Dvir / Paris
Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Thursday: 11:00 – 19:00
Friday – Saturday: 12:00 – 19:00
Matan Mittwoch
Facing Landmark, 2020
aluminium fabricating
300 x 100 x 150 cm (size according to space)
unique
Facing Landmarks In a twofold project, Facing Landmarks looks at notions of privacy, monitoring and effacement across two types of media, sculpture and a web application. The project was triggered...
Facing Landmarks
In a twofold project, Facing Landmarks looks at notions of privacy, monitoring and effacement across two types of media, sculpture and a web application. The project was triggered by an article Mittwoch had read some years ago, from which he learned of a startup company based in China, face ++, whose algorithm is meant to forfeit current methods of payment with face recognition. Despite the purported application, the algorithm is offered to developers free of charge, ready to be used in a range of applications – from face swapping and video avatars to state policing and counter-terrorism.
With its pristine, minimal-looking interface, the web component of the project delves directly into the backend operation of face ++, showing users the data extracting data from facial captures while forgoing the entertainment value of a leisure app that might otherwise lure them in. Feeding it any image of their choosing, users get to peek into parameters such as expression, race, credit ranking and status which the algorithm analyzes and collects, tied to a user's IP and identity. The data is funneled through the company's servers in China, a country that has already cast a wide net of digital surveillance, monitoring citizens to determine a score yielding personalized rights, benefits or penalties.
The sculpture component of the project 'fools' the algorithm by feeding it a composite image synthesized from every portrait ever uploaded to the net, an image transcending the personalized to suggest a conceptual – if eerie – escape route. Piled up on the floor are some 130 triangular polygons that make up a generalized human face, segmented across facial landmarks as broken down by the algorithm. Only two of those are still suspended from an open ring hung above, a mobile arrangement alluding to a prison warden's keychain, flung open. Spilled on the floor in disarray, the spiky segments that managed to escape represent a hybrid infinitely removed from any one face in particular, a haunting plurality no longer rooted in the human.
In a twofold project, Facing Landmarks looks at notions of privacy, monitoring and effacement across two types of media, sculpture and a web application. The project was triggered by an article Mittwoch had read some years ago, from which he learned of a startup company based in China, face ++, whose algorithm is meant to forfeit current methods of payment with face recognition. Despite the purported application, the algorithm is offered to developers free of charge, ready to be used in a range of applications – from face swapping and video avatars to state policing and counter-terrorism.
With its pristine, minimal-looking interface, the web component of the project delves directly into the backend operation of face ++, showing users the data extracting data from facial captures while forgoing the entertainment value of a leisure app that might otherwise lure them in. Feeding it any image of their choosing, users get to peek into parameters such as expression, race, credit ranking and status which the algorithm analyzes and collects, tied to a user's IP and identity. The data is funneled through the company's servers in China, a country that has already cast a wide net of digital surveillance, monitoring citizens to determine a score yielding personalized rights, benefits or penalties.
The sculpture component of the project 'fools' the algorithm by feeding it a composite image synthesized from every portrait ever uploaded to the net, an image transcending the personalized to suggest a conceptual – if eerie – escape route. Piled up on the floor are some 130 triangular polygons that make up a generalized human face, segmented across facial landmarks as broken down by the algorithm. Only two of those are still suspended from an open ring hung above, a mobile arrangement alluding to a prison warden's keychain, flung open. Spilled on the floor in disarray, the spiky segments that managed to escape represent a hybrid infinitely removed from any one face in particular, a haunting plurality no longer rooted in the human.