The entire scene did its best impression of the surreal, time-lapse movie Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, and I wondered: If I became sick-really sick-on the street would anyone help me? Or had the dazzle effectively opted me out of that? By making myself look strange, had I placed myself beyond the public trust? Men in powder-blue dress shirts and women in pencil skirts passed on both sides. One evening when I was wearing the dazzle, I was struck by a wave of throat-tightening nausea. They nodded politely and said, “Oh, okay!” Then they returned to their beer. I tried to explain the premise behind the technology: that I was a tech reporter, that the patterns hid me from computer vision, that the whole thing was a kind of experiment. In an organic market that also functions as a bar and deli, two women asked me why I had the make-up on. On the first day, it wasn’t until I left my friends that I started running into problems. Carrying the reassuring stamp of someone else’s approval, you do not raise suspicions. This isn’t that much of a problem when you’re hanging out with people who are dressed normally. You’re in costume, basically, as out of place as a mascot walking down the street. It’s more than a quick double-take or turn of the head: Their eyes lock, and they stare. People glance at your face, their eyes lingering as you wait on escalators, pass on sidewalks, sit in museums or restaurants. The first thing to know about wearing the dazzle is that everyone looks at you. And I did it by making myself look ridiculous.ĭigital culture in a networked world Read More In D.C.-a city whose planning aspires to the geometry and prestige of a world that once was, and is ringed by sophisticated surveillance operations that hint at the world to come-I smuggled myself from place to place under the watchful eyes of computer algorithms. I commuted in the dazzle I went to work in the dazzle I got burgers and popsicles in the dazzle. So, for a number of days in the spring and summer, I wore facial dazzle as I went about my business in Washington, D.C. That final hurdle had been left for me to surmount. No one I could find, though, had undertaken the real challenge: wearing the dazzle for days while going about everyday life. Harvey has contributed op-art about dazzle to The New York Times and enthusiasts have held facial dazzle parties. After documents from the Snowden tranche revealed the NSA had harvested an enormous database of faces from images on the web, CV dazzle seemed all the more urgent. Since then, more and more people have learned about the technology. Here was a technology that confounded computers with light and color. The first time I saw it, three years ago, I found it charismatic and captivating. If you obstruct them, the algorithm can’t separate a face from any other swath of pixels.ĬV dazzle is ostentatious and kind of rad-looking, in a joyful, dystopic way. These hallmarks all betray the uniqueness of a human visage. Facial recognition algorithms look for certain patterns when they analyze images: patterns of light and dark in the cheekbones, or the way color is distributed on the nose bridge-a baseline amount of symmetry. Examples of CV dazzle makeup from Adam Harvey’s “Look Book.” (More here.)
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