Reversed Surveillance

Starting from a 3 hour long livestream of a recent French protest, the artist uses the software ‘Video Content Analysis’ to analyse the crowd and discern over 30 000 people’s faces.

In January 2023, the French government passed a bill allowing the use of Algorithmic Video Surveillance as a legal crowd controlling measure for any gathering of more than 300 people. This technology is put in place to automate the process of detecting crime. Instead of focusing on identity recognition, emotion recognition aims to read emotional states. AI is trained to detect, analyse, and decode human behavioural patterns associated with emotions.

Starting from a 3 hour long livestream of a recent French protest, the artist uses the software ‘Video Content Analysis’ to analyse the crowd and discern over 30 000 people’s faces.

With the use of an AI trained to recognise 7 facial expression associated with emotions, the artist categorises the protestors based on the emotional state they were assigned by the AI.

The project is the visualisation of how AI interprets a protest.

Though this technology has been widely used by companies to monitor their employees, there is currently no record of emotion recognition being used in decisions affecting protestors.

The continuously evolving nature of surveillance technologies, combined with the normalisation derived by the ease with which these are introduced on a legislative level, poses a threat to the right of assembly, protest, and speech. This becomes extremely threatening when the technology is given the task to decode something of human nature, and the outcomes used to make decisions based on probability rather than events.

In the end Top creates a facial recognition tool to identify police officers during protest. By harnassing the power of surveillance technolgies Top tries to create new tools to expose the danger of these technolgies as wel as to use it at our own advantege.