#reverse surveillance

Picture Sky

In this project we create a crowdsourced image of the sky. Multiple observers are positioned at GPS coordinates that form the points of a grid. At  the moment of the satellite flyover, they take photographs looking directly up.  Their images are stitched together to form a single large image, opposite to the one taken by the satellite.

A smartphone app lets the observers self-organize at the times of satellite flyovers in any geolocation, coordinate the action, take the pictures in sync, and see the resulting crowdsourced image and the satellite image.

The human array forms an optical sensor, a large eye of a new socio-technological apparatus.

Picture Sky is a project by Karolina Sobecka and Christopher Baker, with Ken Caldeira.

source: http://www.nephologies.com/PictureSky/updates/

The series of photos Capture is composed of French police officers’ faces. The artist, Paolo Cirio collected 1000 public images of police in photos taken during protests in France and processed them with Facial Recognition software. Cirio then created an online platform with a database of the resulting 4000 faces of police officers to crowdsource their identification by name. Cirio also printed the officers’ headshots as street art posters and posted them throughout Paris to expose them in the public space. Capture comments on the potential uses and misuses of Facial Recognition and Artificial Intelligence by questioning the asymmetry of power at play. The lack of privacy regulations of such technology eventually turns against the same authorities that urge the use of it. Ultimately, as an activist, Cirio introduced a campaign to ban Facial Recognition technology in all of Europe by organising a petition in collaboration with privacy organisations.

Egor Tsvetkov - Your Face Is Big Data

The next time you ride the subway in St. Petersburg, watch out for 21-year-old photographer Egor Tsvetkov. He recently unveiled a new project called “YOUR FACE IS BIG DATA,” which he created by semi-secretly photographing passengers seated across from him on the city’s metro, without asking their permission.

Using these pictures, Tsvetkov turned to an online service called FindFace, which allows you to upload random photographs of a person’s face. Using facial recognition technology, FindFace then searches the image database of Vkontakte, Russia’s most popular social network. If it finds a match, it does its best to identify the person in the picture. Any photo posted and tagged on Vkontakte can be found this way, provided that the user has opted to make his or her postings public. (Most users do.)

FindFace was launched this February by the Moscow-based company N-Tech.lab, which says the service was designed to facilitate online dating, allowing users to photograph anyone on the street, locate their social media profile, and learn more about them, before trying to get acquainted directly.

Tsvetkov says FindFace was able to find social media accounts for 70 percent of the young people he photographed, though it worked only half as often with pictures of older individuals.

Matthew Plummer-Fernandez - snowden.ppt, 2017

Machine Learning style transfer used to create portraits of Snowden in the styles of the leaked NSA powerpoint slides. The leaked presentations also revealed that Machine Learning was being used by the NSA to automate mass surveillance.