This week marks five years for the reason that launch of Dazed Beauty! Over the subsequent five days we shall be celebrating this anniversary by bringing you big celebrity interviews, cultural deep dives into the strange trends of today, and going back through the archives to resurface a few of our favourite pieces.

To cite our co-founder Bunny Kinney in his original editor’s letter, Dazed Beauty is: “an area for us to document, deconstruct and experiment with beauty in all its forms, in every dimension, and tell the stories of the lived experience each certainly one of us has in our own individual bodies as we navigate the world, each online and off.” We hope we’ve remained true to our promise and can proceed to be difficult, anti-establishment, diverse and exciting. Thanks for being a part of our journey.

The common Londoner is caught on camera more than 300 times a day by cameras operated by public bodies, businesses, and individuals. This might be within the park, the shops, or on the station, with an estimated one CCTV camera for every 14 people currently within the UK’s largest city. That number is predicted to rise to at least one in 11 by 2025, making modern surveillance culture a growing privacy battle as surveillance technology continues to advance. 

To fight back, many individuals and projects are turning to make-up, something Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, says has the potential to throw off most of the algorithms. “Surveillance technology could be very powerful but additionally very fragile,” he explains. “Even placing small amounts of make-up could trick an algorithm into finding no match or a match with a unique face.” This includes blocking out shapes in geometric patterns or obscuring key features corresponding to the eyes or nose-bridge or experimenting with Juggalo clown make-up.

Artist Adam Harvey’s privacy concerns became activism and defiance through make-up. Harvey coined the term “computer vision dazzle” or “cv dazzle” when creating an open source anti-facial recognition toolkit that enables users to explore how fashion could be used as camouflage from face-detection technology. The thought behind CV Dazzle is easy: facial recognition algorithms search for certain patterns after they analyse images, so obstructing those patterns means obstructing the flexibility for the algorithm to recognise you. Techniques to do that include creating asymmetry, using hair to hide the face (particularly the nose bridge), using make-up that contrasts together with your skin tone in unusual tones and directions, and sticking gems on the face. 

Began as a part of his NYU Master’s thesis in 2010, Harvey is currently working on the brand new software application to indicate how face detection and face recognition algorithms are analysing your face. “The long run will look back on the current day and realise that the surveillance technologies developed on this century have profoundly impacted what it means to be human and what it means to dehumanise one another through technology,” says Harvey. “For CV Dazzle, I proved that make-up can have a major impact on face detection and face recognition systems.” The looks created were tested and validated against Facebook’s PhotoTagger, Google’s Picasa, and Eblearn.

“(Anti facial recognition techniques) include creating asymmetry, using hair to hide the face (particularly the nose bridge), using make-up that contrasts together with your skin tone in unusual tones and directions, and sticking gems on the face”

As unregulated facial recognition technologies continue to make headlines, CV Dazzle is inspiring an increasing variety of artists to experiment with the concept of make-up as a defence tactic. One among these is multidisciplinary artist Joselyn McDonald. Through her Mother Protect Me project, she experiments with how femme make-up and flowers can undermine facial recognition technologies, and created a YouTube tutorial last year. “Because surveillance harms womxn, through cyberstalking, spouseware, and facial recognition technology getting used to detect identities of womxn in porn, I desired to create femme looks to interact women (and anyone else occupied with the rituals of make-up) with facial recognition topics,” she explains. McDonald sees her use of flora as a medium as having the additional benefit of connecting viewers to the earth and forces us to take into consideration how far we’ve come from “natural ways of being”.

To begin the project, she applied flowers to hide the important thing areas on the face (eyes, nose, mouth, shadows) over and once more to learn the patterns of what would undermine the algorithms. With the recent release of the extremely powerful facial recognition system Clearview AI, with a database of greater than three billion images, she’s focusing more on diverse bodies for her next iteration of the project to reflect that surveillance datasets can misidentify black faces “Technology could be very entwined with capitalism,” McDonald says. “It’s an extension of us, for higher or worse.”

The Dazzle Club, a collaboration between artist-run organisation AiR and artist duo Yoke Collective would argue for worse. “We’re occupied with disrupting the arms race of technology that’s changing the perception of London, and with the massive profits for software and hardware corporations, possibly misleading us all into the chances of a good and social future,” they explain. The intergenerational group of artists – Anna Hart, Georgina Rowlands, Emily Roderick, and Evie Price – are all based in London and commenced working on The Dazzle Club in August 2019, in response to the forced admission that facial recognition technology was getting used by Argent on the King’s Cross Estate. The project hosts monthly artist-led silent walks through London with participants wearing CV Dazzle-inspired make-up looks, particularly black and blue geometric shapes that cross over or obscure the nose bridge.

“Artists have been on the forefront of political motion, revolution and defiance throughout history. Throughout the project the intersection of political motion and art has generated a strong conversation about freedom and expression in public places,” the group says. “CV Dazzle offers a chance of individual creative expression through face paint, exploring the longer term of fashion, identity and independence.” 

“We’re occupied with disrupting the arms race of technology that’s changing the perception of London, and with the massive profits for software and hardware corporations, possibly misleading us all into the chances of a good and social future” – Yoke Collective

Just as artists basically have been historically energetic in political defiance, make-up and face paint has at all times played a special role within the act of protest. From Joker make-up being used to protest corruption in Lebanon to South Koreans smashing their make-up to “escape the corset”, recently make-up has continued to prove to be a strong tool within the face of political oppression. Because of this, CV Dazzle often goes beyond what’s vital to try and conceal a face (with more easy tactics like face masks or sunglasses) to make use of creativity to oppose the technology and attract attention to the difficulty.

California-based artist Kel Robinson has been working on her own three versions of “anti-surveillance make-up” and learning in regards to the software for over 4 years. The interest was sparked after a gaggle of friends threw a CCTV underground party in 2015 with the theme of avoiding surveillance. After researching for the party, she began to experiment along with her own make-up techniques and steadily gained a small client-base for this specific style of make-up. Now, she’s booked to do that style every few months, mostly for parties or demonstrations.

Robinson’s make-up techniques, which include applying lines, shapes, and colors over the five points of recognition that these softwares use: brow, nose, each cheek, and chin, proceed to develop as surveillance technology changes. She often tries what works through the use of the Facebook algorithm against itself, uploading photos with different shapes and colors until the software now not requests to tag you. “The purpose of this make-up isn’t to “get away with crime”, it’s to guard ourselves from unjust surveillance and move more freely through the world without fear of monitoring,” she says. “One of the simplest ways I’ve found to do that is with the usage of electric blue (from Urban Decay), or black or white liner to create the illusion of shapes protruding from the face.” 

As surveillance technology continues to develop, so too must the make-up techniques used as an try and rebel from it.  As a civil rights lawyer and technologist based in Latest York, Cahn is barely too aware of the town’s “growing use of increasingly invasive surveillance tools” at a state and native level. He says that there aren’t any sure-fire ways to combat one of the crucial expansive facial recognition systems on this planet, including make-up. Actually, some Chinese artificial-intelligence corporations have announced that their technology can discover people even when they’re wearing face masks amid the coronavirus outbreak. Starting the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project a yr ago as a approach to beat back, his biggest concerns for surveillance culture are that the technology is “biased, broken, and fundamentally threatening to an open society.” Cahn explains that error rates are much higher for girls and ladies of color specifically, making surveillance tools threatening to “mainly anyone that isn’t a middle-aged white guy.” 

Cahn warns that one make-up look is not going to work for each facial recognition product and each biometric tool. “You furthermore may need to take into accout that there are other types of biometric surveillance which are being rolled out at the identical time,” he explains, referencing GAIT recognition (which analyses the best way we walk) and infrared cameras (that may discover us based off our body-heat pattern). “While I’m hopeful that we’ll find latest and create ways to beat back on the ever-growing surveillance state, we urgently need comprehensive laws,” says Cahn. Within the meantime, he says a pair of sunglasses or a baseball hat can even make many algorithms perform poorly (his project currently sells hats that say “I opt out”).

While there’s no denying that surveillance culture is a growing issue with many potentially invasive or harmful repercussions, Harvey says the concept of CV Dazzle is currently still too exotic for most individuals. This, he says, has the potential to alter. “Camouflage was also once too exotic. Prior to WWI camouflage was used negatively as a term for hiding from the police, perhaps much like how privacy is commonly discussed this century,” he says. “Within the early twentieth century it was considered socially unacceptable and deceitful. Now it’s mainstream, socially acceptable, and trendy.” With this in mind, and the proven fact that a privacy armour in the form of a bracelet already exists, make-up might be set to be the subsequent mainstream and trendy approach to arm ourselves within the battle for private privacy.

This text was originally published 20 February 2020.