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Fag Face Mask - Oct xx, 2012, Los Angeles, CA Christopher O'Leary

How to hide from Big Brother

Encounter the artists and writers using masks and makeup to thwart regime surveillance

If Facebook can tag you, so can the government. Big Blood brother was never mere fiction, simply cheers to improved technologies, the Orwellian lens has never been sharper. Janus, a recently launched U.South Intelligence program, aims to radically amend facial recognition technologies, mapping your expression like a fingerprint and tagging information technology to a biometric profile to rail your movements and keep a watchful middle – fifty-fifty as yours avert their omnipresent cameras.

Only what does authorities surveillance have to practice with lipstick? Recently, I joined several self-described young female person poets in a Brooklyn apartment to have on the question. The invitation to our gathering read "Anti-Surveillance Feminist Poet Hair and Make Up Political party". There were snacks and stickers, some acrylic paints – blueish, greenish, white, blackness – and an open laptop looping either Beyonce or a YouTube tutorial by operation artist Jillian Mayer teaching united states of america how to apply makeup to hide from the machines.

The goal, the video advises, is to interruption upward symmetry. If the conventions of cosmetics inquire for certain regions of facial structure to exist highlighted – cheekbones, nose bridges, lashes, lips – corrective camouflage necessitates the reverse. Contours must be masked by irregular misshapes. Blobs of black should travel from the lesser chin up into the cheeks while dark strips should swathe the nose, and perhaps a portion of the upper lip. Hair must cover the face, preferably in spiky streaks, to fall over the forehead and barely reveal the optics (the locus of facial recognition).

"This isn't about blending in," Mayer reminds united states. "This is about sticking out yet remaining undetected by cameras." Whatever we practise, nosotros must avert the motorcar'south gaze while performing.

There'southward a science backside this dystopic tribal warrior await. Artist and researcher Adam Harvey'due south CV Dazzle approximates this cosmetic approach towards what he deems the "anti face". The name of the project comes from OpenCV, one of the most widely utilized facial recognition software apps, also as Dazzle camouflage, a black and white stripped design developed during World State of war 1 to foreclose enemy detection of military submarines. Harvey researched facial recognition technology – the same technology that marks little carmine boxes effectually the faces of your friends when you upload images to Facebook – and developed various aestheticized forms of camouflage that circumvent detection by mechanised scanners.

These scanners, such every bit OpenCV, are coded with algorithms that apply the Viola Jones method of facial recognition: identifying a potential face and performing calculations on areas identified by black and white rectangles to analyse, and thereby identify, the dark and light regions of the face. CV Dazzle's makeup strategy uses shapes that darken normally lightened areas of the face to confuse detectors. The resulting look is somehow one-half-reminiscent of both mohawk-punk and on-duty-solider.

As the faces of Harvey'south models attest, the patterns that subvert computational detection are simultaneously hyper-visible – nearly outright performative in their need for attention. This attention is antagonistic: at once subverting systems of surveillance while publicly protesting their very being. Only the use of cosmetics begs the question: are these forms of protest only drawing more attention and stares?

That question was levelled at the women who participated in the anti-surveillance makeup meeting. A slice inThe New York Daily News featuring some of those writers spurred inter-feminist policing from fellow female person poets, spawning into a back-and-forth dialogue of "who wears feminism best": the girls wearing crop tops and lipstick, or the girls wearing sweatpants?

More than using the gal pal party as ways to challenge the omnipresent state watch, these women organised the run across to accost how women police force one another. The makeup political party, a trope of suburban housewife-era female person bonding, aimed to re-directly the energy spent on feminist in-fighting to address the larger threat of "the male gaze".

In cinema, the original concept of the male gaze proposes that the camera lens is ever masculine: stalking, following, and sneaking upwardly on the female body. The "state gaze" is similarly voyeuristic towards the motility of its citizens. And while all bodies, male person or female person, are watched, the "quality of the gaze" differs. Women are cultured to assume ascertainment and identification in public space – hence the ubiquity of street harassment and true cat calling. The "state gaze" might create a new imposition on male bodies, but female bodies have grown accustomed to hiding in public.

For Harvey, the beauty of CV Dazzle as a form of camouflage is that it doesn't crave hiding. Wearing a hoodie or a mask, he argues, ousts those who desire to avoid detection and stifles their creativity by making them anonymous. Only who'south granted the privilege of creative activism?

While surveillance is omnipresent, its watch is not universally aimed. Every bit these detection technologies get more exact, our identity categories – our race, gender, sexual preference, or religious affiliations – will be used to monitor and police specific subsets of the population. Certain faces are the subjects of protection while others are criminalized earlier they are even surveilled. It wasn't lost on the anti-surveillance makeup participants that they were all white (or at least fair-skinned)  women performing their dazzles in a predominantly African-American neighborhood.

Stephanie Young, organizer of the first surveillance makeup party in Oakland questioned the political uses of the projection. "Sure faces are the subjects of protection," Immature said, "while others are criminalized earlier they are even surveilled."

Only some faces – mainly young, female, and white – can hide through cosmetic decoration. Others tin can't afford to be seen.

Perhaps instead of an anti-face, we need no confront at all. Instead of performative antagonism, we need opaqueness. Working from similar research on facial recognition technologies, artist Zach Blas recognized that not just do these technologies surveill, they also propagate inequality by coding idealized complexions. Biometric technologies, for example, exercise not detect darker skin tones. Blas proposes the mask, instead of makeup, as the tool to weaponise our complexions. Standing with other mask-wearing protestors like the Zapatistas and Pussy Riot, Blas created "collective masks" modeled from the aggregated facial data of partcipants from community workshops. Fag Face Mask, a vivid pink amorphous, bubbling blob was, for case, generated from the information of queer male faces. Compiling individuals into ane commonage face, creating a faceless mass that threatens the state.

If we are to hibernate, we need to make sure our methods of concealment don't get co-opted every bit fashionably friendly antagonisms by the systems we hope to avoid. Aesthetic approaches to antagonize surveillance systems need to take into account the layers of privilege that render some subjects more visible than others. While anti-surveillance makeup proposes such antagonism, its focus on "individuality" and "creativity" at all-time feeds the entitlement of certain faces and, at worst, can be all as well easily absorbed as a beauty trend. Masks provide more a constructive artful of revolt, turning the freedom of anonymity into Big Brother's greatest threat.