Shi Zheng's "Free Fall Study Ill" documents experiments in falling simulation from the video installation "Free Fall." The vertical, narrow perspective of the work captures computer-simulated white sheet masks that keep falling downwards. As another layer in the work, a computer-vision recognition system surveils and detects how the image is moving. The facial recognition system then identifies whether the image of each falling mask matches the features of a human face. Numbers between 0.0 and 1.0 represent the approximation value of "human" identified by the machine compared to "real human."
In today's highly observed, studied, and analyzed world, vision machines powered by algorithms exist everywhere. Meanwhile, visual images are gradually becoming a computational product that has impacted the way we see and understand the world, and "meat vision" has to be mixed with and controlled by computer vision. The facedetection algorithms in this work programmatically translate complex human face information into numbers, which end up overly simplifying the diversity of what a face looks like. Thus, the falling "masks" in the work not only physically embody products-including facial processing and digital filters-but also epitomize what it means to be "human" in our data-flooded era.
