Artist Report – Adam Harvey – Art & Sustainability

“Spreading that awareness is always a tricky balancing act. Not a week goes by without news of some new privacy intrusion. Yet it’s still mostly privacy wonks and professionals like Harvey who walk around realizing that—for example—their Facebook Likes can be used to determine their mental state, sexual preferences, politics, and more with surprising accuracy. ”
— Kopfstein, Janus (Dec 2nd, 2015) These ‘Think Privacy’ Posters Make Perfect Gifts for Cypherpunks and Paranoids

Created by Adam Harvey, the Anti Face or CV Dazzle is a camouflage technique used to avoid detection by the large amounts of facial recognition software in today’s society, but more specifically the Viola-Jones Haarcacade classifiers. The first “look” was originally created in 2010 as the artist’s masters thesis at ITP NYU and the other five soon followed for other commissions. Harvey has comprised a “look book” to give parameters for individuals to wear their hair and makeup in a fashionable manner, so that they are not recognized by facial recognition software. These looks appear to be bold and far more extravagant than what the average person would wear on a day-to-day basis. This project outlines parameters, or “style tips,” to alter ones makeup, hair, nose bridge, and head shape while suggesting the wearer have a great level of asymmetry in their design and avoiding the use of masks as they are illegal.

It is a statement on the concerns of facial recognition being a part of our everyday lives. The saying “big brother is always watching” has become extremely prevalent in recent future. We are always being monitored of our activities through facial recognition or the GPS in technology that humans have become enslaved to. CV Dazzle could also be a social experiment to see how many people decide to actually go to these efforts to hide their identity through wild fashions. Is Harvey making something that seems so outlandish to then find how many people are truly concerned about being tracked? What type of person would go to these great lengths? This could be the future of not only the fashion world, but of the average person.

For more information, check out the websites below or visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s current exhibition, “Designs for Different Futures,” now open through March 8th.