What is it?
These five mannequin heads show visitor faces, captured from the sidewalk outside Transformer. They are not retained or stored for more than 15 seconds.
I am interested in the implications of widespread facial recognition. One recent example in the news was an IRS decision to begin requiring taxpayers to use facial recognition through ID.me, a private, venture-capital-backed company which could do anything it wishes with the visages of taxpayers using the service. The IRS reversed their decision in February after widespread public outrage.
As the title alludes, biometric gathering of this sort is illegal in one U.S. state: Illinois, thanks to its Biometric Information Privacy Act. Perhaps this is a model to follow.
Thanks to David Mordini for scanning, modeling, and printing Jenna and Big Chris.
Two of the smaller heads were sourced from Thingiverse: Low poly HEAD by francfalco and Printable Mannequin Head with Shoulders by cudatox. I printed them. The last head was a foam mannequin head found outside my studio one day, impaled on a stick.
About the Series
This is part of my “Algorithm” body of work:
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“Illegal in Illinois”
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“Morale is Mandatory (Algorithm Livery)”
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“Probing GauGAN2”
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“Feedback Loop”
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“Probing DALL-E Mini”
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“Probing ImageNet”
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“Snap Judgment”
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“Data Chains”
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“Print/Shred”
More details at “About Algorithms,” the companion site for this work.
Press
- Washington City Paper: "Best Bets for July 14–21" (July 14, 2021)