WeiweiCam

» see weiweicam.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 3 April 2011 Ai Weiwei was stopped at Beijing Capital Airport and disappeared into eighty one days of detention. On 3 April 2012, to the day, he put four webcams inside his own house in Caochangdi and pointed them at himself. One covered his desk. One covered his bed. The feeds went out live and unedited at weiweicam.com, around the clock, to anybody with a browser.

The joke was aimed at the surveillance cameras the state had already mounted outside his compound. If they wanted to watch him, he would save them the trouble and do it better, in public, handing the view to everyone at once. He described it as a way of making the surveillance transparent. The state had a monopoly on looking, and he broke it by giving the view away for free.

It ran for 46 hours and collected 5.2 million views. Then the police called and told him to shut it down. Ai took the cameras offline on the evening of 4 April 2012 and said afterward that nobody had given him a reason.

~ the dossier ~

~ the 46 hours ~

What was actually on the stream was mostly boring, which is what made it work. A desk with a man doing paperwork at it. The same man asleep in a dark room a few hours later. Millions of people sat and watched that because the Chinese government had spent a year making an ordinary life interesting.

~ the part that traveled ~

Turkey in 2012 had its own version of this argument, running in the opposite direction. YouTube had been blocked nationally from 2008 to 2010 over insult cases, and everyone I knew learned to change their DNS settings the way you learn a bus route. Here the state was removing things from view. In Beijing the state was objecting to a man adding something. Both come from the same assumption about who gets to decide what is allowed on a screen.

~ what got buried with it ~

The cameras came down and the surveillance did not. Ai kept living under it until his passport was returned in July 2015 and he left China for Berlin. weiweicam.com is now a parked domain with a "Domain for Sale" banner sitting where the feed used to be, which is a quieter ending than the project earned. The 46 hour run survives as a line in art writing about surveillance used as a material.

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