2023

Artists: Lauri Love & Michelle Tylicki

Title: D A Z Z L E

Photo: Maria Silvano

From #DNL30 Artivism: The Art of Subverting Power, Berlin, June 23–25 2023

Installation by Lauri Love (Computer Scientist, UK) & Michelle Tylicki (Artist & Activist, PL/US/UK).

An interactive tool to teach computer vision dazzle – anti-surveillance makeup. Designed to break machine vision systems, this subversively placed art installation satirises the beauty industry and reveals a critique of surveillance capitalism in advertising. For activists planning to take direct action, with D A Z Z L E one can create a custom template of camouflage applicable against modern advances in police surveillance tech.

D A Z Z L E is the facelessness of the resistance.

Cameras proliferate as surveillance becomes ubiquitous, data is invasively collected and commodified without consent. The human face is tracked, profiled, herded. Enter D A Z Z L E, an interactive tool for the reclamation of agency. Designed to break machine-learning facial recognition models, this subversive salon experience satirises the beauty industry to reveal a critique of surveillance as a tool of capitalism and the state. Observe, frustrate and defeat realistic facial detection and recognition systems. Emerge as a certified enigma with a camoflagued look analysis report giving quantitative data that empowers you to reclaim your own.

Through a boutique salon experience, clients have their facial features detected and displayed within a closed system, learn how the technology works, then follow tips on effective methods to defeat it as they customise their camoflagued style, apply dazzling modifications and accessories, and emerge rewarded with a tailored look analysis report to certify their fabulous mystique against eight of the most commonly used detection models.