken with a smartphone application. A computer program will hack these real images and reprogram them into transgender and cross-racial digital images that resist surveillance networks.
Cheang is conducting in-depth studies on prototypes across history to form ten characters, including Giacomo Casanova, Michel Foucault, and Marquis de Sade, towards developing ten fictional transpunk videos in sci-fi and abstract image format. Involving legal documents, fake news, historical reports, myths and fantasies, the work leads visitors into a maze of multiple narratives, where the distance between the one who represents and the one represented, the observer and the observed is radically quested. “Cheang forces visitors to interrogate the distance between punishment and pleasure, surveillance and lust, between the system that is apparently watching us and we as actively participating and enjoying the act of surveillance. 3x3x6 explores the relationship between political punishment and sexual enjoyment, between modes of seeing and processes of subject production. Inverting the watchful eyes of our panoptic society to partake in an empowering collective vision, the exhibition aims to reinvent desire and pleasure beyond hegemonic norms,” says curator Preciado.
Cheang states, “With this exhibition we explore the possible strategies for resistance against highly controlled societies, the self-affirming dignity against repression, and the variable versions of self-granted pursuits for (un)happiness.”
In the auditorium of TFAM on November 27th at 2 p.m., the artist Shu Lea Cheang and curator Paul B. Preciado will be in conversation with Audrey Tang, social innovator and the first minister without portfolio on digital affairs in Taiwan; the conversation is titled “Democracy in Transition: Freedom, Art, and Cooperative Action in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Departing from the exhibition project, they will discuss how art, activism, digital technologies, and critical discourses interact to invent new social practices and new subjectivities.
Taiwan’s Representation at the 58th Venice Biennale 2019
3x3x6
Exhibition period: May 11–November 24, 2019
Venue: Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice, Italy
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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。