Dana Potter

My studio is a laboratory where I test biometric and sensory technologies. I’ve worked with eye-trackers, Geo-location mapping, computer-mouse movement recordings, and most recently facial recognition. These technologies translate the physiological and behavioral characteristics of an individual into readable data for a computer. The collected data sets are visually rich for artistic appropriation: Eye-trackers reveal gradient heatmaps; facial recognition uses graphic lines and shapes overtop photographs, and computer-mouse movements create abstract line drawings. I make artworks to reveal what these complex processes look like because they are an invisible presence in our everyday life through touchpoints such as mobile phones, internet connection, and CCTV cameras. Translating these invisible forces into physical objects makes the reality of surveillance feel present and personal. The digital frontier is a capitalist one, social media platforms are the factory farms, and our individual profiles are harvesting grounds for data.

In the recent series, Data Figures, I created a series of screen-prints to investigate the computer vision behind facial recognition (FR), to understand what the computer does to a face. I reinterpret the logical instructions of facial recognition (FR) as artistic prompts for hand-collage and filter photos directly with facial recognition (FR) software called Edge Detection and Gabor Filtering, which are military technologies for identifying figures in video and images. The mixing of facial recognition and other surveillance tools with selfies and group photos tangibly connects social media to its role in surveillance capitalism. In early 2020, a technology company called ClearView AI scraped millions of public sites, including Facebook, YouTube, and Venmo, amassing nearly 3 billion photos for facial recognition, and sold the datasets to more than 600 law enforcement agencies in the US.