"I think we all have a personal experience of being under surveillance. But the character of surveillance is that you only see one side of the story." - Ai Weiwei

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These images are from the exhibition "HANSEL & GRETEL" at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The show opens today, June 7th and on display for most of the summer. I'm excited to check it out. From what I can tell, the huge showroom floor has been outfitted with infrared cameras that record visitors as they explore the exhibition.

It's a commentary on surveillance and a division of space between the observed and the observer. This showcase puts both in the same room. You can look at the people being recorded while also being recorded yourself. It's an interesting experiment and visually, it looks pretty stunning. Cameras track you in real time. Neon red boxes project onto the floor, highlighting unique features of the subjects beneath them...

All show images sourced from photographer © James Ewing.

Hacking Surveillance with Art

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This exhibition reminded me of a post I did a while back about surveillance and artful attempts to mitigate it. We are being surveyed more and more everyday. For me (in New York City) that's a norm and reality that I accept. It's largely out of my control, but there are growing movements that seek to take back anonymity through things like haircuts and makeup designed to throw off an untrained digital eyeball.

One big digital eyeball belongs to Janus a new government sponsored program with a huge reach. It's an experimental research initiative organized by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence. The program uses powerful biometric facial-recognition software to sweep social media networks with the intention of compiling a digital library of faces.

"Radically expanding the scenarios in which automated face recognition can establish identity.... The goal of the Janus program is to enable dramatic improvements in unconstrained face recognition…to develop novel representations to encode the shape, texture, and dynamics of a face for the purpose of improving face recognition performance from video and still images, and then allowing higher performance search and retrieval based upon these more efficient representations.” Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). (Sourced from the Janus website)

A Dazzling Resistance

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In light of this exhibition, I thought I might reshare the example of "CV Dazzle" by artist Adam Harvey... pictured above.

"CV Dazzle uses avant-garde hairstyling and makeup designs to break apart the continuity of a face. Since facial-recognition algorithms rely on the identification and spatial relationship of key facial features, like symmetry and tonal contours, one can block detection by creating an “anti-face”." (CVD website.)

If you're in NYC this summer make sure to check out the show! And a step further, maybe test out some new makeup when you visit ;)

follow me @voronoi | design collective @hitheryon