Realface Glamouflage
Year: 2013
Format: T-Shirt Collection
Realface Glamouflage is a collection of Tshirts offering facial recognition dazzle. Dazzle is a form of camouflage developed during World War 1, it’s goal is not to conceal but to confuse. Realface Glamouflage confuses facial recognition algorithms, such which are used on Facebook to recognise and tag people in photos as well as in surveillance technology to identify suspects. The pattern of the Realface Glamouflage shirts consist of celebrity impersonators and pirated faces used for fake social media accounts. Both of these faces exist in multiples and raise questions of privacy, identity and verification, is this Michael Jackson?
In the aftermath of the 2011 London riots, the Metropolitan Police took to the photo sharing service Flickr, using it as an online wanted billboard, calling on the public to aid in identifying the suspects. Meanwhile autonomous forensics efforts organised via Google Groups like "London riots facial recognition" made use of the open source face.api algorithm to cross match public pictures with Twitter and Facebook profiles. Will profile pictures be stored in a biometric cloud, for ease and speed of identification? Faces effortlessly roam online as a bunch of pixels; reblogged, repurposed and renamed. How do you design your face for such a fluid environment? Would your face be most anonymous if your profile picture would be the most pirated, spread and repurposed? What is the value of the face in a time of crowdsourced forensics and faceless enemies?
related writing
press
- Weird T-Shirts Designed To Confuse Facebook's Auto-Tagging Wired (2013)
- DIS magazine
- Avoid Facial Detection Algorithms … With a T-Shirt The Atlantic (2013)
- Bizarre shirts turn famous faces into Facebook-confusing camouflage The Verge (2013)
- The Future of Social Media: An Interview with Simone C. Niquille Art21 magazine (2014)
FaceValue
The (human) face’s value in a time of rapidly mutating standards and techno norms.
Recession, depression, faceless enemies, aerial views, cutbacks, bailouts, dead bulls, and raging bears: FaceValue is not traded on the stock market—yet.
FaceValue is what you and I are left with when CCTV is hooked to the Facebook databank and parents look younger than their children. FaceValue is what has a Britney look-alike earn more than Spears herself. FaceValue is what you consider when contemplating the appropriate nose for the day and while placing a new “chinplant” order at RapidAesthet3d. FaceValue is what stares back at you and me, relentlessly reflected in the surrounding screens fading to black.
FaceValue will remain after the Internet blacks out, putting monikers and avatars to sleep. Grainy purple PhotoBooth portraits of girls.jpg
#ThickEuroCamgirl
#ShavedCreampie
endlessly re-posted, the breadcrumbs leading to their intimate Tumblr origin long trailed off, before/after anti-aging cream miracle comparisons with two different faces as proof, pop-ups and banners twitching and smiling in RGB hues, the replica’s copy’s multiples, same faces different names same names different faces, fictionally multiplying the world population—all are asleep. Imagine how quiet it will be.
"Bad breath is better than none." @TheTweetOfGod
And sometime before this I was trying to make a purchase choice: face.xxx, face.gov, face.biz, or plain and simple face.info? There were no bundle offers available.
Face.com, a facial recognition technology company, was sold to Facebook in June 2012. Post-acquisition their technology was incorporated into Facebook’s tagging algorithm and their products discontinued. Their product, the mobile phone app Klik, allowed you to identify faces on-the-go. All you had to do was hold your mobile device in front of the suspect, take a photo, and the app would comb through the Facebook database for a match. A face needed to exist in both worlds, on- and offline, in order to be recognized. Klik promised facial recognition in the palm of your hands, like John Travolta/Nicolas Cage’s character’s identifying palm-over-face gesture in 1997’s Face/Off. As identification shifts from the face to a gesture, proximity is certainty.
related projects
technoflesh Studio ( ᐛ )و
Design & Research practice
of Simone C Niquille
Based in Amsterdam, NL
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