Artists reverse-engineer surveillance algorithms to exploit their blind spots

Evidence

Take a casual stroll through the shop at the New Museum for Contemporary Art in Manhattan, and you pass a display of its bestseller: table-top mirrors whose reflecting surface is covered with the bright-orange message “Today’s Selfie Is Tomorrow’s Biometric Profile.” This “Think Privacy Selfie Mirror” is a project of the young Berlin-based artist Adam Harvey, whose work is aimed at the problem of surveillance and foiling the power of those who surveil. Harvey’s art begins with “reverse engineering… computer vision algorithms” in order to detect and exploit their vulnerabilities through camouflage and other forms of hiding. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1563

Categorization

• CANDY: ‘Today’s Selfie Is Tomorrow’s Biometric Profile’ is a perfect elevator-conversation tidbit about surveillance-resistance art.
• XREF: Adam Harvey’s adversarial camouflage parallels the adversarial-machine-learning literature and the broader theme of resisting extraction. — connects to: Activists and artists now build counter-surveillance tools to achieve invisibility — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1561; Artists weaponize surveillance tools’ own metrics to resist extraction — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1564

Broader Connections

• Artists weaponize surveillance tools’ own metrics to resist extraction #expands (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1564