Camouflage for Surveillance
From magical thinking to pragmatic ornaments that emphasize existing but no visible daily behaviours of the self; masks have been present since early days in collective practices around the world. Masks allow belonging in Halloween or Carnival by dissolving uniqueness of the private into the communal of the public. Like most technologies, masks are prosthetics of a body that wants to be present anonymously. On the other hand, there are facial detection technologies that under the promise of protecting us from bots accessing private information from mobile devices; end up turning into forms of control and supervision of people in the public domain. “Camouflage for surveillance” addresses those paradoxes in which the form of resistance is found in the same technology, which controls us for the sake of protecting us, and in which the only way to highlight humanity is by manipulating intelligence algorithms that strip us precisely of our recognition as human beings.
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Shown at “Facing Time”, Surrey Art Gallery, Canada, 2021