The starting point of Emidio Battipaglia’s project All Watched Over by Machine of Loving Grace Ver 1.1b is the eponymous BBC documentary by Adam Curtis (2010), which argues that humanity has been “colonised” by computers. The nearly 3-hour video addresses the widespread deployment in the People’s Republic of China of a CCTV architecture connected to machine vision systems, a technology used as a coercive control system in urban space and as an efficient communicational tool of the regime. Despite the country being systematically quoted in surveillance studies, not much is known though about the specifications of these systems, which remain a black box. Battipaglia’s project combines several layers of image recognition technologies.