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Aesthetics Art Art Computing Culture Free Culture Politics

An Aesthetics Of Disappearance

I stumbled over this anti-face-recognition project again and, post-“world’s ugliest t-shirt” from “Zero History” I enjoyed it even more:

http://ahprojects.com/blog/117
http://ahprojects.com/blog/122
http://ahprojects.com/blog/146
http://ahprojects.com/blog/146
http://ahprojects.com/blog/156
http://cvdazzle.com/

This technique can work in reverse, causing false positives and misdirected automated actions:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/02/google-street-view-p.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/5356031/Google-Street-View-blurs-face-of-Colonel-Sanders-at-every-KFC.html

And it can use objects other than faces, operating on sensors other than 2D cameras:

http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2010/09/subverting-the-lidar-landscape.php
http://www.constructingrealities.com/?p=20

When more and more human activity is being structured and quantized to make machine processing easier, aesthetics can disrupt this.

“…the opacity of the aesthetic offers some much needed resistance to the kinds of transparency increasingly demanded…”

http://www.systemsart.org/a_lpaper.html

An “Aesthetics Of Disappearance” and of false positives

[Via Netbehaviour]