Looking Outwards 08

https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2019

For my Looking Outwards this Week I looked at the 2019 Lecture of the eyeo Festival (The Speaker being Adam Harvey). His previous work includes CV Dazzle (camouflage from face detection) and the anti-drone Burqa (camouflage from thermal cameras). I was interested in his work because I personally find face recognition kind of creepy. Personally I don’t use it on my phone, and I was interested to learn more. Adam Harvey breaks the face recognition tools by deconstructing them, and makes art, by constructing visuals on top of faces to make them unrecognizable. I learned to admire this project more as he talked about how easy it is for someone to use visual surveillance to watch you. His project is a rebellion against military or corporate use of surveillance and their  abuse of face recognition.   

Where do people get their data sets of people’s faces to study? Are these methods ethical? 

This talk overall made me afraid for the future. I don’t want to get my face scanned and then analyzed and I’m sure other people don’t want to either. I would see surveillance through face recognition as a breach of my freedom. And if Microsoft included my face in a database I would not be exactly thrilled, even if I had just done something as simple as post to social media. 

I am inspired by this talk because of the use of art and coding to be able to fight back or find out more about a very prevalent problem that needs to gain more recognition.