![]() “I found that this is my little archive of people that I see in my daily life,” he told HKFP. Soon after starting the project Siu found he had built up a diary of the people he had met throughout the day on the thermal imaging camera. Hot Shots also comes together to form a visual archive of interactions. The coronavirus pandemic has fed the digital world’s growing appetite for personal information and accelerated the shift towards automated archiving such as Zoom call logs or contact tracing. Now, people overlook the value of images - but others, maybe authorities, may think to store and use these images.” Siu Wai Hang “Before, family photos were only for important moments. It is, as curator Angela Su said, reminiscent of the recidivist criminals in French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon’s photographs: dehumanised and alien. The mugshot-like portraits reduce subjects to disembodied vessels of warmth that are then packaged into miniature versions of their digital selves. Hot Shots reduces its subjects to a smattering of saturated colours that blur all identifiable features into a luminescent glow. The casual observer may be tempted to dismiss such mundane routines as a gesture of comfort to a community scarred by previous disease outbreaks such as the Hong Kong flu in 1968 and SARS in 2003, which killed 299 people in the city.īut Siu takes another approach. Above 37.3C indicates a low-grade fever, an ominous symptom of Covid-19. Its Cantonese equivalent uses “wok,” slang for “chaos,” to describe the upheaval of our daily lives under Covid-19.Īt first, the composition of Hot Shots is self-evident: rows upon rows of faces filtered through a thermal imaging camera, each accompanied by a temperature reading in the top-right-hand corner: their biometric ticket into businesses and restaurants. The exhibition’s name is a playful reference to a viral Covid-themed parody of MC Hammer’s classic U Can’t Touch This. ![]() But the latest shift towards mass data acquisition has ignited a debate over transparency, and whether the public has an absolute right to privacy.Īrtist Siu Wai-hang takes this tension and places it in front of us in his photo installation Hot Shots, part of WMA’s Can’t Touch This! exhibition that examines the changes coronavirus has brought to Hong Kong over the past year. From the moment a person steps out in Hong Kong they are asked to hand over their personal data - a small price to pay, some argue, to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic through digital contact tracing. Hong Kong Hot Shots put Covid privacy concerns in a new light - Hong Kong Free Press HKFP Close
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