Under the Cyber Eyes
A new cutting-edge exhibition, Under the Cyber Eyes, opens this month at the University’s Immersive Room, Y Fforwm, Swansea, offering a profound examination of digital identity and surveillance in the age of informatics. This bold exhibition investigates how virtual body representation constitutes alternative subjectivities and identities to go beyond systemic inequalities and restraints in the digital era.
Curated by art historian Dr Shiyu Gao, who was awarded the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, CCVA, at Birmingham City University, Under the Cyber Eyes explores these urgent questions through diverse multimedia works, opening Dr Gao’s further projects focusing on surveillance, technology, and art. The exhibition presents a series of multimedia works from emerging artists, each of whom explores virtual bodies to engage with the critical issues of cyber surveillance and the implications of living under a watchful digital gaze.
Among the featured works, Yizhi Chen’s Glitch Self (2024) uses feedback control between humans and digital entities to generate a multiplicity of selves, questioning the fluidity of digital identity. In Crypto Legend (2023), Zhiyi Kwong (Kwong4Ever) builds various self-incarnations to rethink the spiritual and existential dilemmas resulting from new technologies. LODTALAD, as the artist’s avatar expanding from virtual space into physical reality, utilises pencils to create portraits with 3D virtual aesthetics to transcend the boundaries between the cyber and real world. Shangyang Yu’s uncanny Selfie# (2023) employs model clipping, an error to be avoided in digital filmmaking, to challenge the existing virtual representations. Meng Zhao’s Black Genie (2024) uncovers the family secrets surrounding the artist’s older brother who passed away at birth and Chinese state-owned coal mining industry in the context of the one-child policy. Under the Cyber Eyes invites viewers to critically examine the intersections of technology, identity, power, gender, and subjectivity.
Supported by both online and in-person venues, and hosted by doctoral student Yizhi Chen of the University’s Wales Institute of Science and Art, the exhibition features a dynamic mix of multimedia installations, digital artworks, and interactive elements. The exhibition serves as a foundation for Dr Gao’s further projects focusing on surveillance, technology and art, with plans to expand into workshops and events at other institutions.
Under the Cyber Eyes opens to the public both online and at the Immersive Room, Y Fforwm, Swansea on September 18. Admission is free, with gallery hours from 2pm to 6pm.
Timi O’Neill , Deputy Dean of Lanzhou University, Wales College said: “It is a surprise to see the novel expression of these artist exploring on avatars, among them Yizhi Chen. Since the beginning of Yizhi’s doctorate journey, she has rigorously examined the intricate issues surrounding identity within virtual reality environments. The culmination of her efforts, now arriving at a stage of denouncement, is both exhilarating and thought-provoking, inciting, for me curiosity about her future scholarly contributions.”
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