Tezos

Bait #5

Creator

tz1Xbo6SJnN7fAcUesjfQ7zVeNNNf8vPzKUM

Description

Dear Guest, For Human Eyes Only the second performance in an ongoing series examining adversarial fashion as a site of political and technological inquiry. The series runs parallel to the artist's Dear David, a body of work concerned with surveillance and the human actor behind the machine. Where Dear David attends to the man operating the system, the Dear Guest series turns to the body the system is trained on. The work deploys a garment engineered to subvert PoseNet, a machine learning algorithm used for human body detection in airports and other sites of institutional surveillance. False silhouettes embedded in the pattern reduce the algorithm's confidence score, rendering the body statistically illegible to the system while remaining wholly visible to the human eye. The work situates this technical intervention within a structural critique of computer vision. PoseNet operates bottom-up, disaggregating the body into a set of skeletal keypoints before reconstructing it as data. Human vision operates inversely, apprehending the body as a unified whole. The adversarial garment exploits this asymmetry, producing a body that exists in two irreconcilable registers simultaneously: absent to the machine, present to the viewer. For Human Eyes Only inverts the logic of classified information, designating the body itself as something the machine is not permitted to access. Drawing on ethological models of camouflage and mimicry, the work frames surveillance as predation and the body as prey. Animals of prey have historically survived by identifying and exploiting the perceptual limits of their predators. The adversarial garment proposes this as a political strategy. Yet the work does not resolve into straightforward resistance: it also holds the question of what is lost when the body must become illegible to survive, and what it means that visibility to the machine and visibility to another person have become categorically distinct conditions.

Traits

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